President Barack Obama on Wednesday (epa/ZUMApress.com)

A year after President Obama’s speech in Cairo vowing to reset relations with the Muslim world, Muslims worldwide are telling pollsters about their disillusionment with what they consider unfulfilled expectations.

According to the Pew Center’s new survey of global attitudes (PDF), released Thursday morning, citizens of Muslim nations report disproportionate antipathy to Obama’s foreign policy. With the exception of Indonesia, where Obama spent a portion of his childhood, Muslims are the exceptions to the Pew poll’s findings that eighteen months of the Obama administration have seen a surge of international support for the United States after the public-opinion troughs of the Bush administration.

[Security1] “The Pew results reflect growing dissatisfaction with Obama’s policies, as many Arabs and Muslims are disappointed that Obama has not lived up to his promises, especially on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Marc Lynch, a George Washington University professor and the co-author of a recent Center for a New American Security report measuring Obama’s global engagement efforts. “They don’t see his actions matching his words, and until they do then it isn’t likely that there will be a sustained recovery in America’s image.”

In Jordan, the U.S. approval rating has fallen to 21 percent. It’s at 17 percent, the lowest of any countries Pew surveyed, in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan. And this comes after the Obama administration has presided over the largest non-military aid package to Pakistan — the $7.5 billion, five-year Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill — in history.

“Opposition to key elements of U.S. foreign policy remains pervasive,” Pew analyzes, “and many continue to perceive the U.S. as a potential military threat to their countries.”

The news is not universally negative. Nigerian Muslims give Obama a 70 percent approval rating, up from 61 percent in 2009. But they’re the outliers. In Egypt and Lebanon, Obama’s ascendance — and the departure of George W. Bush — elevated Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. somewhat: 25 percent of Egyptians reported favorable opinions of the U.S. in 2009, up from 20 percent a year earlier; Lebanese Muslims in 2008 had given the U.S. a 34 percent favorability rating, which rose to 47 percent in 2008. Now Egyptian Muslims have reverted to their pre-Obama 20 percent favorability rating. Lebanese Muslims have settled into a 39 percent favorability rating.

More ominous from the perspective of Obama’s Cairo speech, Muslims express a sentiment directly opposite the speech’s offer of partnership: They fear that the U.S. will attack them. Majorities, and sometimes large ones, of respondents in Egypt (56 percent), Lebanon (56 percent), Indonesia (76 percent), Pakistan (65 percent), Jordan (52 percent) and Turkey (56 percent) believe the U.S. is a potential military threat. That shouldn’t be surprising: Pakistan, despite being a Major Non-NATO Ally of the U.S., is currently battered in its tribal areas by CIA drone strikes, a step the U.S. has taken in response to what it considers insufficient Pakistani military action against al-Qaeda-aligned extremist groups. In Cairo, Obama pledged that the U.S. “is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” but many Muslims worldwide believe that the U.S. still has them in its crosshairs.

Support for the Afghanistan war and U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Muslim countries is also anemic. Lebanon is the only Muslim country surveyed by Pew where even 20 percent believe that the U.S. should keep fighting in Afghanistan. (Neighboring Pakistan? Seven percent.) While support for U.S. counterterrorism efforts have grown in non-Muslim countries since Obama took office, it’s at 18 percent in Egypt, 12 percent in Jordan, and 47 percent among Nigerian Muslims.

Several counterterrorism experts believe the U.S.’s counterterrorism efforts will ultimately be hobbled if they run into a headwind of Muslim antipathy. Malcolm Nance, a retired veteran military intelligence officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, argues in a new book that rather than attempt to change Muslim attitudes, a more productive strategy would involve moving the conversation to al-Qaeda’s apostasy. Nance code-names this approach CIRCUIT BREAKER, and writes in “An End to Al-Qaeda” that subjecting al-Qaeda to a “deep analytical dissection of their religious motives” can provide a path to “a new era for reconciliation and cooperation with the Muslim street.” It would also provide a platform for popular acquiescence to military or intelligence action against al-Qaeda — or at least limit blowback from it.

The administration appears to be attentive to the challenges, even if it hasn’t figured out a programmatic way to overcome them. Last month, the Pentagon quietly established a new office to ensure that military efforts don’t inadvertently undermine the administration’s broader promotion of the rule of law around the world.

Lynch, who also recently evaluated Obama’s counterterrorism efforts for CNAS partially through the prism of Muslim acquiescence, disputed that the Pew numbers demonstrate that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world was in vain. “It’s more that he said he would do things, but thus far hasn’t delivered,” Lynch said, “so the words lose their meaning. It’s a real problem for the broader counterterrorism strategy, since winning over mainstream support is absolutely key to the strategy.”

