A senior U.S. official briefed on the matter tells ABC News that the phone call prompted the father to contact Nigerian intelligence, fearing that his son might be planning a suicide mission in Yemen. The Nigerian officials brought Mutallab directly to the CIA station chief in Abuja Nov. 19.
I hope everyone doesn't get so caught up in the Abdulmutallab incident they fail to focus on the bigger picture, which is figuring out what al Qaida Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is planning next and how to weaken AQAP in Yemen.
U.S. military strikes are not a solution, just a temporary bandaid. Neither is imprisoning their sympathizers. They will only emerge more radicalized and determined. Neither is freezing the release of the other Yemenis at Guantanamo, which will also fuel U.S. hatred.
Gregory Johnson, a former Fullbright scholar now at Princeton, and co-author of the Yemen blog, Waq al-Waq, offered this view in September (pages 8 -11).
The United States must learn that its insistence on seeing everything through the prism of counterterrorism has helped to induce exactly the type of results it is hoping to avoid. By focusing on al-Qa`ida to the exclusion of nearly every other challenge, and by linking almost all of its aid to this single issue, the United States has ensured that the issue will never be resolved
...This short-sighted and narrow focus by the United States has translated over time into a lack of influence within the country. The United States is not the most important player on the domestic Yemeni scene.
....While the United States and Yemen have both been distracted by other, seemingly more pressing issues in recent years, al-Qa`ida has been working single-mindedly to create a durable infrastructure that can withstand the loss of key leaders and cells. It has done an excellent job of tailoring its narrative for a local audience.
....The organization is also benefiting from other government mistakes. The overreaction of governments such as Yemen, largely as a result of U.S. pressure, of arresting nearly everyone suspected of harboring sympathy for al-Qa`ida in the aftermath of September 11 and periodically since then is not reducing radicalization; instead, it is having the opposite effect. Young men are leaving Yemen’s security prisons more radical than when they were initially incarcerated.
...The various clerics and religious shaykhs who visit the prisons to preach also appear to be playing a role in the radicalization process.19 Al-Qa`ida’s potential recruiting pool in Yemen is not drying up but is expanding.
The country’s revolving door prison policy is compounding the problem as more young men spend significant time in prison. In a sense, many of these young men have been prepared for recruitment by their time in prison. The initial groundwork is being laid not by al-Qa`ida but rather by the government’s actions, which makes these men tempting recruitment targets when they are eventually released.
What Abdulmutallab shows, if he is indeed connected to them, is that they are no longer limiting their actions to Yemen, but striking out regionally and internationally, with Saudi Arabia and now the U.S. as targets. In the past, AQAP has announced its goals and then acted on them. They have a media organization for this purpose, Al-Malahim, and a newsletter, Sada al-Malahim (The Echo of Battles.)
Slicing and dicing the intelligence failures in the Abdulmutallab case may or may not prevent the next attack from being successful. Same for the new airline restrictions. Freezing the release of the remaining Yemeni Gitmo detainees is also no solution, and it may increase the likelihood the U.S. will be the target of future attacks. There's a much bigger focus that's needed.
