A rebel group in Syria denied on Wednesday that it was officially merging with the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda, instead pledging allegiance to core Al Qaeda, raising questions of just what this means for counterterrorism efforts in the region and U.S. support for the ongoing struggle against the Syrian government.

In a confusing 24 hours, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) on Tuesday announced that their alliance with the rebel group known as Jabhat al-Nusrah was now official and public, seemingly ending any uncertainty about ties between the two. Calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIGS), the new group was to be devoted to imposing a harsh form of Islamic law and establishing a caliphate throughout the Middle East.

Rather than going along with AQI’s assertion, however, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, the head of Jabhat al-Nusrah, denied AQI’s claim. Instead, in a recording, al-Jawlani said the group “pledge[s] allegiance to Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri,” the head of Al Qaeda’s core in Pakistan. The State Department originally named al-Nusra as a Foreign Terrorist Organization back in December 2012, even then referring to them as an alias of AQI. Al-Nusrah is at present reportedly the strongest group locking in combat with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Whether al-Nusrah has merged with AQI or pledged itself to Al Qaeda core, the question remains just what effect al-Nusrah’s shift towards publically supporting Al Qaeda will have on the ground, given the Obama administration’s clear antipathy towards the group already. Some have suggested that the newly strengthened ties in either case opens up the Syrian offshoot to military targeting under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), the Congressional approval for the Executive Branch to carry out strikes against terrorist groups responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

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Ten years after the first American bombs fell on Baghdad, the United States is still paying the costs for the invasion of Iraq — monetarily, strategically, psychologically and morally. The decision to launch the war is sure to be re-debated ad nauseum over the coming days. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Sunday that it’s “too soon to tell” whether the Iraq war was a success. Here’s just five reasons why he’s wrong:

1. The debt

At the start of the war, the Bush administration predicted that it would cost around $50-60 billion in total. They were wrong by more than a factor of ten, sending the U.S.’ debt soaring, a condition that has yet to be rectified. According to a recent study, the war is set to have cost the U.S $2.2 trillion, though that number may reach up to $4 trillion thanks to interest payments on the loans taken out to finance the conflict. Of that staggering amount, at least $10 billion of it was completely wasted in rebuilding efforts.

2. The physical and psychological strain on U.S. troops.

The soldiers charged with fighting the war were stretched to their limits, put through multiple tours, with increasing length of time overseas as the war stretched on and shrinking downtime in between each. All-told, over 4,000 U.S. troops died during the country’s time in Iraq, with another 31,000 wounded in action. In the aftermath, the cost of providing medical care to veterans has doubled, adding to the difficulties faced by those who served. Up to 35 percent of Iraq War veterans will suffer from PTSD according to a 2009 study, while the suicide rate among veterans has jumped to 22 per day.

3. The forgotten war in Afghanistan.

Even worse, the war in Iraq caused the U.S. to take its eye off the ball in Afghanistan. Rather than following through, the Bush administration allowed the country to stagnate, prompting a Taliban resurgence beginning in 2004. As the West focused almost exclusively on Iraq, Taliban fighters imported tactics seen in Iraq to great effect, keeping the Afghan government weak and U.S.-led NATO forces on their heels. The result: the United States is still attempting to tamp down on Taliban momentum today.

4. The opportunity costs.

Aside from missed opportunities in Afghanistan, the Iraq War-effort was all-consuming, pulling resources from all other areas of U.S. defense policy. Relationships with key allies were allowed to grow stale and U.S. prestige around the world plummeted. Fighting in Iraq was realized to be a diversion from combating al Qaeda, drawing funding that could have gone towards a litany of other efforts to effectively counter terrorism.

5. The strengthening of Iran and al Qaeda.

The power vacuum left after the fall of Saddam and the lack of adequate U.S. forces left room for U.S. adversaries to fill the void. Counter to what some still believe, Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq prior to 2003. Instead, it was only in the post-Saddam climate that they gained a foothold in the form of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The group continues to carry out attacks against civilians to this day, keeping the Iraqi government on edge.

In the end, it was not the United States that gained the most strategically from invading Iraq, but the Shiite-dominated Islamic Republic of Iran. In removing Saddam Hussein’s predominantly Sunni regime from power, the U.S. opened the door to a greater Iranian influence in the region. That influence has been seen playing out counter to U.S. interests in situations such as allowing Iranian planes bearing weapons for Syria to cross Iraqi airspace.

“The end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a consider- able global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future,” CAP’s Matt Duss writes in the Iraq War Ledger, A Look at the War’s Human, Financial, and Strategic Costs, “But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits.”