President Obama meeting with Michael Leiter, center right, and other intelligence officials at the National Counterterrorism Center in October (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

President Obama is scheduled to meet on Tuesday afternoon with 20 of his security advisers to receive the results of two inquiries into how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck a bomb onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. One of those advisers is Michael Leiter, the Bush-appointed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a hub created after 9/11 for the intelligence community’s voluminous data about terrorist plots and ambitions. While NCTC, as it’s known, has taken much criticism in the media over the past two weeks for failing to flag Abdulmutallab as a threat, NCTC has so far evaded criticism over a structural problem it still faces five years after its creation: of the 300 analysts working at the center, fewer than a dozen focus full-time on the Middle East.

[Security1] According to NCTC veterans, the NCTC’s Middle East Branch consists of eight to nine analysts at any given time. Those analysts are responsible for integrating and analyzing millions of pieces of fragmentary data relevant to terrorism in the Middle East provided by partner intelligence agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency. They disseminate their synthesis throughout the intelligence community and into the law-enforcement and policymaking worlds, to ensure officials perceive previously hidden connections that might reveal the next al-Qaeda plot and act accordingly. And they’re responsible for analysis of a region central to the organization: Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Osama bin Laden and ancestral home of most 9/11 hijackers; Iraq, rocked by years of war and occupation; the restive Levant, Israel and the Palestinian territories, a decades-long hotbed of extremism; and Yemen, where the Nigeria-born Abdulmutallab received his explosive device from a growing al-Qaeda presence.

“There’s limited manpower and finite resources,” said a former NCTC analyst who, like several colleagues in the intelligence community, described the state of the Middle East Branch on condition of anonymity. Longstanding and government-wide shortfalls in language resources afflict the branch as well, the analyst said: “Very few people speak Arabic, and very few have ever been to the region.”

An individual familiar with NCTC’s current operations did not dispute the number of Middle East Branch analysts. But the individual said focusing on the number was misleading, because NCTC can shift analysts around from across the center to surge attention and resources to deal with an emerging problem. “There might be eight or nine people that are deemed those particular experts, but across the Center, there’s a heck of a lot more that can be drawn upon,” the individual said, citing more-experienced supervisors and additional NCTC branches and groups working on related issues that can contribute as needed.

But several NCTC veterans, none of whom would agree to be identified because of their ongoing involvement with the intelligence community, discussed chronic shortfalls of manpower at the agency. One NCTC veteran described a single analyst — “yes, singular,” a different former NCTC analyst emphasized — who until recently was responsible for analysis of terrorism on the entire Arabian Peninsula, apparently during the time when al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has emerged as what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday termed a “global threat.”

A different U.S. intelligence official pushed back on the importance of that seeming shortfall. “Yemen has been an area of significant focus by this organization and others around the government,” the intelligence official said. Pointing to the eight or nine analysts on the Branch is “wholly misleading,” because others in NCTC work on aspects of terrorism analysis for al-Qaeda not specifically related to Yemen or the Middle East that assist understanding al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But the official continued, “Now, there may be one primary person who’s looking at a particular area or has particular expertise or is a regional expert or is a country expert, OK, let’s say that’s ‘The Person.’ But with all that’s been going on in that country” — a reference to U.S. intelligence-assisted strikes on the terrorist organization — “it is totally wrong to think that there is just one person that’s watching Yemen.”

Since passengers and crew aboard Northwest Flight 253 prevented Abdulmutallab from detonating a device hidden in his underwear, overwhelming media and political attention has focused on how NCTC synthesized fragmentary bits of data acquired about Abdulmutallab and the organization that outfitted him, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based franchise of the terrorist network. The most specific piece of information NCTC received came from officials at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, after the would-be bomber’s father told embassy staff on Nov. 19 that Abdulmutallab might be an extremist. An interagency process led by NCTC determined that the information did not meet an agreed-upon standard of “specific derogatory information leading to reasonable suspicion” necessary to place Abdulmutallab on a terrorist database maintained by the FBI, a precursor to placement on the no-fly list. Frustrated intelligence officials have wondered what they were really supposed to do with those data fragments, and have expressed bitterness over becoming a media scapegoat — and having other government departments blame them for the Christmas Day near-attack.

