LIBYA DEMANDS ANSWERS FOR RAID
Al-Qaeda suspect seized at seaside villa
WA SHI NGT ON • Four vans with tinted windows converged in a comfortable Tripoli neighbourhood as Libya’s leader of al-Qaeda returned home Saturday from early morning prayers. As his wife watched with alarm from a window, the men armed with silencer-equipped weapons, some masked and some not, smashed his car window. Within moments, they were gone, taking with them one of America’s most wanted terror suspects.
Around the same time about 3,000 miles away, highly trained commandos from the same Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden slipped out of the sea and stormed into a villa in Somalia to capture another man high on America’s target list. Met by a hail of bullets and then a lengthy gunfight, they withdrew without their quarry from a country best known to many Americans as the scene of Black Hawk Down.
The l at es t chapter in President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat al-Qaeda and its loose affiliates turned out to be a tale of two raids, one that succeeded and one that did not. The seizure of Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, better known as Abu Anas al-Liby, from outside his home in Tripoli, where he was living largely in the open, represented a longsought victory for the United States. But the failure of the Somalia operation underscored the limits of America’s power even for one of its most storied military units.
Thanks in part to the bin Laden raid in Pakistan by SEAL Team 6 in 2011, many Americans have become accustomed to the triumphs of Special Forces and see them as a sub- stitute for the larger-scale military operations that characterized Iraq and Afghanistan for so many years. The disparate results in two corners of North Africa over the weekend served as a reminder of the uncertainties and dangers inherent in any form of warfare.
Mr. Obama, who authorized both raids, made no comment about them Sunday. But administration officials acknowledged that the Somalia operation went awry.
“It did not achieve the objective,” said one official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive operations. “It achieved other things in the sense that these guys are now trying to figure out what happened, trying to figure out who dimed out who, and there’s a certain amount of confusion there.”
Militar y veterans said that the contrasting results reflected the challenges of counterterrorism.
“It’s hard to think of a more complex mission than an amphibious raid into strongly held enemy territory,” said Gen. Carter F. Ham, the retired head of the military’s Africa Command, who noted that he had not been briefed on the details of the operation.
While only one of the two targets was captured, no Americans were hurt.
“The reality is that there’s no such thing as 100% success except in the movies,” said a defence official who asked not to be named. “This was a betterthan-average day.”
The nearly simultaneous raids came at a time when Mr. Obama is trying to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and shift the nation’s long-running terror war away from the prolific use of unmanned drone strikes that has characterized his presidency. The twin operations on the African coast underscored the evolving geography of the terror threat away from its Middle East and South Asian epicentres.
They also may have set another precedent in the terror struggle as the United States made clear it had little trust in Libya’s security services.
“This appears to be the first unilateral operation under military authorities to capture someone outside of war zones or ungoverned places like Somalia,” said Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff at the Pentagon and CIA under Obama.
The Libya raid traces its origins to last year, according to the administration official, when national security agencies believed they had an understanding of the whereabouts of Abu Anas and began formulating a plan to capture him. Abu Anas, who was indicted in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, was a much-coveted target, but in addition to the logistics of capturing him, government officials had to consider the legalities.
The Somalia operation came together more recently, just in the past few months, after simmering debate inside the government about whether direct assault missions in the largely lawless nation were worth the risk to American lives.
In terms of diplomatic relations, the Somalia raid was in some ways the easier decision.
“It’s less of a concern with the Somalia operation where there’s already this established infrastructure and a lot of co-operation on al-Shabab,” the administration official said.
“Libya with a new, fragile government, the concerns were different and very real. We had to weigh what the risks and benefits are to doing this on the government, on the security situation for our people on the ground.”
Mr. Obama signed off on both operations, and it became clear last week that windows of opportunity for each were opening, the administration officials said. Lisa Monaco, the president’s counterterrorism adviser, began updating him daily and then several times a day on the progress.
The administration is also trying to bring to justice the perpetrators of last year’s deadly assault on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others.
Some critics pointed to the failure Sunday to do that.
“Why if we were able to get al-Liby we didn’t get the operatives from Benghazi?” Rep. Peter T. King, R-N.Y., asked on the CBS News program Face the Nation. “We know where they are and they’ve been almost open and notorious now for quite a while.”
The capture of Abu Anas appeared to come off without a hitch from the American point of view.
He was driving a black Hyundai sport utility vehicle to his three-story house in the Noflene neighbourhood in the northeastern part of Tripoli when the four vans rushed toward him from three directions, according to his son, Abdullah, 20, who was inside the house.
There was no shooting, his son said, and his father was not carrying a weapon.