It
was a brave gesture by a father of seven who commanded great respect in
the community, and it did not go unnoticed. Two days later, three
members of Al Qaeda came to the mosque in the tiny village of Khashamir
after 9 p.m., saying they merely wanted to talk. Mr. Jaber agreed to
meet them, bringing his cousin Waleed Abdullah, a police officer, for
protection.
As the five
men stood arguing by a cluster of palm trees, a volley of remotely
operated American missiles shot down from the night sky and incinerated
them all, along with a camel that was tied up nearby.
The
killing of Mr. Jaber, just the kind of leader most crucial to American
efforts to eradicate Al Qaeda, was a reminder of the inherent hazards of
the quasi-secret campaign of targeted killings that the United States
is waging against suspected militants not just in Yemen but also in
Pakistan and Somalia. Individual strikes by the Predator and Reaper
drones are almost never discussed publicly by Obama administration
officials. But the clandestine war will receive a rare moment of public
scrutiny on Thursday, when its chief architect, John O. Brennan, the
White House counterterrorism adviser, faces a Senate confirmation
hearing as President Obama's nominee for C.I.A. director.
From
his basement office in the White House, Mr. Brennan has served as the
principal coordinator of a "kill list" of Qaeda operatives marked for
death, overseeing drone strikes by the military and the C.I.A., and
advising Mr. Obama on which strikes he should approve.
"He's
probably had more power and influence than anyone in a comparable
position in the last 20 years," said Daniel Benjamin, who recently
stepped down as the State Department's top counterterrorism official and
now teaches at Dartmouth. "He's had enormous sway over the intelligence
community. He's had a profound impact on how the military does
counterterrorism."
Mr.
Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has
taken a particular interest in Yemen, sounding early alarms within the
administration about the threat developing there, working closely with
neighboring Saudi Arabia to gain approval for a secret C.I.A. drone base
there that is used for American strikes, and making the impoverished
desert nation a test case for American counterterrorism strategy.
In recent years, both C.I.A.
and Pentagon counterterrorism officials have pressed for greater freedom
to attack suspected militants, and colleagues say Mr. Brennan has often
been a restraining voice. The strikes have killed a number of
operatives of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network's
affiliate in Yemen, including Said Ali al-Shihri, a deputy leader of
the group, and the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
But
they have also claimed civilians like Mr. Jaber and have raised
troubling questions that apply to Pakistan and Somalia as well: Could
the targeted killing campaign be creating more militants in Yemen than
it is killing? And is it in America's long-term interest to be waging
war against a self-renewing insurgency inside a country about which
Washington has at best a hazy understanding?
Several
former top military and intelligence officials — including Stanley A.
McChrystal, the retired general who led the Joint Special Operations
Command, which has responsibility for the military's drone strikes, and
Michael V. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director — have raised concerns
that the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen are increasingly targeting
low-level militants who do not pose a direct threat to the United
States.
In an interview
with Reuters, General McChrystal said that drones could be a useful tool
but were "hated on a visceral level" in some of the places where they
were used and contributed to a "perception of American arrogance."
Mr. Brennan has aggressively
defended the accuracy of the drone strikes, and the rate of civilian
casualties has gone down considerably since the attacks began in Yemen
in 2009. He has also largely dismissed criticism that the drone campaign
has tarnished America's image in Yemen and has been an effective
recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.
"In
fact, we see the opposite," Mr. Brennan said during a speech last year.
"Our Yemeni partners are more eager to work with us. Yemeni citizens
who have been freed from the hellish grip of A.Q.A.P. are more eager,
not less, to work with the Yemeni government."
Christopher
Swift, a researcher at Georgetown University who spent last summer in
Yemen studying the reaction to the strikes, said he thought Mr.
Brennan's comments missed the broader impact.
"What
Brennan said accurately reflected people in the security apparatus who
he speaks to when he goes to Yemen," Mr. Swift said. "It doesn't reflect
the views of the man in the street, of young human rights activists, of
the political opposition."
