WikiLeaks: Cables reveal US military role in Muslim world

Source McClatchy Newspapers

From the Saudi-Yemen border to lawless Somalia and the north-central African desert, the U.S. military is more engaged in armed conflicts in the Muslim world than the U.S. government openly acknowledges, according to cables released by the WikiLeaks website. U.S. officials have struck relationships with regimes that generally aren't considered allies in the war against terrorism, and while the cables show U.S. diplomats admonishing the regimes to respect the laws of war, they also underscore the perils of using advanced military technologies in complex, remote battlefields with sometimes shifty friends. Experts said that the revelations of secretive American operations in Muslim countries could offer fodder to Islamist militants who accuse the United States of aggression against Muslims and of siding with authoritarian and unpopular regimes. "This kind of feeds the al Qaida narrative, that we're doing it everywhere," said Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration.