How Will the U.S. Handle Yemen?

Bruce Riedel, Daily Star January 18, 2010

The failed attempt by the Nigerian bomber, Omar al-Farooq Abdulmutallab, to blow up Northwest flight 253 near Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day has suddenly brought into the limelight another important link in the chain of global terrorism. That of ill-governed Yemen. The country has been on the Obama administration’s radar since Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula emerged as a major threat.

The fact that Yemen is now at the forefront of the United States’ counter-terrorism effort does not, however, mean the fight there is going to be easy. The country has always been one of the world’s least governed spaces with the problems made worse by the fact that for several decades US-Yemeni relations have been poor. This has turned many Yemenis against the United States and sympathetic to Al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda has long been active in Yemen, the original home land of Osama bin Laden’s family. One of the organization’s first major terror attacks was conducted in the port of Aden in 2000, when an Al-Qaeda cell nearly sank the American guided missile destroyer the USS Cole. A year ago, Al-Qaeda franchises in Saudi Arabia and Yemen merged after the Saudi branch had been effectively repressed by the Saudi authorities, under the leadership of the deputy interior minister, Prince Mohammad bin Nayef. The new Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula showed its claws when it almost assassinated the prince last August. The organization used a suicide bomber who passed through at least two airports on the way to his attempt to kill Nayef, wearing an explosive-packed underwear like the Nigerian on Northwest flight 253.

The same bomb makers who produced that device probably made the bomb that Abdulmutallab used to try to blow up flight 253. In claiming credit for the Detroit attack, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula highlighted how it had built a bomb that “all the advanced, new machines and technologies and the security boundaries of the world’s airports” had failed to detect. They praised their “mujahedin brothers in the manufacturing sector” for building such a “highly advanced device” and promised that more such attacks will follow.

Another Yemeni connection to come to light in recent days is the Yemeni-American cleric Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki. He was in contact with the US Army major, Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas on November 5 of last year. In an interview with Al-Jazeera released on December 23, Awlaki said that he had encouraged Hassan to kill his fellow soldiers because they were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan and were part of the Zionist-Crusader alliance that Al-Qaeda says it is fighting.

Yemen’s emergence as a terrorist trouble-spot is relatively new, but the country has always been a lawless land. Nominally part of the Ottoman Empire from the 1530s onwards, Yemen gained independence at the end of the World War I when the empire collapsed. After 1918, the northern part of the country was ruled by an almost medieval regime dominated by the minority Zaydi Shiites (who make up about 45 percent of the population), a uniquely Yemeni Shiite movement that is independent of the larger, mainstream Shiite sect that runs Iran. Yemen lost a border war with Saudi Arabia in the 1920s, which has left Yemenis angry towards Riyadh ever since. In 1962 a pro-Egyptian coup led to a long civil war and military dictators have ruled Yemen ever since. Recently, some Zaydi tribes called the Houthis, named for one of their late leaders, have again revolted.

The southern part of Yemen became a British colony in the 1830s. Actually, the British only wanted to control the port of Aden as a transit stop on the passage to India. The British were ousted by a communist guerilla war backed by the Soviet Union in 1968. When the communist regime in Moscow collapsed in 1990, the abandoned and bankrupt communist south had no choice but to merge with the north. The hero of unification was President Ali Abdullah Saleh who survived a Saudi backed southern rebellion in 1994 and has now been in office for 31 years. The south still seeks to break away from the north, however, and Aden is a hotbed of secessionism.

The Saleh government has ruled by both dividing and accommodating the different power centers in the country. Saleh is himself a Zaydi Shiite, but he is also a firm Arab nationalist. He backed the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the first Gulf War in 1990. In response, the Saudis expelled a million Yemeni workers from the kingdom and backed the anti-Saleh southern insurrection in 1994. Saleh has permitted parliamentary elections, but the regime in fact oversees a police state, albeit a weak one.

The Saleh government’s battle against Al-Qaeda has illustrated its inherent weaknesses. Again and again Al-Qaeda operatives have been captured by the government only to escape from prison. The current head of -Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasser al-Wahishi, broke out of the nation’s number one prison in 2006 along with 30 other terrorists. His deputy, Said al-Shihri, is a Saudi released by the Bush administration from the Guantanamo Bay prison to Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s strongholds are mostly located in the south of Yemen, in the remote Sunni tribal provinces that have remained ungoverned for decades.

US-Yemeni relations have never really recovered from the differences the two countries had over the 1990 Gulf War. All American aid was cut off in 1991 and only slowly resumed thereafter. After Al-Qaeda blew up the USS Cole in Aden harbor in 2000, the investigation of the attack only further embittered both sides as each claimed that the other was holding back key information. The Bush and Obama administrations have rightly refused to send Yemeni detainees back from the Guantanamo facility, given the history of prison breaks in Yemen during the last decade. Yemenis rightly believe the US treats them like a poor cousin compared to their traditional Saudi enemy.

But there is no “made in America” answer to resolving the problem of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Drones can kill key operatives if the United States has good intelligence on where they are located. But that primarily comes from the Yemeni authorities. Controlling lawless spaces where Al-Qaeda thrives must be a Yemeni mission. The US can and should help with military and economic assistance, but the Yemenis have to buy into the job. Despite years of bad relations between Riyadh and Sanaa, the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs have to provide the economic aid and jobs that are the only long-term solution to salvaging Yemen’s anemic economy. Thankfully, Saudi Arabia and its regional allies seem to be recognizing that a failed Yemen will destabilize the entire Arabian Peninsula.

The Obama administration has offered the Saleh regime additional military assistance and has encouraged the government to strike hard against Al-Qaeda hideouts in the last few weeks. The attacks have killed some leaders of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, however it is unclear exactly how serious a blow these efforts have inflicted on the group. The Al-Qaeda leadership has vowed revenge for the strikes, which it blames on an alliance between the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Saleh government. The fight promises to be a long and difficult one.

While fighting Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the United States should bear in mind that the organization still takes its strategic guidance and direction from the Al-Qaeda core leadership that is located in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The merger between the Yemeni and Saudi factions of Al-Qaeda that created Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula last January was directed by Osama bin Laden himself. Yemen remains a vital battlefield in the war against Al-Qaeda, but the epicenter is still in Pakistan. The challenge the Americans must meet is to try to strengthen governance in three of the most ungoverned spaces in the world – Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

This will neither be cheap nor speedy. However, the only alternative is to continue living with a deadly threat.

Bruce Riedel is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. He served for 30 years in the Central Intelligence Agency and has traveled extensively throughout Yemen. His 2008 book, “The Search for Al-Qaeda,” will be published in paperback this spring. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary, which appeared in YaleGlobal Online Magazine, by permission from the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

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How Will the U.S. Handle Yemen?

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