South African Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius was released on bail this morning following the shooting death of his girlfriend, and the cable news networks devoted the vast majority of their coverage to the hearing. CNN alone spent 192 minutes in total on the story between 5:00 AM to 10:00 AM, broadcasting for three hours without a single commercial break. The network maintained a constant box on the side of its screen alerting viewers to the imminent bail hearing.

And while the Pistorius case has scandalous appeal, there are other real important news stories in Africa that the networks routinely ignore. Here are just five things happening on the African continent that have nothing to do with the Olympian’s trial:

1. U.S. sending troops to Niger.

President Obama announced in a letter to Congress that he will be deploying 100 troops to Niger, to help aid in the ongoing operations against Islamists in Mali. According to the Associated Press report on the letter, the troops will be armed “for the purpose of providing their own force protection and security,” and focus on “intelligence sharing.” This is the second such deployment that Obama has made in recent years; 100 military advisers were sent to Uganda in 2011 to aid in the hunt for wanted war-criminal Joseph Kony.

Transference of military resources to the African continent has become a hallmark of Obama’s foreign and counter-terrorism policies, as groups like Boko Haram, the Lord’s Resistance Army, al-Shabaab, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have taken on more threatening postures towards U.S. interests. The United States and Niger recently signed an agreement that would allow for the opening of a base for unmanned aircraft — or drones — to be piloted for surveillance purposes.

2. There’s a war in Mali.

The fighting in Mali continues apace, despite French claims that they will begin withdrawing troops in the coming weeks. France intervened in the fight between the Malian government and several rebel groups in January, sending U.S. and European allies scrambling to provide support for the operations. While almost all towns in Mali’s north have been retaken by the government, low-levels of fighting flare up periodically.

Complicating matters are claims of atrocities — mostly in the form of “reprisal killings — committed by the Malian Army against minorities. The International Criminal Court in the Hague has already launched an investigation into potential war-crimes committed during the course of the last year’s fighting,

3. Sales of elephant ivory are fueling terrorism.

The poaching of elephants and rhinos for their ivory is a real security threat to the United States according to a State Department official. Robert Hormats — who serves as Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Enviroment — gave an interview with AllAfrica.com, in which he agreed that ivory counts as a ‘conflict resource.’ Organized groups, like al-Shabaab and the janjaweed militia in Sudan, kill large numbers of animals, sell off the ivory illegally, and use the purchases to buy more weapons for themselves.

The majority of that ivory is being sold to China, as much as 70 percent as reported by the New York Times.

4. Africa’s economic boom.

“Seven of the ten fastest growing countries are on the African continent,” Secretary of State John Kerry declared Wednesday, in his first major speech since taking on the role. Each of those seven countries — Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Congo, Ghana, Zambia, and Nigeria — had projected growth rates of 8 percent or more in 2011 according to the International Monetary Fund. In comparison, last year the U.S. economy grew by around 2 percent. By 2030, the continent is set to boast a middle-class majority for the first time, as poverty drops. All of that growth may not correspond to happiness though — as The Economist points out, not many of the fastest growing economies currently rank among the best places to live.

5. Elections looming in Kenya.

2007’s Presidential elections in Kenya led to the death of thousands as neighbors clashed over the outcome of a disputed vote. Only the diplomatic intervention of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan helped stanch the flow of blood at the time, prompting serious concerns over the pending March 4 elections. This year’s coming elections – in which one of those running have been indicted by the ICC for helping promote violence in 2007 – have the potential to launch another violent struggle between ethnic groups in the East African country. President Obama has already issued a video statement to the people of Kenya ahead of the first round of voting, urging calm and faith in the democratic process. Meanwhile, the State Department’s Conflict and Stabilization Operations Bureau has been working for months with the local government to prevent another outpouring of violence.

CIA Director nominee John Brennan

Yesterday’s Senate hearings on the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA Director brought several questions from Senators related to the program, started under the Bush administration, but expanded over the last four years, involving the targeted killings of suspected militants associated with Al Qaeda. Concern has grown over the past several days, following the leak of a Department of Justice white paper laying out the legal justification for the killing of American terrorists abroad.

Sen. Angus King (I-ME) during the proceedings raised the idea of sending cases where Americans have been accused of collusion with Al Qaeda to a special court of some sort. Such a court, one of several possibilities to rein in the program this blog suggested this week, could potentially be based around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts that approve the wiretapping of individuals suspect of being foreign agents:

KING: A soldier on a battlefield doesn’t have time to go to court. But if you’re planning a strike over a matter of days, weeks, or months, there is an opportunity to at least go to some outside of the Executive Branch body — like the FISA court — in a confidential and top secret way. Make the case that this American citizen is an enemy combatant. At least that would be some check on the activities of the executive.

