Al-Qaeda's Coming Home

It seems al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has just pulled off a spectacular coup and scared us all ahead of Halloween. It has successfully smuggled two explosive devices onto two cargo planes bound from Yemen for the United States, flying via Dubai in the Gulf and Cologne in Germany.

True, the packages did not explode. But the first check by British police at East Midlands airport failed to spot anything suspicious. And the cargo would not have been checked at all if it had not been for a tipoff from Saudi intelligence. What’s more, I understand that the tipoff came after the UK-bound plane took off, with every indication that the device was supposed to explode mid-flight.

It is very likely that the bombmaker did not know the plane would go via the Midlands airport hub of the courier service UPS. The package was addressed to a Jewish community group in Chicago, so the perpetrator knew he was sending it in what he regarded as the right direction, but British officials believe he would not have known precisely where the bomb would have gone off.

So why is this a success for terrorism? After September 11th 2001, al-Qaeda changed the way the world travels by plane. In the last 48 hours, it has forced a change in the way much of globalisation works. The movement of commercial goods around the planet will never be the same again because of a type of bomb not seen before and very hard to detect.

“It was a professional piece of work,” one Whitehall official told me. “A very sophisticated device. Whomever made it knew what they were doing.”

The explosive material, PETN or pentaerythritol trinitrate, has already been used by al-Qaeda. It was what Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab carried when he was caught on a plane over Detroit last Christmas Day.

It can’t be detected by sniffer dogs and requires proper forensic examination. The evil brilliance of these particular devices appears to have been that the PETN was the same colour as printer toner liquid. And apparently it wasn’t immediately obvious to police how the explosive was supposed to detonate.

The inspiration for this attack may have come from Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American cleric of Yemeni descent hiding somewhere in Yemen. He is believed to have inspired Abdulmutallab’s Detroit exploit as well as the massacre at Fort Hood in Texas which left 13 people dead. Awlaki was the only wanted terror suspect named by Sir John Sawers, the MI6 Chief, in his first very prescient public speech last Thursday. Sawers is an Arabist and knows Yemen – he served there as a junior intelligence officer at the beginning of his career, so his appointment as the new “C” last November has turned out to be prescient too.

For it seems inevitable that the focus of western intelligence agencies will have to widen and shift from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border back to the Arabian Peninsula, where al-Qaeda began. Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, almost certainly had nothing to do with this plot. If he later applauds it in an audio tape smuggled out of the Pakistan border region, it may be to claim credit for an act of terror he can no longer order or control.

Osama Bin Laden remains al-Qaeda’s figurehead. But Anwar Al-Awlaki could now be the evil brains behind the Arabian franchise of al-Qaeda – the franchise which the Arab world and the West have to fear most. I don’t believe the date of this would-be attack was coincidental. Al-Qaeda likes big diary days. It tried to attack last Christmas. The ghosts and ghouls of Halloween must have been tempting.

So how do we help make Yemen safer, beyond banning flights from its territory and strengthening cargo transport security around the world?

Those who know the country well insist that nothing less than a Marshall Plan of economic development, funded by the rich Gulf States and others, will put the country on its feet. Yemen is short of water and running out of oil and apart from being the poorest country in the Middle East it boasts some of the highest child malnutrition rates anywhere in the world.

Yemen is therefore a new priority for DFID, the Department for International Development, which is busy enacting a new strategy focused on fragile and conflict states. But how do you spend lots of money in a country as unsafe and corrupt as Yemen? In April terrorists tried to assassinate Tim Torlot, the British Ambassador there. A few weeks ago they tried to kill his deputy. I am told over half the British Embassy staff are being relocated to London because Yemen is so unsafe. So what hope for a massive aid programme as well?

It seems inevitable that Britain and America will continue working in partnership with Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s President who has been doing the job for the last twenty years or so. Yemeni special forces and coastguard are receiving western training. But the country is still so unsafe that Barack Obama cannot close Guantanamo Bay, out of fear that its largest ethnic group of prisoners – the Yemenis – cannot be returned back home without escaping from jail.

American boots on the ground is not an option. The occupation by “infidel” forces from the holy lands of Mecca and Medina on the Arabian Peninsula was given as the justification for September 11th, and more Americans would only boost al-Qaeda’s cause.

The most likely short term scenario is an increase in unmanned drone attacks on suspected al-Qaeda targets. But bear this in mind – the strength of al-Qaeda in Yemen may be no more than 500 to 700 men. Get the strategy wrong, with inaccurate bombing raids and clumsy Yemeni-led offensives, and the al-Qaeda corps could double in numbers in a matter of months. In short, Britain’s chief role in Yemen is to ensure that America does not make a bad situation worse.