Our guest blogger is Elizabeth Marcus, an intern with the National Security team at the Center for American Progress.

The Middle East is undergoing dramatic political transformation. Despite the prominent role women have played in organizing these popular movements, the treatment of women in Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, raises serious concern about the future of democracy and human rights in the region. A central issue is the use of rape by both government and non-state forces as an attempt to silence opposition forces. In the context of patriarchal religious societies, rape and sexual violence holds unique potential as a horrific tool of political repression, and its use has been widespread as an attempt to stunt the growth of the Arab Spring.

Women agitating for political change in these countries face the ever-present threat of sexual abuse and the societal stigma that results from sexual violence in highly patriarchal societies. Unlike physical violence, rape and other forms of sexual violence can permanently damage a woman’s reputation and status within her community. Not only is she considered unfit for marriage but rape causes profound humiliation to the male members of her family and, potentially, her community.

Rape was used excessively during Moammar Qaddafi’s attempt to remain in power in Libya. Towards the end of his struggle, his regime ordered soldiers to go into villages and rape the female adults and children, some as young as 8 years old, in front of family members. Condoms and Viagra were found in pockets of dead Qaddafi soldiers. Benghazi journalists reported seeing the ground littered with Viagra after troops had been through.

Rhetoric related to women and sexual violence always comes back to ideas of honor, which is held in the highest regard within Islamic societies. Raping a woman strips the woman, her family, and her community of “honor.” Qaddafi understood this dynamic and used it as a tool to prevent women from organizing opposition to his regime.

Despite Egypt’s notorious reputation for sexual harassment and violence against women, female activists have been at the forefront of efforts to change Egypt’s political system from the very beginning. Perhaps predictably, Egyptian women have also faced sexual violence as they seek to effect political change.

On March 9, 2011, just under a month after President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, protesters returned to Tahrir Square to express frustration with the slow pace of reforms. The Egyptian military broke up the demonstration and arrested demonstrators, including at least 18 women. These women were beaten, charged with prostitution, and forced to submit to “virginity checks.” When confronted, a senior general said, “The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine… these were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square.” In a patriarchal religious society in which female sexuality is heavily policed, accusations of promiscuity serve to damage the reputations of female protesters.
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Nearly half of Air Force drone pilots reported high stress levels in a new survey. The stress, linked to long and erratic work hours and a dramatic increase in the use of drones, leads to “high operational stress” for Reaper, Predator and Global Hawk drone pilots. A smaller number — including approximately a quarter of Global Hawk operators — exhibited signs of “clinical stress,” defined as anxiety, depression or stress severe enough to affect an operator’s family life or job performance.

Drone operators fly missions over Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan and Iraq from bases in Nevada and California. The study — conducted by the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio — found that frequent shift-changes, “mind numbing” monotony, and increasing workloads contributed to the heightened stress levels. Between 65 and 70 percent of drone operators with symptoms of mental illness were not seeking treatment.

The dramatic growth in the use of drones in recent years has led the Air Force to increase the number of drone pilots but the ratio of pilots to drones remains low. The Pentagon has about 7,000 aerial drones and about 1,100 drone pilots. “There’s just not enough people,” Wayne Chappelle, an Air Force psychologist who helped conduct a six-month study of drone operators from 2010 to 2011, told USA Today. “You have to constantly sustain a high level of vigilance, both visual and auditory information, and that would be really tough to do when there’s a lot of monotony.”

While Lt. Gen. Larry James, Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, told USA Today that he didn’t think instances of pilot error could attributed to high stress levels among drone operators, instances of pilot error and civilian deaths have increased as drone mission over Afghanistan and Pakistan increase.

In April, a Predator done killed a Marine and a medic in what appeared to be the first case of “friendly fire” from a drone. And in late October, the drone program drew more negative publicity after 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his cousin were killed in a drone strike one day after attending a “Waziristan Grand Jirga,” an official meeting, to discuss the impact of drone strikes on communities in Pakistan.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton endorsed Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh as “preferable to anarchy” in a Fox News appearance this morning. Bolton argued that Saleh — despite clinging to power for three decades, refusing to implement democratic reforms and overseeing a violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators — is the key to preventing Al-Qaeda from sweeping from across Yemen. He said:

I think Saleh’s return is quite significant. For month’s people had been saying the Saudis were trying to talk him out of power — him and his family — and when he was wounded in that attempted assasination and had to go to Saudi Arabia for treatment, I think many people thought that was the easy way out, in effect, and he would never go back. And he obviously didn’t leave Saudi Arabia without their concurrence. So my guess is the Saudis have put more weight on stability in Yemen than perhaps we’re willing to. But in light of the killing of Awlaki, I think we have to look again at whether Saleh might not be preferable to anarchy, certaintly preferable to Al-Qaeda.

