You know, for a “dead” group, al-Qaeda seems pretty lively to me.

According to the Wall Street Journal…

The State Department Sunday extended some embassy closures for the rest of the workweek, citing a need to “exercise caution” and take “appropriate steps” to protect American diplomats, local employees and visitors. Officials said the move wasn’t an indication that the U.S. had any new intelligence about the suspected plot or plots.

The high level of concern from U.S. officials underscores what many in the intelligence world have long warned. While al Qaeda’s central leadership may be weakened, the rest of the group has morphed into smaller entities and dispersed, which has made the threat harder to predict and track. This process was accelerated by the turmoil of the Arab Spring.

Officials briefed on the latest intelligence say the new warnings show that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, is as determined as ever to attack the West, but it is unclear whether the group is as capable of following through as it was before the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command started targeting its leaders in Yemen in parallel campaigns.

The deaths of Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda officials in Pakistan has fueled U.S. confidence that al Qaeda’s core leadership can’t mount attacks on the U.S. and that U.S. drone strikes there could be phased out over time. But al Qaeda affiliates, the most active and lethal of which is AQAP, have shown themselves to be increasingly capable and autonomous organizations, making it harder for the U.S. to track and target their leaders.

A major concern for the U.S. is AQAP’s chief bomb-maker—a Saudi citizen named Ibrahim al-Asiri—who is thought to still be at large and has been active both experimenting with new bomb designs and training other bomb-makers, according to American officials and analysts.

Beyond Yemen, al Qaeda in Iraq has reconstituted itself. Its branch in Syria is drawing in hundreds of foreign recruits each month. And in Mali, al Qaeda-linked fighters fled French warplanes and commandos and have set up a rudimentary base in the Libyan Desert outside Paris’s reach.

“The problem we face today is there are probably more al Qaeda cells and affiliates across the Arab world in 2013 than there have ever been before because of the chaos that’s followed the Arab Spring,” said Bruce Riedel, a Central Intelligence Agency veteran and now director of the Brookings Intelligence Project

About al-Qaeda...

The group was founded in approximately 1988 by Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam, and Muhammad Atef — the latter a native Egyptian and a onetime member of the terrorist group Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Al Qaeda’s overriding objective is to establish a worldwide caliphate governing all the earth via the dictates of Islamic Law. Crucial to the achievement of that goal is the destruction of America by any means necessary. As one Al Qaeda Training Manual makes explicitly clear, violence is the preferred method of dealing with the enemy:

“Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are established as they [always] have been by pen and gun, by word and bullet, by tongue and teeth.”

The manual further exhorts jihadists to “pledge … to make their [the infidels’] women widows and their children orphans … to slaughter them like lambs and let the [rivers] flow with their blood.”

Al-Qaeda has been in Yemen for a number of years.

Al Qaeda’s presence in Yemen is due to the with the country’s domestic conflicts and the convoluted agendas of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. In the 1994 civil war, in which Saleh’s government defeated the Southern Rebels, Saleh and his loyal generals organized the mujahideen, some of whom would split off and form Al-Qaeda in Yemen, into fighting units against southerners who the jihadis already thought were godless socialists.

In the process of destroying an uprising of Zaydi Shiites in Yemen’s north known as the Houthi rebellion, Saleh backed the bujilding of Salafi schools linked with Al-Qaeda in Houthi territory, thus turning his political threat into a sectarian battle. Even during the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets, Yemeni leaders urged the country’s young men to travel to Afghanistan to fight.

Despite cooperating with them at the beginning, jihadis would find Saleh an undependable ally. Salah would readily cozy up to them when it suited his political goals, then he would just as readily turn on Al-Qaeda as soon as the benefits from doing so were presented to him, usually in the form of American aid money. His turncoat nature, in the years following the Cole bombing, led to the Yemeni Government arresting the group’s members, using deadly force against them, and allowing the U.S. intelligence services to operate in the country.

Saleh was an unfaithful friend to the United States in the war on terrorism, as well. His friendship ran hot and cold, even at one point refusing the FBI access to prisoners complicit in the USS Cole bombing.

Then, over the past decade, the U.S. supported a totally inept and totally corrupt Yemeni security apparatus When Yemeni security forces would somehow actually manage a victory in its fight against Al-Qaeda, it would lose to “escapes” twice as many Terrorists as it would capture.

Meanwhile, our American President, instead of providing troops to protect our American Embassies, has simply closed them, showing weakness to the barbarians, which is never a good idea.

I recognize the need to protect Americans, so more are not butchered, as Americans were on that fateful night in Benghazi. However. If this Administration does not show some backbone soon, America will continue to be in the same situation that England was under Neville Chamberlain.

We will be negotiating from a position of weakness.  

This is Smart Power?

Until He Comes,

KJ