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Former CIA chief: We totally dropped the ball on al Qaeda's rebound
(AP)
A former CIA chief has admitted in a new tell-all book that the intelligence organization badly misjudged Qaeda's rebound during the Arab Spring, Greg Miller of The Washington Post reports.
In "The Great War of Our Time," former CIA chief Michael Morell recounts his three-decade career in the agency. He reportedly places special focus on counter-terrorism and the resurgence of al Qaeda and later ISIS.
Particularly noteworthy is Morell's admission that the US intelligence community believed that the Arab Spring would undermine al Qaeda's message and help to shift the Middle East away from terrorism, especially after the May 2011 death of Osama bin Laden.
“We thought and told policy-makers that this outburst of popular revolt would damage al-
Qaeda by undermining the group’s narrative,” Morell wrote.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described Morell's statement as "a pretty big admission."
The Arab Spring triggered the collapse of long-serving secular autocratic regimes in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia, and was arguably one of the sparks for the still-ongoing civil war in Syria. The chaos unleashed during the Arab Spring also led to conservative retrenchment in Egypt and the Persian Gulf states.
Morell wrote that the failure to predict the growth of the jihadist threat following the uprisings was because of the CIA's own failure to have reliable human intelligence sources on the ground in the various nations where the unrest was taking place. Instead, the CIA had grown accustomed to relying on information from Middle Eastern intelligence services, some of them attached to the regimes swept away during the Arab Spring protests.
“We were lax in creating our own windows into what was happening, and the leadership we were relying on was isolated and unaware of the tidal wave that was about to hit,” Morell notes in his book.
(US Department of Defense)
Today al Qaeda and ISIS control vast stretches of territory in the Middle Eas. ISIS controls an area about the size of Belgium in Iraq and Syria, while having affiliates active in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, Yemen, and Libya.
Al Qaeda has been adapting in response to the rise of ISIS. One of the primary rebel groups in Syria is the al qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, which is currently guiding the first major successful rebel push against the Assad regime in almost two years.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has also largely taken advantage of the chaos in Yemen to expand its own area of operations. The group is now present in nearly half of the country.
(REUTERS/Nabeel Quaiti) Smoke rises from an arms depot at the Jabal Hadeed military compound in Yemen's southern port city of Aden March 28, 2015. Explosions rocked Aden's largest arms depot on Saturday, sending flames and smoke into the sky above the southern Yemeni city, witnesses said.
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