Yemen

Over the past six months, the tone in international media coverage of Yemen has become increasingly apocalyptic. On the security front, the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Yemen has been well documented via a spate of brazen attacks, leading security experts to warn that the new generation of Yemeni militants will be more lethal than its predecessors. The failed state narrative, in which Yemen devolves into something resembling Somalia or Afghanistan, has also spread. Yemeni ministers, foreign aid workers, and journalists routinely predict an imminent demise, as food prices skyrocket, drought hurts harvests, the long-running al-Houthi rebellion in the north drags on, and riots erupt in the south over unresolved grievances stemming from the 1990 reunification of the country.

Sharp, who notes that scholars "reflexively repudiate" the apocalyptic scenario, isn't quite sure what to make of Yemen's increasingly dire plight. President Ali Abdullah Saleh has long ruled in a milieu of "controlled chaos," so maybe we're seeing a manufactured crisis aimed at securing more foreign aid. It's possible the country could "muddle through" its crisis.

Whatever the truth, Sharp argues, it's high time the international community, and Saudi Arabia and the United States in particular, developed a strategy for insuring that Yemen doesn't go the way of Somalia or Afghanistan.

Ranked 21st in this year's Failed States Index, Yemen may not be blinking red just yet. But it's better to be safe than sorry.

Yemen blast just one sign of nation’s troubles

An insurgency in the north, separatist discontent in the south and Al Qaeda attacks support predictions of descent into chaos in an area in close proximity to a major oil route.

By Borzou Daragahi
July 06, 2008

A brutal insurgency rages in the northern highlands. Separatist discontent grows in the south. Al Qaeda is moving in, targeting oil facilities and foreigners as well as ordinary Yemenis.

In the latest unrest, at least five people were killed Saturday in an explosion at a post office in the northern town of Sadah, one of numerous hot spots in this Arabian Peninsula country of 23 million.

Observers fear that Yemen is descending into chaos – a prediction made more dire by its proximity to a critical choke point through which one out of every 25 barrels of the world’s daily oil output passes en route to the United States and Europe.

“Yemen is located next to some very important real estate where there’s a lot of oil,” said Mark Katz, a George Mason University political scientist who has studied Yemen for a quarter-century. “Even if everything goes right in Iraq, even if we have rapprochement with Iran, Yemen is still a time bomb for the region.”

The Bab al Mandab strait, off Yemen’s southwestern edge, is one reason the West, Iran and neighboring Saudi Arabia have taken a heightened interest in this once-ignored corner of the Middle East. The U.S. State Department recently sent an envoy to Sana, the capital, to discuss weapons smuggling, one of Yemen’s many afflictions.

A badly destabilized Yemen would be a “disaster” for the Middle East and the Horn of Africa as well as the West, said Mohammed Abulahoum, a leading member of Yemen’s ruling party.

“You don’t want another Somalia in this region,” he said.

Like those before him, long-reigning President Ali Abdullah Saleh has ruled the fractious Muslim country by pitting tribe against tribe and sect against sect. But critics say at least one of his gambits misfired disastrously, spurring a Shiite insurgency that has drained scarce government resources.

“The war has established a network of interests and financial interests,” said Nabil Subaye, editor of the newspaper Neda, whose managers are being tried in court for reporting on details of the fighting. “The government doesn’t what anyone to know what is happening. We are not even allowed to go to the military hospital to see wounded soldiers.”

Five peace agreements have collapsed since the fighting began four years ago, with each renewal of clashes more fierce than before. Time and again, employees of aid agencies working in the north have seen massive convoys of tanks heading north and reported helicopter sorties targeting rebel fighters, estimated to number between 3,000 and 15,000 men, holed up in the caves and mountains of Sadah province.

Some describe the fighting as proxy war between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. But Tehran maintains friendly ties with the government in Sana, and most officials and experts doubt Iran could supply the rebels, who belong to the Zaidi sect of Shiite Islam, with anything more than moral support.

“Zaidis and Shiites have some things in common,” said Ali Saif Hassan, executive director of the Political Development Forum, a pro-democracy nonprofit organization. “But mostly [they] think they are close to Iran. They are inspired by Iran” and movements it supports, such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

The government insists that it has tried to make peace with the rebels only to be repeatedly rebuffed. “If they do not accept negotiations, we have to fight them,” said Hossein Hazab, an official inside Saleh’s ruling circle.

But if the troubles in the north are draining precious resources, the rising discontent in the south could crack the country in half, again. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, communist South Yemen was its own country. Reunification began in 1990. A short war broke out in 1994 as the south chafed under the rule of the more populous and wealthy north.

Now the south, which includes the Bab al Mandab and some of the country’s key oil fields, is clamoring again for more autonomy. The movement, based in the southern port city of Aden, has developed ties with Yemen’s expanding network of civil society and pro-democracy groups in the capital demanding government accountability and transparency.

“The south is very serious,” said Abdullah Faqih, a professor of political science at Sana University. “These people have a strong state and oil, and they want out.”