Though
Mr. Swift said he thought that critics had exaggerated the role of the
strikes in generating recruits for Al Qaeda, "in the political sphere,
the perception is that the U.S. is colluding with the Yemeni government
in a covert war against the Yemeni people."
"Even
if we're winning in the military domain," Mr. Swift said, "drones may
be undermining our long-term interest in the goal of a stable Yemen with
a functional political system and economy."
A Parallel Campaign
American
officials have never explained in public why the C.I.A. and the
Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command are carrying out parallel
drone campaigns in Yemen. Privately, however, they describe an
arrangement that has evolved since the frantic, ad hoc early days of
America's war there.
The
first strike in Yemen ordered by the Obama administration, in December
2009, was by all accounts a disaster. American cruise missiles carrying
cluster munitions killed dozens of civilians, including many women and
children. Another strike, six months later, killed a popular deputy
governor, inciting angry demonstrations and an attack that shut down a
critical oil pipeline.
Not
long afterward, the C.I.A. began quietly building a drone base in Saudi
Arabia to carry out strikes in Yemen. American officials said that the
first time the C.I.A. used the Saudi base was to kill Mr. Awlaki in
September 2011.
Since
then, officials said, the C.I.A. has been given the mission of hunting
and killing "high-value targets" in Yemen — the leaders of Al Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula who Obama administration lawyers have determined
pose a direct threat to the United States. When the C.I.A. obtains
specific intelligence on the whereabouts of someone on its kill list, an
American drone can carry out a strike without the permission of Yemen's
government.
There is,
however, a tighter leash on the Pentagon's drones. According to American
officials, the Joint Special Operations Command must get the Yemeni
government's approval before launching a drone strike. This restriction
is in place, officials said, because the military's drone campaign is
closely tied to counterterrorism operations conducted by Yemeni special
operations troops.
Yemen's
military is fighting its own counterinsurgency battle against Islamic
militants, who gained and then lost control over large swaths of the
country last year. Often, American military strikes in Yemen are masked
as Yemeni government operations.
Moreover,
Mr. Obama demanded early on that each American military strike in Yemen
be approved by a committee in Washington representing the national
security agencies. The C.I.A. strikes, by contrast, resulted from a far
more closed process inside the agency. Mr. Brennan plays a role in
overseeing all the strikes.
There
have been at least five drone strikes in Yemen since the start of the
year, killing at least 24 people. That continues a remarkable
acceleration over the past two years in a program that has carried out
at least 63 airstrikes since 2009, according to The Long War Journal, a
Web site that collects public data on the strikes, with an estimated
death toll in the hundreds. Many of the militants reported killed
recently were very young and do not appear to have had any important
role with Al Qaeda.
"Even
with Al Qaeda, there are degrees — some of these young guys getting
killed have just been recruited and barely known what terrorism means,"
said Naji al Zaydi, a former governor of Marib Province, who has been a
vocal opponent of Al Qaeda and a supporter of Yemen's president, Abdu
Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Mr.
Zaydi, a prominent tribal figure from an area that has long been
associated with members of Al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate, pointed out that
the identity and background of these men were no mystery in Yemen's
interlinked tribal culture.
A Deadly Ride
In
one recent case, on Jan. 23, a drone strike in a village east of Sana
killed a 21-year-old university student named Saleem Hussein Jamal and
his cousin, a 33-year-old teacher named Ali Ali Nasser Jamal, who
happened to have been traveling with him. According to relatives and
neighbors of the two men, they were driving home from a nearby town
called Jahana when five strangers offered to pay them for a ride. The
drone-fired missile hit the vehicle, a twin-cab Toyota Hilux, just
outside the village of Masnaa at about 9 p.m. The strangers were later
identified in Yemeni news reports as members of Al Qaeda, though
apparently not high-ranking ones.
After
the strike, villagers were left to identify their two dead relatives
from identity cards, scraps of clothing and the license plate of Mr.
