Four years after identifying al-Qaida in Yemen as a major terrorist threat, the US seems stuck with a plan of 'bombing and hoping'

If the barrage of US drone strikes over the last week weakened al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate, the terrorist organization that has captured Washington's attention isn't acting like it. Not only is it vowing another attack, it has prompted the US to keep its Yemen embassy closed while reopening all the others – implicitly highlighting the weakness of the US policy of launching drone strikes first and asking questions later.

Intelligence chatter indicating an imminent attack by al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula (Aqap) prompted two reactions by Washington. The first was to order a dramatic, temporary shutdown at embassies and consulates throughout the Middle East and Africa. The second was to order a surge in drone strikes in Yemen.

A Saturday strike marked the ninth such attack in two weeks. At least 38 suspected "militants" are reported dead. Throughout 2013, the US has launched 21 airstrikes in Yemen, the vast majority from drones; displacing Pakistan as the epicenter of the covert air war, which has seen 18 strikes thus far, according to statistics compiled by the Long War Journal, which tracks the drones closely.

Should that trend hold, it would mean there would be more annual US drone strikes in Yemen than in Pakistan, the home of al-Qaida's central leadership, for the first time in the entire post-9/11 era. The steady rise in drone attacks strikes some as an ominous sign about America's true capabilities in Yemen four years after identifying Aqap as a major terrorist threat.

"The US doesn't seem to have good human intelligence [in Yemen]. It's essentially bombing and hoping, which is neither sustainable nor wise," said Gregory Johnsen, author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia.

"It doesn't seem to have an impact on al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula."

The strikes, conducted under parallel programs run by the CIA and the military's Joint Special Operations Command, are significant not only for their intensity and timing. A US official acknowledged to the New York Times that they are no longer targeting simply the top tier of leadership in Aqap – an expansion that may be hard to reconcile with President Obama's May pledge to rein in the drone campaign.

"Before, we couldn't necessarily go after a driver for the organization; it'd have to be an operations director," an anonymous official told the Times. "Now that driver becomes fair game because he's providing direct support to the plot."

But while Obama indicated he would restrict the drone campaign during a May 23 speech at the National Defense University, his criteria for using lethal force left the CIA and the military with significant leeway. He did not pledge to only kill senior leaders of terrorist organizations – although his reference to "highly skilled al-Qaida commanders, trainers, bomb makers and operatives" may have left that impression.

A White House factsheet issued after the speech referred to killing "a senior operational leader of a terrorist organization or the forces that organization is using or intends to use to conduct terrorist attacks" as long as the strike is lawful.

Either way, expanding the pool of eligible targets for strikes is rarely a sign that the power launching them believes itself to be winning. Yet such expansion has been a feature of the drone campaigns in Yemen and Pakistan before it: intelligence and military officials have succeeded in both countries to launch strikes against suspected militants without even knowing their names, something known by the shorthand "signature strikes."

Any individual strike might perhaps be sound; or have a tactical effect on Aqap. But the organization hardly sounds like it's under stress.

On Monday, Aqap's leader, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, vowed in an unusual letter to free Aqap prisoners in Yemen. "Your brothers are about to bring down the walls and thrones of evil," Wuhayshi said in a rare public communication. Not only did Wuhayshi himself break out of a Yemeni jail in 2006, but several recent prison breaks around the Middle East and south Asia have sparked fears of resurgent al-Qaida affiliates, particularly when compared to weak governments in their host countries.

Wuhayshi's message came a day after gunmen ambushed and killed five Yemeni soldiers guarding an oil and gas installation in the country's south. Aqap is suspected of involvement – just days after Yemen boasted of disrupting a major Aqap plot; and despite the drone barrage.

The US State Department, meanwhile, has reopened all the diplomatic facilities it abruptly shuttered last week in response to fears of an Aqap attack. The exception is in Yemen, where the Sana'a embassy remains closed.

State Department representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

The human consequences of the interlocking wars in Yemen – Aqap's war against the Yemeni government; the Yemeni government's war to reestablish its control over its population; the US war against Aqap and its support of the Yemeni government– are profound.

While it is unknown exactly how many people have died in US drone strikes, cruise missile strikes and raids, several hundred is a consensus range. Then there is the psychological effect.

On July 31, a Yemeni man named Faisal bin Ali Jabar wrote to Yemeni president Abdo Rabu Mansour Hadi and Barack Obama to seek answers about the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew in an August 2012 drone strike.

"Our family are not your enemy. In fact, the people you killed had strongly and publicly opposed al-Qaida. Salem was an imam. The Friday before his death, he gave a guest sermon in the Khashamir mosque denouncing al-Qaida's hateful ideology. It was not the first of these sermons, but regrettably, it was his last," Jabar wrote.

Earlier this year, a US Senate panel heard for the first time from a Yemeni, activist and journalist Farea al-Muslimi, who sought to explain how deeply drones had affected average Yemenis, even those who never lost anyone in a strike. Muslimi testified that parents now scare their children into behaving by threatening to send a drone after them. He warned that the drone strikes were instilling "psychological fear and terror."

Muslimi spent last week tweeting about surveillance planes loitering overhead of his home in Yemen to underscore the fears ordinary Yemenis have during the current emergency. He vented about the way presumption given in the media to the US that anyone killed by a drone was a member of Aqap.

"Th # of times media says "suspected militants n #Yemen" makes me thnk All living n yemen, including foreign diplomats, r suspected militants," Muslimi tweeted Sunday.

"The US is running to drones every time its counter-terrorism efforts fail," Muslimi wrote in Sunday's Independent. "On each occasion the public rage against al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula grows and its image is tarnished, and the US – via drone strikes – restores it again. In its recent actions, the US has become al-Qaida's public relations officer."

As the US keeps the Sana'a embassy closed and drone-fired missiles keep pounding Yemen, experts are wondering when Washington will develop a strategy for Yemen more sophisticated than bombing and providing a measure of foreign aid.

"I don't see the US having a strategy or policy. I see it as having an approach – one that's fluctuating, depending on how severe the threat is," Johnsen said. That being: drones strikes.

"I think US has two goals in Yemen," Johnsen explains. "One is: it wants to prevent any sort of Aqap attack on the US homeland or US interests in the Middle East. Second: making sure no official Americans die. Those are both very defensive goals. The two primary, goals when you see what US is doing in Yemen – those are things the US wants to avoid."