John Brennan, Obama’s senior White House counterterrorism adviser and the first director of NCTC, said on ABC’s “This Week” that a positive sign in the Abdulmutallab case was that unlike before 9/11, there was “no evidence whatsoever” that the various intelligence agencies with information on Abdulmutallab or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were “reluctant to share” with each other. The trouble, Brennan said — and will likely report to Obama on Tuesday afternoon — was that “there are millions upon millions of bits of data that come in on a regular basis. What we need to do is make sure the system is robust enough that we can bring that information to the surface that really is a threat concern.”

Yet some experts question NCTC’s organizational configuration for such synthesis. Staffing the Middle East Branch with eight or nine full-time analysts is “a baffling management decision” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence-policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists. “Other than South Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, what is more important than the Middle East from a counterterrorism point of view? Where are the other several hundred [NCTC] analysts focused?”

Much of NCTC remains outside public view. Its budget is classified, a component of the budget allocated to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which is also not publicly disclosed.

NCTC veterans described a situation where the requirements of preventing terrorist attacks outweighed the resources provided to NCTC. “The sheer volume of intel is amazing,” one said. “The word ‘jihad’ is on the Internet every single day, it’s like [several] billion hits. And there’s no way you can track every email or cellphone conversation.”

Compounding the challenge is the questionable experience of many NCTC analysts, about 60 percent of whom are on loan from other intelligence organizations on two-year rotations. One of the former NCTC analysts described eager and dedicated colleagues being assigned to areas of expertise they did not come to NCTC possessing; as well as analysts reassigned from their areas of focus to assist with the latest crisis.

“You’re assigned to Yemen? Great, but you don’t know who the players are, what the [country's] resources are, and you don’t know where al-Qaeda fits into the whole process,” the former analyst said. Analysts will often be asked to be brought up to speed by their colleagues or predecessors. The two-year rotations are meant to encourage a culture of intelligence sharing within the 16 intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. Some intelligence professionals believe that those rotations ultimately give CIA or Defense Department analysts a broader perspective about an intelligence question. Others lament that their acquired expertise rotates back from NCTC to their partner agencies. “The nature of this organization is that people leave their jobs every two years,” the ex-NCTC analyst said.

The center’s hundreds of analysts are organized into units looking at extremist groups, various regions of the world where they operate, and questions about the groups’ capabilities and intentions. “There’s staffing that’s re-prioritized all the time. None of this is set in stone,” said a U.S. intelligence official. “People are put on particular groups and task forces that examine issues closely as they emerge. The numbers themselves are not really telling you the story of how much can be put against a particular issue or topic or threat that’s emerging.”

But with Brennan talking about an accelerated need to “bring [terrorism] information together so when a father comes in with information and we have intelligence, we can map that,” some in the intelligence community are concerned that the already overtaxed NCTC will be asked to synthesize even more fragmentary data from its contributing intelligence agencies. “What you’ll end up doing is opening up the firehose to full blast,” said one. “They’re barely able to handle what they have right now.” Indeed, Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic reported Tuesday that before the attempted Christmas attack, Leiter and the NCTC’s leadership were preparing for 2010 budget cuts. The U.S. intelligence official who defended NCTC added, “Clearly, if people believe more resources have to be applied against something, it’ll be identified” for Congress to approve, although the official said that conclusion was premature.

Aftergood, however, questioned whether NCTC’s performance merited giving the center additional funding or manpower. “There’s a tendency to say if organization fails in its mission we should give it more resources, and if it succeeds in mission we should give it more resources,” he said. “There are some other questions we need to examine first, such as: is this organization properly structured to accomplish its mission? Maybe there’s an explanation for the surprisingly small allocation of Mideast analysts, but it’s not at all obvious.”

While we already knew that Abdulmutallab’s father, a retired banker in Nigeria, had warned U.S. authorities about his son’s extremist views, “it now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community, and it was not sufficiently distributed” through the homeland security system, President Obama said in a speech this afternoon. As a result, Abdulmutallab did not land on the government’s no-fly list — although he should have, said the president.

“We’ve achieved much since 9/11 in terms of collecting information that relates to terrorists and potential terrorists attacks,” said Obama, but “the system is not sufficiently up to date to take advantage of the information we have.” If it had been, “a fuller clearer picture of the suspect would have emerged” and “the suspect never would have been allowed to board that plane to America.”

Obama will no doubt be criticized for referring to Abdulmutallab as “the suspect” instead of “the terrorist” — he was denounced this morning on Fox & Friends for using the big word “allegedly” instead of simply presuming the man’s guilt in plain English and in a more “presidential” fashion.