Jamal's Toyota; the seven bodies were shredded beyond recognition, as
cellphone photos taken at the scene attest. "We found eyes, but there
were no faces left," said Abdullah Faqih, a student who knew both of the
dead cousins.
Although
most Yemenis are reluctant to admit it publicly, there does appear to be
widespread support for the American drone strikes that hit substantial
Qaeda figures like Mr. Shihri, a Saudi and the affiliate's deputy
leader, who died in January of wounds received in a drone strike late
last year.
Al Qaeda has
done far more damage in Yemen than it has in the United States, and one
episode reinforced public disgust last May, when a suicide bomber struck
a military parade rehearsal in the Yemeni capital, killing more than
100 people.
Moreover,
many Yemenis reluctantly admit that there is a need for foreign help:
Yemen's own efforts to strike at the terrorist group have often been
compromised by weak, divided military forces; widespread corruption; and
even support for Al Qaeda within pockets of the intelligence and
security agencies.
Yet
even as both Mr. Brennan and Mr. Hadi, the Yemeni president, praise the
drone technology for its accuracy, other Yemenis often point out that it
can be very difficult to isolate members of Al Qaeda, thanks to the
group's complex ties and long history in Yemen.
This
may account for a pattern in many of the drone strikes: a drone hovers
over an area for weeks on end before a strike takes place, presumably
waiting until identities are confirmed and the targets can be struck
without anyone else present.
In
the strike that killed Mr. Jaber, the cleric, that was not enough. At
least one drone had been overhead every day for about a month, provoking
high anxiety among local people, said Aref bin Ali Jaber, a tradesman
who is related to the cleric. "After the drone hit, everyone was so
frightened it would come back," Mr. Jaber said. "Children especially
were affected; my 15-year-old daughter refuses to be alone and has had
to sleep with me and my wife after that."
Anger at America
In
the days afterward, the people of the village vented their fury at the
Americans with protests and briefly blocked a road. It is difficult to
know what the long-term effects of the deaths will be, though some in
the town — as in other areas where drones have killed civilians — say
there was an upwelling of support for Al Qaeda, because such a move is
seen as the only way to retaliate against the United States.
Innocents
aside, even members of Al Qaeda invariably belong to a tribe, and when
they are killed in drone strikes, their relatives — whatever their
feelings about Al Qaeda — often swear to exact revenge on America.
"Al Qaeda always gives money
to the family," said Hussein Ahmed Othman al Arwali, a tribal sheik from
an area south of the capital called Mudhia, where Qaeda militants
fought pitched battles with Yemeni soldiers last year. "Al Qaeda's
leaders may be killed by drones, but the group still has its money, and
people are still joining. For young men who are poor, the incentives are
very strong: they offer you marriage, or money, and the ideological
part works for some people."
In
some cases, drones have killed members of Al Qaeda when it seemed that
they might easily have been arrested or captured, according to a number
of Yemeni officials and tribal figures. One figure in particular has
stood out: Adnan al Qadhi, who was killed, apparently in a drone strike,
in early November in a town near the capital.
Mr.
Qadhi was an avowed supporter of Al Qaeda, but he also had recently
served as a mediator for the Yemeni government with other jihadists, and
was drawing a government salary at the time of his death. He was not in
hiding, and his house is within sight of large houses owned by a former
president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and other leading figures.
Whatever the success of
the drone strikes, some Yemenis wonder why there is not more reliance on
their country's elite counterterrorism unit, which was trained in the
United States as part of the close cooperation between the two countries
that Mr. Brennan has engineered. One member of the unit, speaking on
the condition of anonymity, expressed great frustration that his unit
had not been deployed on such missions, and had in fact been posted to
traffic duty in the capital in recent weeks, even as the drone strikes
intensified.
"For sure,
we could be going after some of these guys," the officer said. "That's
what we're trained to do, and the Americans trained us. It doesn't make
sense."
Robert F. Worth reported from Sana, and Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane from Washington.
