Middle East upheavals complicate U.S. counterterrorism efforts

al Qaeda group who had been sentenced to five years for his ties with it. Al-Shai had met in 2009 with Anwar al-Awlaki, a fugitive militant cleric who is suspected by American authorities of involvement in the Christmas Day plot that year to bomb a Detroit-bound jet and the October 2010 scheme to send mail bombs on planes from Yemen to the United States.

Saleh, who has kept power despite battling three separate insurrections, often has to wire-walk between U.S. officials pressing for more leeway to take the battle against al Qaeda and powerful Yemeni tribes suspicious of his dealings with the Americans. Diplomatic cables released this year by WikiLeaks described the gap between Saleh’s public posturing and private utterances — telling top U.S. counterterror adviser John Brennan at one point that he would pretend that a series of U.S. air strikes had been carried out by Yemeni forces.

“Saleh’s good at dancing in the snake pit,” said Juan Zarate, a former top Bush administration counterterror official who is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The unrest he’s dealing with now poses some dangers, but he’s pretty adept at getting out of trouble.”

Egypt once had to contend with its own breed of hardcore Islamic militants. Three decades of brutal repression by the country’s security services — most recently led by new Vice President Omar Suleiman — largely eliminated them as a threat. The secretive Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization has been headed by al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri since 1991, but Egypt’s secret police crushed the group, expelling al-Zawahri and imprisoning its members.

In a classified diplomatic cable written on 13 April 2009, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Margaret Scobey, wrote that Cairo’s “active opposition to Islamist terrorism and effective intelligence and security services makes Egypt an unattractive safe haven for terror groups, and there is no evidence to suggest there are any active foreign terrorist groups in the country.”

During the uprising last week, there were numerous reports that some Islamic Jihad inmates were among hundreds let out during a mass jailbreak. Egyptian authorities said they rounded up many of those who escaped, but it was not clear whether all of them were back in custody. “As long as the military and security apparatus is in control, I still don’t see Egyptian militants as a real threat,” Cressey said.

The greater concern in Egypt, Zarate said, is tending to the strong ties