AQAP was a coalition of tribal warlords, and wasn't looking to pick a fight with America. They just wanted regime change. According to journalist Jeremy Scahill, who has spent an enormous amount of time among the tribesmen of Yemen, most Yemenis had a positive view of America.
That all changed when the U.S. military stepped in to defend Saleh and started bombing tribal villages. One attack in particular, the 2009 cluster bomb attack that killed 21 children (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/cable-reveals-airstrike-killed-21-children-yemen/), resulted in the imprisonment by Yemeni authorities of a journalist named Abdulelah Shaye. Shaye was guilty only of the crime of reporting what happened.
True to form, Obama in 2011, when he learned that Shaye was due to be released by the Yemeni government, contacted Saleh and pressured him to keep Shaye imprisoned:
http://www.thenation.com/article/166757/why-president-obama-keeping-journalist-prison-yemen#
On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.
Unlike most journalists covering Al Qaeda, Shaye risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. “We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda,” recalls his best friend Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.”
Shaye had no reverence for Al Qaeda, but viewed the group as an important story, according to Sharaf. Shaye was able to get access to Al Qaeda figures in part due to his relationship, through marriage, to the radical Islamic cleric Abdul Majid al Zindani, the founder of Iman University and a US Treasury Department–designated terrorist. While Sharaf acknowledged that Shaye used his connections to gain access to Al Qaeda, he adds that Shaye also “boldly” criticized Zindani and his supporters: “He said the truth with no fear.”
Meanwhile we had replaced cluster bombs with drone strikes, with ever-increasing frequency. Saleh was deposed in 2012, but thanks to our murderous drone campaign the Yemeni tribesmen - once relatively favorably disposed to us - now hate us. The focus of AQAP has changed, from the ouster of the Yemeni dictator to attacking targets in the West.
In this case our belligerent policy has contributed to the deaths of 11 French citizens.
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