In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph today, the new head of Britain's armed forces, General Sir David Richards, says there will be no "clear-cut victory" against Islamist militancy, though it can be contained.

"In conventional war," he tells the paper, "defeat and victory is very clear cut and is symbolised by troops marching into another nation's capital. First of all you have to ask: do we need to defeat it [Islamist militancy] in the sense of a clear cut victory? I would argue that it is unnecessary and would never be achieved.

"But can we contain it to the point that our lives and our children's lives are led securely? I think we can."

He also argues that the real weapon in the war against al-Qaeda is "upstream prevention" along with "education and democracy" – though he does not predict a quick solution.

The BBC's security correspondent notes that Gen Richards' views reflect a "new realism" and would have been considered outrageous and defeatist a few years ago.

Though the general refers mainly to Afghanistan in his interview, his remarks also seem particularly relevant to Yemen, where the Obama administration in is the throes of a debate – with itself and with the Yemeni government – about the use of drones against al-Qaeda. The outcome of this debate will probably shape the US approach to covert action in other countries too.

According to various reports (for example, Los Angeles Times andAFP), the US has been using drones in Yemen for several months for surveillance purposes but not for strikes against militants. (The US has nevertheless been implicated in some earlier strikes targeting militants but we'll ignore that for the moment.)

Part of the argument about drones in Yemen is an internal American one, about whether they should be controlled by the CIA or the Special Operations Command. This is discussed in some detail by Gareth Porter in an article for the Khaleej Times.

However, the main problem with airstrikes in Yemen is what CNN calls a lack of "actionable intelligence". Overcoming this isn't simply a matter of persuading the Yemeni authorities to be more co-operative as some reports suggest. The Yemeni regime is not necessarily interested in gleaning precise, detailed intelligence about al-Qaeda; it is quite happy to see any of its opponents tarred with the al-Qaeda brush, whether justifiably or not, for its own political purposes.

That, in turn, adversely affects the battle for public opinion inside Yemen. Many Yemenis, with good reason, suspect the extent of the threat from al-Qaeda has been greatly exaggerated.

The scepticism is further increased when flawed intelligence leads to airstrikes that kill innocent civilians (as has already happened in Yemen several times). Such blunders, of course, are music to the ears of al-Qaeda.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 14 November 2010