The American Conundrum: Arm and fund terrorists in some parts of the world while killing their brothers in other corners

Failed foreign policy of a nation who should know better.  No other country has failed as badly as the USA in  foreign policy matters year after year,  president after president for the last several decades.  

Hannah Allam and Adam Baron writing at McClatchyDC:
..... The rise in prominence  of Nasir al Wuhayshi, the Yemeni head of al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, underscores the transformation of al Qaida from a relatively small group led by one charismatic man into a diffuse global organization with many branches that pursue local objectives but follow a single ideology, according to counterterrorism analysts and officials.

The change has undermined the Obama administration’s boast that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have “decimated” what’s been called core al Qaida, according to veteran al Qaida watchers. Instead, the organization, no longer dependent on the leadership of a single personality, is growing, with authority now spread among leaders not just in Yemen but also in Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Egypt’s Sinai. The branches that operate in those regions aren’t affiliates, the experts say, they’re al Qaida.

The experts are still uncertain how the various leaders of al Qaida interact with one another, and there are signs that Ayman al Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who was named to lead al Qaida after U.S. special forces shot and killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, still holds special influence.

But experts say it’s no longer accurate to talk about a core al Qaida that’s in charge of groups operating in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Iraq and Syria.

“The great fiction al Qaida perpetrated on the West is that a centralized, hierarchical group controlled things from a cave in Afghanistan. That might’ve been true five years ago, but it’s certainly not true now,” said Christopher Swift, an adjunct professor of national security studies at Georgetown University who advises U.S. officials on counterterrorism strategy.....

....The role of Zawahiri is still in question; an intercepted directive from Zawahiri to Wuhayshi to launch an attack is thought to have been the trigger for the U.S. decision to close diplomatic posts in 16 countries this week. But whatever his role, analysts say, it’s important for U.S. officials to grasp that the core is no longer essential for the survival of al Qaida – by now more a movement than a group.....