But unlike his predecessor after the 9/11 attacks, Obama is acknowledging quickly where things went wrong, and now promises to do something about it.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (U.S. Marshall's Office/ZUMA Press)

The Obama administration’s decision to try the Nigerian man suspected of attempting to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas as an ordinary civilian criminal rather than as an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” in a military commission, as the 9/11 hijackers initially were, highlights the inconsistent approach taken by both the current and previous administrations, civil libertarians and defense lawyers say.

The Justice Department appears to have immediately treated the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian who claims he trained in Yemen with al-Qaeda, in the way it has long treated suspected terrorism: as a criminal act to be prosecuted in a civilian federal court.

[Law1] Arrested on Friday, Abdulmutallab was charged the next day, while being treated for burns in a hospital room in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was charged with attempting to blow up Northwest Flight 253, which left from Amsterdam and was headed for Detroit.

Asked why the Department of Justice treated Abdulmutallab as a civilian rather than a suspected belligerent, DOJ spokesman Dean Boyd said: “At this time, we have no comment on the ongoing investigation or any prosecutorial deliberations — beyond the public charging documents that have been filed in the case.” The criminal complaint is here.

Defense lawyers who represent Guantanamo detainees who have not been treated as civilians applauded the Obama administration’s move, but noted the lack of a coherent rationale for continuing to treat other alleged terrorist plots as acts of war.

“There is something striking about fact that they treated the 9/11 attacks as an act of war but treat somebody who’s trying to blow up a plane as an ordinary criminal,” said David Remes, legal director of Appeal for Justice who represents almost a dozen Yemeni men still detained at Guantanamo Bay. “What is the basis of the distinction?”

Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union similarly called it “a positive step that the Obama is handling this case through the criminal justice system which has demonstrated time and again that it is fully capable of prosecuting terrorism without sacrificing constitutional rights or values.”

He added in an e-mail that it is “unfortunate that the Obama administration is not applying this strategy across the board and instead continuing to detain individuals at Guantanamo without trial and outside the criminal justice system.”

This case was probably easier to send to federal court than some others because it does not involve a defendant who’s been detained for years without charge or tortured or otherwise abused by U.S. authorities, as have some detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. Those factors could all complicate a subsequent prosecution in federal court. By turning Abdulmutallab over to the FBI immediately, the administration could ensure that lawful procedures were followed and the evidence collected would more likely be admissible in a subsequent civilian trial.

That’s not the distinction the Obama administration has relied upon to justify the use of military commissions, however, and many critics have claimed that the administration has still failed to offer a coherent explanation for its choice of courts for different cases.

The Bush administration similarly chose different fora for different trials, often with little or not explanation. Richard Reid, for example, the so-called “shoe bomber” who tried to blow up an American Airlines plane shortly before Christmas in 2001, was, like Abdulmutallab, treated as an ordinary criminal and tried and convicted in federal court. In fact, the Bush administration tried more than 120 international terrorism cases in federal court after the 9/11 attacks. Still, both administrations have both treated some terror suspects with alleged links to al-Qaeda as war criminals to be tried in military commissions instead.

When Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November he was transferring the 9/11 suspects to federal court for trial, he also announced that four other high-level detainees would be tried by military commission. They include Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected USS Cole bomber, and others who allegedly attacked military targets. Holder at the time attempted to distinguish the cases on that ground, although many critics, including former Justice Department officials, said that distinction didn’t hold up.

Abdulmutallab’s claimed connection to al Qaeda suggests that his alleged attempt to blow up a plane could be treated as an act of war, and he could be tried as a war criminal as well. Similarly, the alleged USS Cole bomber and others charged as war criminals could easily be tried as alleged murderers in federal court.

In fact, as even Justice Department official David Kris has acknowledged, the crimes of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism have traditionally been treated as federal civilian crimes, not as war crimes. That could complicate current attempts to try al Qaeda suspects for those crimes in the newly-reconstituted military commissions.

The hope of a speedy and successful prosecution may be the reason the Justice Department chose to prosecute this latest case in the civilian system, where it’s had a long record of success, both before and since September 11, 2001. Almost 200 terror suspects have been convicted in civilian federal courts since the 9/11 attacks; only three have been convicted in military commissions.

The alternative, say many legal experts, would have been to risk procedural delays, appeals and the reversal of any conviction in the new and untested military commissions.

The Justice Department was expected to seek a warrant to take a DNA sample from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab,, who reportedly told the FBI that he was planning to set off an explosive on the plane, and had been trained by al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. He’s also said that more such attacks are planned. The criminal complaint against Abdulmutallab can be found here (PDF).