Brennan said that the concept was “certainly worthy of discussion,” without elaborating on whether he was for or against the idea. Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein (D-CA) after the hearings seemed to be supprotive of the the idea put forward by King, saying that she and other lawmakers “may explore setting up a special court system to regulate strikes.” Such a system, however, could prove to be as susceptible to abuse as the FISA courts currently are.

Commentators on both sides of the political spectrum have spent the week expressing their concern about the extensive nature of the program and the lack of investigation into whether the strategy behind it is working. While the House and Senate Intelligence Committees currently monitor the CIA’s drone program activities in Somalia, Pakistan and other locations, they are bound by secrecy rules to keep those reports under wraps. Some lawmakers have pressed the administration for more declassification of the information surrounding drone strikes and other methods of targeting, opening up what is already a widely reported on occurrence.

The Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow on the confirmation of President Obama’s nominee for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan. There are a number of questions Brennan should and needs to answer but the hearing presents the perfect opportunity to get the current top Obama administration counterterrorism official perhaps most closely involved in the targeted killing program against al Qaeda to answer the fundamental question about it: when does it end?

Since his first bid to direct the Agency fizzled in 2008 after questions were raised about his role in the CIA torture program during the Bush years, Brennan has filled an at times more vital role in the Obama administration. Acting as the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security, serving under the National Security Adviser, Brennan has advised the President on counterterrorism for the past four years. As such, his access to the President to weigh in on security matters domestic and international has been almost unparalleled. In the aftermath of the failed Christmas Day bombing in 2009, Brennan authored a scathing review of what was then U.S. counterterrorism policy. While the Newtown tragedy was still ongoing last December, it was Brennan who first briefed Obama about the school shooting.

Brennan’s most controversial role has been his front-and-center position in the Administration’s military campaign against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The use of targeted killings — most famously executed with drones — against individuals and groups suspect of connection to terrorist groups off the battlefield is by far the most visible outcome of those discussions. In a profile written in the Washington Post, Brennan is identified as the primary supporter of codifying the rules regarding when and where armed drone strikes could be carried out into what’s now called “the playbook” and the benign-sounding disposition matrix that identifies targets for strikes.

So Brennan, then, is ideally positioned to answer the fundamental question that needs to be answered to get a hold on America’s targeted killing program:

What role do targeted killings play in the broader U.S. counter-terrorism strategy and under what circumstances might we cease to employ them?

The question goes beyond the tactic of drone strikes to the conditions that cause them to be used in the first place. As a tactic, drone strikes have garnered significant opposition due to the potential for blowback among the populations where they are utilized, as well as the secrecy that surrounds the CIA’s classified program in Pakistan and moral questions about the serious harm cost in civilian lives the program carries with it. However, whether the program is achieving the ends that the Obama administration seeks, or even an explanation of what those ends are, is often left out of the debate and questioning of government officials.

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Andrew McCarthy

In a segment on Monday night, Fox host Sean Hannity expressed supreme surprise and concern that the United States has not taken on a leading role in the rolling back of rebels in Northern Mali, instead leaving it to France. The situation hit the mainstream media following a hostage crisis in neighboring Algeria linked to Mali, that left at least thirty-seven foreign workers dead — including three Americans — and Fox looking for someone to blame.

In finding Obama’s choice to militarily intervene in Libya in 2011 at fault, contributor Andrew McCarthy argued that leaving Libyan strongman Moamar Qaddafi in place would have prevented such a tragedy from occurring:

MCCARTHY: Well, the French think they have a better idea what their national interest is. That’s for certain. But I think what’s really interesting, Sean, if you remember — you’ll remember this, Judy, you will, too, 2004, 2005, 2006 we were arguing whether George Bush had brought al Qaeda to Iraq.

Now we have a situation where al Qaeda has been basically given the northern portion of a continent and they’ve been armed, because this ridiculous thing we did in Libya where we took out someone who was at the time was deemed to be an American ally, didn’t worry about who was going to come behind him and what ended up happening? His arsenal is now in the hands of terrorists.

The parallel McCarthy draws between Iraq and Libya manages to be wrong — or at best inconclusive — on several points. In comparing the presence of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) to the emergence of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in 2004, McCarthy misidentifies the link between the two groups and the core Al Qaeda leadership based in Pakistan. The latter came into existence only after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, taking advantage of the security vacuum provided by the Bush administration. AQI reported directly to AQ’s core leadership and their rise led to the death of thousands of U.S. soldiers.

AQIM, on the contrary, has existed since 1998 and only in the past decade did it change its name from the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) as a re-branding effort. Even since then, they’ve primarily focused on local, regional issues, all from the West African locations they still operate from. While ties exist between AQIM and core Al Qaeda, the link between the two is not firmly established.

McCarthy also indicates that leaving Qaddafi in place would have prevented Mali from being a harbor for AQIM. Leaving aside the moral questions in allowing Qaddafi in power after his threatening to massacre his people, the idea that the intervention in Libya led directly to the current state of play in Mali has yet to be conclusively proven. The quick spread of AQIM in Mali was sped along by two factors: a new wave of rebellion by the Taureg ethnic group in the North and a coup by low-level officers in April 2012. That neither one of those events would have happened without the Libyan intervention is uncertain, given the weakness of the Malian government, shifting explanations the coup leaders gave for their takeover and that the rebellion appears to have been previously planned. None of which backs McCarthy’s claim that Obama is to blame for Mali’s current troubles as Bush was for Iraq’s.

A 2012 map showing rebel-held territory in Mali

The initial forces on the ground are there to take part in a United Nations-authorized mission to boost training of the Malian Army, ahead of an international force due to be deployed in the fall of this year. Several other European countries have also pledged to send trainers to Mali, but France surprised many with the swiftness of its action. President Francois Hollande laid out the thinking behind France’s decision in a speech on Friday:

“France, like its African partners, cannot accept this. I have decided that France will respond, alongside our African partners, to the request from the Malian authorities.

“We will do it strictly within the framework of the United Nations Security Council resolution. We will be ready to stop the terrorists’ offensive if it continues.”

France — which has a history of intervening in the region, such as in Cote d’Ivoire in 2011 — had previously indicated publicly that it would wait for a further clarification of U.N. resolutions before taking action. While these forces are not necessarily mandated to engage in combat with the coalition of rebels and Islamists in control of Northern Mali, French diplomats are now arguing behind closed doors that previously passed U.N. resolutions give them the authority to do so, should France choose. Given the ease in which the rebels, whose make-up include groups thought to be affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), took a key town on Thursday, Hollande may make that call relatively soon.

France’s speedy response may help make U.S. decision-makers coming to a conclusion regarding the region far easier. After the Sept. 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, reports floated the possibility that the U.S. was considering launching drone strikes against AQIM. Those strikes never came to fruition, but remain a distinct possibility, as J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, sees U.S. counter-terrorism officials being increasingly open to air strikes. “Drone strikes or airstrikes will not restore Mali’s territorial integrity or defeat the Islamists, but they may be the least bad option,” said Mr. Pham, a senior strategy adviser to the U.S. military’s Africa Command.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)

On Fox News this morning, Ayotte gave what was akin to a greatest hits version of the fact/logic-free Republican narrative on Libya, before focusing in on the administration’s not specifically referring to al Qaeda in their public remarks on the attack.

This newest source of outrage of Ayotte and other Republicans stems from the fact that the CIA’s original unclassified talking points, used by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice in explaining the administration’s then-understanding of the attack on Sept. 16, were edited before delivery by Rice. In particular, a direct reference to terrorist groups was changed to read “extremists” during an interagency review to both broaden the scope of the points and not warn suspects of the extent of U.S. knowledge. However, this explanation did not satisfy Ayotte:

AYOTTE: Fourteen days later he did not call it a terrorist attack, nor did he reference it as connected to al Qaeda or an al Qaeda affiliated group. In fact the only reference he made to al Qaeda in that U.N. speech to the world was that al Qaeda had been weakened and Osama bin Laden was dead. This raises additional questions, it goes beyond Ambassador Rice. First of all, why were the talking points changed? It doesn’t make any sense to me that we were trying to dupe al Qaeda, that doesn’t pass the laugh test. But also, why was the President out fourteen days later and still failing to call it a terrorist attack to the world?

Watch Ayotte here:

The certainty that Ayotte shows is in no way shared by the administration or the intelligence community. Investigations into the assault’s perpetrators and their motives are still ongoing, with no official determination given yet by Congress, the State Department, or the FBI. While potential links between the Libyan militia Ansar Al-Sharia and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) have surfaced, there have been no “smoking guns” that the latter helped plan the attack, counter to conservative claims.

While Ayotte and others attempt to learn where the change came from, former CIA Direct David Petraeus has already informed Congress that the talking points used by Rice were approved by the CIA, despite GOP concerns about the original content being changed at the Deputies Committee-level of the National Security Council. The White House has also denied that the edit came from it specifically, having only swapped the word “consulate” for “mission.”

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