On Christmas Day a Nigerian was about to blow up an American airliner, on New Year's Eve a Jordanian inflicted the most grievous blow on the CIA in 25 years. Graham Usher, in New York, reports on the ramifications Americans entered the new decade as they departed the old: scared. News that a 23-year old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdel-Mutallab, had tried to bring down an airbus over Detroit on Christmas day by igniting explosives sewn into his underwear brought an anxious people to the edge of hysteria. Millions of travellers suffered invasive searches and delays as United States airport security went into overdrive. Newark Liberty International airport near New York shut down because a passenger walked through the wrong gate. California airport froze because a "potentially explosive substance" was found in a bag: it was honey. Common sense wasn't the only casualty. Cutting short a Christmas vacation Barack Obama admitted "systemic failure" in the various and multiple defences supposedly in place to protect America from another 9/11. "The buck stops with me," he said. Fending off Republican charges that he was "soft on terrorism", the president promised billions of dollars worth of new technology to screen passengers more thoroughly, tightened an already tight visa regime, and placed 14 countries under harsher surveillance, all but one Muslim or Muslim majority states. He also named the organisation and "failed state" that had enabled the plot. It was not Iraq, where as many as 150,000 US troops have been at war, or Afghanistan, where around 100,000 will be at war, but another country few Americans know and their intelligence agencies' believed lacked the capacity to attack them. "We've known throughout the year that Al-Qaeda in Yemen has become a more serious problem," Obama told People magazine on 10 January. "And, as a consequence, we've partnered with the Yemeni government to go after those terrorist training camps and cells there in a much more deliberate and sustained fashion." "Partnership" has probably meant missiles fired from US pilotless drones on alleged Al-Qaeda bases, such as those that hit Yemen's Shabwa province on 17 and 24 December and killed 60, including women and children. Abdel-Mutallab allegedly told his captors he had been trained, instructed and equipped with explosives in Yemen. Al-Qaeda there issued a statement on 26 December saying the botched attack was "vengeance" for the raids. Both said there would be more. This will invite more US missiles, which is what Al-Qaeda wants. Based on experience in Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia, it knows nothing adds more to its appeal than disproportionate US aggression against it, especially in a land as Arab, tribal and hostile to foreign intervention as Yemen. For now Obama has ruled out "US boots on the ground" in Sanaa, a la Baghdad and Kabul. Instead the model is Islamabad, arm-twisting a weak central government to accept US Special Forces and drones to fight Al-Qaeda on its soil. Both had been lauded in the American media for inflicting "near strategic defeat" on Al-Qaeda's core leadership on Afghan-Pakistan border -- until New Year's Eve. On that day Humam Al-Balawi killed himself, seven CIA agents and a Jordanian officer at the agency's base in Afghanistan's Khost province near the Pakistan border. Balawi -- a Jordanian national -- had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence to work with the CIA and infiltrate Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In a posthumous video released by Al-Jazeera he explained why he had turned on his handlers. "This attack will be the first of revenge operations against the Americans and their drone teams outside the Pakistan border after they killed Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud," he said. Mehsud had been killed inside Pakistan by missiles fired from a US drone on 6 August. The drone was almost certainly launched from Khost. "We will never forget the blood of our leader," said Balawi, in the video. "What remains is to avenge him, inside and outside America." Under the pseudonym Abu Dujana Al-Khorasani, Balawi apparently posted his statements on Jihadi websites. A physician by training -- he obtained his medical degree from a Turkish university -- he was outraged by Israel's war on Gaza last year and volunteered to tend the wounded. Instead he was picked up by Jordanian intelligence officers who "persuaded" him to work with them and the Americans first in Pakistan, then in Afghanistan. Over the summer he apparently supplied accurate information on low-level Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. He won the trust of his mentors and was permitted access to meet the CIA hierarchy at Khost. He was said to have information about Ayman El-Zawahri, Al-Qaeda's second-in- command. He inflicted the most grievous blow on the CIA in 25 years. Of the seven agents killed, five were "experts" on Al-Qaeda whose knowledge was "irrecoverable", a NATO official in Afghanistan admitted to the New York Times on 7 January. Balawi "effectively closed down a key station". He also exposed the depth of collaboration between the Jordanian and American intelligence services. The slain Jordanian officer was a relative of King Abdullah, who, with Queen Rania, attended his funeral. Jordan's media reported that he had been working for a "humanitarian" outfit in Afghanistan. The attack was claimed by Al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban, evincing a rare unanimity among organisations whose goals sometimes diverge and whose relations can be fraught. What bound them here was a common hostility to America's presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that all three are increasingly in the sights of drone predator aircraft. The same magnet has drawn different groups and individuals under the Al-Qaeda banner in Iraq, North Africa, Indonesia, Somalia and Yemen.
