From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Jan 07 2010 - 09:11:52 EST
Yemen: The Most Fragile Ally
By <http://www.time.com/time/letters/email_letter.html> Andrew Lee Butters
Thursday, Jan. 07, 2010
Ali Abdullah Saleh has a phrase for it. Ruling Yemen, he says, is like
"dancing on the heads of snakes." Saleh, Yemen's President, has had plenty
of practice. As an army officer back in 1978, he took power in North Yemen
after the assassination of the previous President. (North Yemen had become
an independent state after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.) In
1990 he led the North to victory in a war against South Yemen, the territory
that was once the British colony of Aden, and has ruled the unified nation
ever since. He's done so using the classic techniques of a Middle Eastern
strongman — clamping down on the press, concentrating military and economic
power in the hands of friends and family and winning elections by
suspiciously high margins. Though Saleh's main source of legitimacy is the
semblance of unity he has brought to what is one of the world's most
fragmented countries, his chief skill has been survival.
<http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1883150,00.html> (See
pictures of a jihadist's journey.)
Now Saleh, 67, finds his snake-dancing skills being tested as never before.
The suspicion that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who allegedly
tried to blow up a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day, trained for his
mission with al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen has renewed attention on the
nation as a breeding ground for extremists. Saleh — a professed U.S. Ally —
has promised action and indeed has sent hundreds of extra soldiers to the
front lines of al-Qaeda-dominated territory east of Sana'a. But U.S.
officials view him as a fickle leader facing a difficult array of threats —
from a sectarian rebellion in the north and a secessionist movement in the
south, to say nothing of dwindling water supplies and oil reserves. In the
past, the Yemeni government has been lax about the threat from al-Qaeda, and
critics have charged that Saleh has used jihadists against his own
adversaries. "The question is, What's his appetite for taking the fight to
the bad guys?" says a U.S. official. It's a good question. But with no other
options but to work with Saleh, the issue for the U.S. may be how to manage
expectations of what is possible in Yemen. And manage them down.
A Troubled History
Stretched around the southern heel of the Arabian Peninsula and home to 23.8
million people — compared with 28.7 million in neighboring Saudi Arabia —
Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. It has a long
history of being both a source of militants and a staging ground for
jihadist attacks. In 2000, al-Qaeda fighters rammed an explosives-packed
speedboat into the U.S.S. Cole in the port of Aden, killing 17 sailors.
Militants have also attacked the U.S. embassy in Sana'a several times.
One indication of Yemen's salience in the fight against terrorism: of the
200 or so detainees still held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, some 90 — more
than from any other country — are Yemeni. And one indication of the
confidence (or lack of it) that the U.S. has in Saleh's government: last
year, officials determined that 40 to 50 of those detainees were safe to
send back to Yemen for eventual release, but last month it was decided to
keep them at Gitmo. Why? Because, said a State Department official, "We all
took a look at Yemen and said, Oh, man, this stinks. Normally, when you
repatriate [detainees] to a government that is competent, they keep an eye
on them. In Yemen, the government has less capacity [to do so]. We'd be
negligent if we were ignoring that." And the Administration hasn't. Barack
Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, took direct control of
the Yemeni-detainee issue, traveling to Yemen twice last year to push the
U.S. counterterrorism agenda.
Government opponents claim that Saleh's use of state resources to bolster
his circle of supporters has left the rest of the country to rot. But not
all of Yemen's problems are Saleh's doing. The country faces a severe water
shortage, in large part because of the national addiction to khat, a shrub
whose young leaves contain a compound with effects similar to those of
amphetamines. (The crop accounts for roughly a third of the country's water
usage.) Moreover, Yemen's production of oil — which constitutes 90% of its
exports — is limited and could end by 2017, according to the World Bank.
Without money, Saleh's ability to play patronage politics and buy off the
opposition has faded. Though posters bearing his portrait are plastered
across Sana'a, his authority doesn't extend very far beyond the capital.
About two-thirds of the country is in the hands of either separatist groups
or local tribes, some of which have a habit of kidnapping foreign tourists
to use as bargaining chips with the central government. Economic and
developmental issues — Yemen's most volatile regions are among those hardest
hit by drought and government neglect — are at the heart of most of those
conflicts, especially the war between the government and Shi'ite rebels,
known as Houthis, that is being waged in the northern province of Sa'ada.
