I think it's naive to imagine that drone attacks or foreign invasions might win over the hearts & minds of the ordinary people who live in the targeted countries. That they somehow get over it & feel kindly toward their invaders.
I also think it's naive to imagine that it is
only the targeted suspected al-Qaeda operatives who were killed or harmed by the recent drone attacks. Why has no one so far mentioned the civilians who have also died in these attacks? It is almost as if they don't count. These have not been some surgically clean attacks which have harmed
only their intended targets. Drone attacks rarely are, but that's a fact that is rarely considered in western media reports when some AL-Qaeda leader is wiped off the map.
Yemen is the poorest country in the middle east. It's citizens fought long & hard & at great cost to remove its former corrupt president (Saleh) from office during the "Arab Spring" ... & now (with the apparent blessing of the new president) they are having to deal with an
escalation for foreign drone attacks. I suspect that the priorities of ordinary Yemen citizens would be food, work, peace & a less corrupt country. They do not
need further instability created from outside.
Removing a few AL-Qaeda operatives does not solve the problem of "terrorism", either, by the sound of things. In fact it seems to be have quite the opposite effect ... of radicalizing civilians who were previously unsympathetic to AL-Qaeda to actually
supporting it. In other words creating many more
new anti-government/anti-US converts which didn't exist before.
Removing "top AL-Qaeda leaders" has not solved anything at all from the US perspective ... it may have actually escalated the problem.
This article addressing those very issues is from
the Washington Post:
Quote:After recent U.S. missile strikes, mostly from unmanned aircraft, the Yemeni government and the United States have reported that the attacks killed only suspected al-Qaeda members. But civilians have also died in the attacks, said tribal leaders, victims’ relatives and human rights activists. .....
.... Since January, as many as 21 missile attacks have targeted suspected al-Qaeda operatives in southern Yemen, reflecting a sharp shift in a secret war carried out by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command that had focused on Pakistan.
But as in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where U.S. drone strikes have significantly weakened al-Qaeda’s capabilities, an unintended consequence of the attacks has been a marked radicalization of the local population.
The evidence of radicalization emerged in more than 20 interviews with tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists and officials from four provinces in southern Yemen where U.S. strikes have targeted suspected militants. They described a strong shift in sentiment toward militants affiliated with the transnational network’s most active wing, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.
“The drone strikes have not helped either the United States or Yemen,” said Sultan al-Barakani, who was a top adviser to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. “Yemen is paying a heavy price, losing its sons. But the Americans are not paying the same price.”
In 2009, when President Obama was first known to have authorized a missile strike on Yemen, U.S. officials said there were no more than 300 core AQAP members. That number has grown in recent years to 700 or more, Yemeni officials and tribal leaders say. In addition, hundreds of tribesmen have joined AQAP in the fight against the U.S.-backed Yemeni government.
In Yemen, U.S. airstrikes breed anger, and sympathy for al-Qaeda:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/in-yemen-us-airstrikes-breed-anger-and-sympathy-for-al-qaeda/2012/05/29/gJQAUmKI0U_story.html
