Something unfortunately pressing kept me from attending Gen. Petraeus’ talk to the Institute for the Study of War, but I can’t help but notice this discussion of Yemen, courtesy of a transcript ISW emailed me. Petraeus is talking about the effect of a visit to Yemen he took in July:

The visit in July, on the other hand, was a literal as far as figurative embrace. That gave us what we needed together with the State Department to intelligence agencies to start building what ultimately enabled us when we saw the serious threats starting to emanate from Yemen to help with operations that were conducted on the 17th of December, 24th of December, and a number of other smaller ones that the Yemenis conducted.Those operations took out two training camps, killed three suicide bombers, the fourth who was with those three was wounded and captured with his suicide belt still on by the Yemeni sensitive site exploitation team. A senior leader was killed and a number of others also were killed or wounded. That pressure has continued. I think it is known. I was in there on the 2nd of July as well, had a very good meeting, and illustrative, I think, of where we are, we were going to make that a secret meeting as was the meeting in July, until a month or so ago at least.

Really? Progress is measured by corpses? Petraeus gestured toward the “central casting” nature of Yemen as a terrorist redoubt, what with “the tribal nature of it, fairly conservative event of religion in certain areas and so on, and the dissatisfaction again with levels of services and opportunity and all the rest of that.” But he didn’t build it into a critique, nor did he use it as a guide for the way strategy should unfold.

I don’t blame Petraeus for not having an off-the-shelf policy to deal with Yemen, because who in the Washington policy establishment really understands that country, really. But it’s jarring to see the guy who taught us about how misleading it can be to focus on an enemy and not the conditions that allow an enemy to foster get so enemy-centric.