Interestingly, while the 23-year-old Nigerian says he’s associated with al-Qaeda, the Obama administration did not hesitate to treat him as a civilian criminal, rather than as an “unprivileged enemy belligerent,” although arguably the attempt to blow up a civilian plane as a terrorist attack on U.S. soil could have been characterized as an act of war, as the 9/11 terror attacks were for years.

CNN reports today that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is claiming responsibility for the Christmas Day attack.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, would not comment on the decision to charge Abdulmutallab in a civilian court, saying:  “At this time, we have no comment on the ongoing investigation or any prosecutorial deliberations — beyond the public charging documents that have been filed in the case.”

Those public documents indicate that the Nigerian man was charged with attempting to destroy the aircraft. He’s been charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan, along with the Counterterrorism Section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

His arraignment was held in the hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan where he is now being treated. Instead of blowing up the plane, Abdulmutallab reportedly set only his crotch and legs and seat 19A of the aircraft on fire.

As Politico reported over the weekend, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, to Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) are loudly connecting the dots between the Nigerian suspect’s visit to Yemen and the fact that about 90 Yemeni prisoners remain at Guantanamo Bay to conclude that the prison camp in Cuba should not be shut down.

“Yesterday just highlights the fact that sending this many people back—or any people back—to Yemen right now is a really bad idea,” Hoekstra said. “It’s just dumb. … If you made a list of what the three dumbest countries would be to send people back to, Yemen would be on all the lists.”

King, meanwhile, called it “a major mistake” to send anyone back there. “I don’t think Guantanamo should be closed, but if we’re going to close it I don’t believe we should be sending people to Yemen where prisoners have managed to escape in the past,” he said, citing the claims that Abdulmutallab had trained there.

Even House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) now seems to be hesitating on what to do with the Yemenis. “I’d, at a minimum, say that whatever we were about to do we’d at least have to scrub it again from top to bottom,” he told Politico.

Actually, the U.S. government has been “scrubbing” Yemen quite a bit lately. As The New York Times reports today: “The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over the next 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels” in an attempt to help Yemen crack down on terrorism.

In addition to helping Yemen root out al-Qaeda, such assistance is also likely aimed at helping President Obama close Guantanamo Bay. Long before the incident on Christmas, the Yemeni government was seen as unstable and unable to control the rise of terror groups within its borders. And the problem of the Yemeni men imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay — including about 34 who have been cleared for release — has been a thorn in the side of the administration’s plans to close the detention camp since they were announced last January.

The six repatriated to Yemen earlier this month had been seen as a sign of progress on that front. The Christmas bombing attempt could become a major setback.

My friend Kriston Capps tips me to an interesting look by The Associated Press at whether Nigeria’s violence-plagued oil sector foreshadows oil development in Iraq. Since I don’t want to run afoul of The AP’s infamous anti-blogger guidelines, I’m going to have to ask you to follow the link and trust my paraphrasing.

This is the lay of the land: Nigeria has a massive amount of oil; a weak central government; unequal distribution of its oil wealth (or at least the perception of such) is an accelerant of violence, and the presence of thug-ish oil corporations are an accelerant of the unequal distribution of its oil wealth. (The piece doesn’t really come out and say that, but it’s fairly clear.) Sound like any country we might be occupying?

The Iraqi government is fumbling through its own round of negotiation with petro-giants, despite little being settled in terms of oil’s relationship to sectarianism. There’s one quote from The AP article that seems particularly apt when applied to Iraq, so the wire service can sue me:

“Oil companies can negotiate with the central government, but if the local government and local people are not happy, the oil companies are not going to be able to do what they want to do,” said Amy Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

For years, the oil pipelines and the Bayji refinery in the north have been frequent targets of insurgents. Nearly every political party has a militia. All it takes is a few bombs, a few hostages and a few sprays of gunfire by a party that feels, uh, disrespected at either the national or the local level to upset an extremely delicate process.

Take that one step further: any oil company that’s going to operate in Iraq is going to hire a private security company. Probably not Blackwater, but think Triple Canopy or DynCorp or someone like that. These guys do not take lightly to being shot at, and they are extremely aggressive in protection of their clients (to put it neutrally).

In short, they’re perfect insurgent targets. Not only are they symbols of unaccountable foreign interference, but they overreact almost by the terms of their hire.

It would take a minimum of effort to set off a vicious circle of petro-insurgent (new term?) chaos.