More ominously, Yemen's social and economic problems have created a vacuum
for al-Qaeda to fill. Squeezed out of Iraq and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda
operatives have regrouped in Yemen's lawless mountain regions east of Sana'a
and have merged with al-Qaeda's Saudi branch to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula (AQAP). Led by Naser Abdel-Karim Wahishi and Saeed Ali Shehri, a
Guantánamo detainee who was released in 2007, AQAP may constitute 200 core
members supported by thousands of locals. Terrorism experts worry that with
a firm footing in Yemen, al-Qaeda can coordinate with Red Sea pirates
operating from Somalia and eventually reach the Suez Canal — or launch
attacks in Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf countries. "Anyone who
has been to Yemen knows that automatic arms, explosives, even rockets are
sold out in the open — on street corners — often by people who make no
secret of their Islamist affinities," says a French counterterrorism
official. "It's been this enormous crossroads for people traveling from one
jihad, like Iraq or Afghanistan, to another one, like Somalia."
The U.S. has few military options against a guerrilla organization that has
blended in with the local population and landscape. Air strikes and missile
launches from afar run the risk of highlighting America's impotence rather
than its might. On Dec. 17 and 24, joint Yemeni-U.S. strikes against
purported AQAP training camps took place and killed more than 60 militants,
U.S. intelligence officials claimed. It was initially hoped that the attacks
had disposed of Wahishi, Shehri and radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the
cyber–pen pal of the accused Fort Hood shooter, Army Major Nidal Malik
Hasan, but no evidence has yet demonstrated that to be the case. And more
missile strikes could prove politically disastrous in a nation whose
citizenry seethes with anti-U.S. sentiment.
<http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1897932,00.html> (See
pictures of Pakistan beneath the surface.)
Washington wants to continue to cooperate with Saleh and is encouraging his
government to take the lead in rooting out al-Qaeda. The U.S. boosted
counterterrorism funding for Yemen from less than $5 million in 2006 to $67
million in 2009 and has been dispatching CIA and military personnel to train
Yemeni forces. U.S. Centcom commander General David Petraeus said on Jan. 1
that military assistance would double in the coming year. But outside
observers are skeptical of how much effect more guns and money will have,
especially if the largesse is appropriated by a corrupt bureaucracy. In any
event, Saleh's officials have been wary of seeming to do America's bidding.
In 2002 the U.S. scored a victory against al-Qaeda in Yemen and promptly
spoiled its success. Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense at the
time, took public credit for a Predator-drone strike that killed a top
al-Qaeda figure, exposing Yemeni leaders to domestic criticism for siding
with the U.S.
When Awful Is Good
For foreign aid to have an effect in Yemen, it would have to be tied to some
kind of reform process that both addresses Yemen's endemic corruption and
devolves some power from Saleh. At the top of the wish list would be a
political reconciliation between the central government and the Houthis. Not
all is grim. With the right incentives, tribes in al-Qaeda areas could be
induced to turn against the extremists, along the lines of the Sunni
awakening in Iraq, according to Najeeb Ghallab, a Sana'a University
political analyst. "The situation is moving from bad to worse," he says,
"but there's a golden chance to save Yemen if it sparks reform."
Such reform won't happen overnight, however, and possibly not at all while
Saleh is President. His son Brigadier Ahmad Ali Abdullah Saleh is widely
viewed as being groomed for succession, and his circle of younger,
Western-educated officials is sometimes touted by supporters as being more
reform-minded than the elder generation. But skeptics think the son may end
up being merely a less crafty version of the father. "Ahmad is popular, but
without any strategic vision, he will either be weaker than his father or
just continue the way his father did things," says Adel Shogaa, a
political-science professor at Sana'a University.
That's why managing expectations down seems a sensible step. Perhaps, if the
U.S and its allies play their cards right, with a regional plan to expand
economic development in Yemen and coordinate security, the sort of disaster
seen in Afghanistan and Somalia can be avoided. "We've seen this movie
before, and we know how it ends," says Christopher Boucek, an associate in
the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"Yemen's problems are really unsolvable. But you can reduce the impact that
they will have, make them less bad and increase the chances for it to
survive what we know is coming — state failure."
Which amounts to little more than hoping that the collapse of a U.S. ally
will have consequences that are merely awful rather than catastrophic.
— With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson / Washington; Bruce
Crumley / Paris; Rami Aysha / Beirut; and Abigail Hauslohner / Sana'a
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