Watch it:

But Bolton’s apparent endorsement of Saleh’s iron-fisted rule as means to containing Al Qaeda isn’t backed up by the reported facts on the ground. Indeed, Saleh cooperated with U.S. efforts to pressure al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) but AQAP appears to have suffered a major setback with the death of Anwar al-Awlaki. The main coalition of opposition groups in Yemen have shown little sympathy for AQAP and claim that Saleh used al Qaeda’s presence as an excuse for harsh tactics against pro-democracy activists and his political opponents.

Moments ago, speaking at the retirement ceremony for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, President Obama said American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki took the lead in “planning efforts to murder innocent Americans” as head of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Obama said it was a “major blow” to al Qaeda.

Former Bush U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, however, tried his hardest to downplay the significance of the Obama administration’s killing of Al-Awlaki in Yemen today, telling Fox News that we shouldn’t “read more into it than there is”:

BOLTON: At the same time, I think it’s important as individual Al Qaeda figures and other terrorists are killed that we not read more into it than there is. Consider this analogy if you were around in the 1920s and somebody said, my God, Vladimir Lenin is dead. The Bolsheviks will never recover from this. [...]

So while Al-Awlaki death is significant, I would not read cosmic consequences into it.

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Bolton’s analogy is rather flawed, as Lenin died of natural causes after a period of of semi-retirement from politics, while Al-Awlaki was at the height of his power. Al-Awlaki had a hand in almost all of the high-profile terror attempts in recent years — he helped recruit Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber,” exchanged emails with Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, communicated with failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, and directed the attempted bombing of cargo planes last year.

But as NBC News’ First Read noted this morning, “no president” in over 20 years “has had more foreign-policy successes happen under his watch than President Obama.” Yet, he’s “getting almost no credit from the American public.” Despite the killing of Osama Bin Laden and nearly two dozen other top terrorist, the dismantling of Al Qaeda, and the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi polls show the public still gives Republicans the edge on combating terrorism. That after President Bush failed to capture Bin Laden or even pursue him with much alacrity.

This is likely because conservative media personalities and Republican lawmakers consistently mislead the public on Obama’s foreign policy, suggesting he is weak on terror and maligning his stance as “leading from behind.” There has never been any basis in reality to their attacks, and even less so after the killing of Al-Awlaki. But Bolton’s performance on Fox this morning suggests that even this latest incident won’t make conservatives acknowledge reality.

Recently, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta spoke at an event at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, California. At one point, the event featured a question and answer session, and an economic professor, Dr. David Henderson, stood up and asked Panetta how the United States can afford to spend so much money fighting wars in South Asia when groups like al Qaeda are spending so little and have become much weaker than they once were.

Panetta responded by saying that we will only “end those wars” when people in those countries who threaten to attack America are no longer there:

Q: Good morning, Mr. Secretary. I’m David Henderson, an economist, an economics professor also in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy. Ohio State University Professor John Mueller stated in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, quote, “An al Qaeda computer seized in Afghanistan in 2001 indicated that the group’s budget for research and weapons of mass destruction, almost all of it focused on primitive chemical weapons work, was some $2,000 to $4,000.” In your previous job, you yourself pointed out that there are fewer than two dozen key operatives left in al Qaeda. Given our huge budget deficit that you referred to, when do you say enough is enough? Let’s end those wars because the costs are so much higher than the hypothetical small benefits?

SEC. PANETTA: The answer to that question is you end those wars when those individuals that have threatened to attack this country no longer are there to threaten this country. We have an obligation coming out of 9/11 to defend this country. That’s what we’re here to do. That’s what we’re all about is to make sure that al Qaeda and their militant affiliates never again attack this country.

Panetta’s suggestion that the United States expend any amount of resources to be at war in Afghanistan until there is no one left there who threatens “to attack this country” would not only have us fighting in that country for years to come, but also implies that we would have to be at war in many other locations. The Congressional Research Service pointed out in a report earlier this year that one terror group alone, al Qaeda, now exists in 70 countries and largely consists of autonomous actors rather than militias or armies:

The Al Qaeda network today also comprises semi-autonomous or self radicalized actors, who often have only peripheral or ephemeral ties to either the core cadre in Pakistan or affiliated groups elsewhere. According to U.S. officials Al Qaeda cells and associates are located in over 70 countries. Sometimes these individuals never leave their home country but are radicalized with the assistance of others who have traveled abroad for training and indoctrination through the use of modern technologies. In many ways, the dispersion of Al Qaeda affiliates fits into the larger strategy of Bin Laden and his associates.

It certainly wouldn’t be desirable to be at war in so many countries. So how should the United States orient itself to combat individuals who are trying to harm the country? The RAND Corporation published a ground-breaking study in 2008 where it analyzed how 268 different terror groups ended between 1968 and 2006. It found that the overwhelming majority of them were defeated either by smart police and intelligence work and/or integrating their movements into the political process and de-radicalizing them. It illustrates this in the following chart:

Certainly, it appears to be much more effective to focus on smart policing and policies that de-radicalize people in order to battle terror. And it is certainly desirable to avoid wars that often radicalize local populations and expend enormous resources in both blood and treasure.