The president’s defenders acknowledge that the government has made mistakes in the past, but say its opponents are unreasonable, refusing to acknowledge a track record that includes new schools and roads in the countryside as well as a smattering of foreign investment, including a $2.8-billion gas deal with the French company Total signed in May.

“The problem with the opposition is that they don’t try to meet in the middle,” said Hazab, a member of the government’s leadership committee. “They see everything as black or white.”

But even if the government resolves its problems in the north and south, Al Qaeda has also reemerged throughout Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden. The group’s loyalists were allegedly responsible for the 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole while it was harbored in Aden, killing 17 Americans, and the French-flagged oil tanker Limburg in 2002.

After several years of relative calm, they’ve apparently resurfaced. Last year, a suicide bomber killed at least nine people in an attack on Spanish tourists. Two Belgian tourists were killed in a suspected Al Qaeda attack in January, and in May, a bomb blast at a mosque killed 18 people.

Such instability has scared off foreigners and squelched possibilities for developing a country that is one of the poorest outside of Africa. Many observers say Yemen’s various problems feed off one another, that the war in the north prompts a secluded government to crack down on liberal democracy activists and paves the way for more extremists.

“The lack of democracy led to Al Qaeda,” said Mustafa Raja, a Sana writer.

By Michael Knights
September 24, 2008

Last week, al-Qaeda affiliates attempted to storm the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, leaving seventeen dead, including one American woman. The attack highlights the ongoing problem of terrorism in Yemen, where the United States has struggled to achieve an adequate level of counterterrorism cooperation. The challenge for U.S. policymakers is to achieve greater leverage over the Yemeni government, strengthen that government's capacity to counter terrorism, and simultaneously support much-needed political and economic reforms in the country.

Al-Qaeda in Yemen

The September 17 attack saw two suicide car bombs fail to breach the wall before a four-man team unsuccessfully rushed the embassy on foot, disguised as local security forces and wearing suicide bomb vests. This is the second attack on the U.S. embassy in Sanaa this year; the previous one was a rocket attack on March 18 that killed two Yemenis. These actions and nearly a dozen other terrorist attacks since 2006 were undertaken by cells that brand themselves as "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Jund al-Yemen Brigades." Since their activation in 2006, these groups have been led by terrorists who escaped from a Yemeni prison that same year. The groups also have offshoots in neighboring states such as Saudi Arabia, where government officials raised the country's alert level in August in reaction to evidence of Yemeni-based fighters seeking to carry out attacks in the kingdom.

The government of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Salih has moved energetically to wipe out the current crop of active al-Qaeda affiliates in his country. Of the twenty-three terrorists who escaped in 2006, only two are on the loose -- Qassim al-Raymi and Nasir al-Wahayshi. Militant communiques demand the release of prisoners, the cessation of government harassment of fighters traveling to Iraq, and the distancing of Yemen from the United States.

Shortfalls in Cooperation

Although the government is willing to hunt down committed anti-Salih militants, other elements of the militant Islamist community continue to receive a free pass from the government. The Yemeni government actively recruited for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s and for subsequent jihadist campaigns in the 1990s. These "Arab-Afghan" fighters were also used by the government to fight the socialists from the south of the country. By 1998, a tit-for-tat war broke out between the Yemeni government and the militants, and many Arab-Afghans remained embedded in the government security apparatus and political structure. Yemen's unwillingness to support the U.S. investigation of the October 2000 USS Cole bombing in Aden marked the low point in U.S. confidence in Yemen as a counterterrorist partner.

Salih moved quickly after the September 11 attacks to visit the White House and offer his assistance in the global war on terror. In return, the Yemeni government expected economic assistance, military aid, and political support. Increased U.S. training and operational support to the Yemeni military gave the Salih government greater capacity to crack down on terrorist groups. Terrorist plots against the U.S. and other Western embassies in Sanaa were foiled in 2001 and 2002. A number of plotters from the suicide boat attacks against the USS Cole and the oil tanker Limburg were arrested or killed in 2002, notably Sinan al-Harithi, the head of al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Reduced U.S. Leverage

Following these apparently decisive blows to al-Qaeda in Yemen, the United States turned its attention away from Yemen's counterterrorism efforts and refocused on the regime's political and economic shortfalls. Yemen was rejected from the threshold phase of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) in November 2005 for failing in all eight qualifying categories, ranging from governance reform and political and press freedoms to health, education, and human rights. U.S. nonmilitary assistance to Yemen dropped as low as $7.9 million in 2005, compared to $40.6 million by the United Kingdom in the same year.

Even today, with Yemen admitted to the MCA, the U.S. government is offering only $20.6 million -- a sum linked to the extradition of wanted terrorists, including several of the USS Cole attackers.

The problem is that the amount of U.S. aid is very small in comparison to that of other Western governments (the United Kingdom plans to raise Yemen aid to $100 million by 2011) and tiny compared to multibillion-dollar, no-questions-asked aid pledged by the Chinese and Gulf Arab governments. U.S. leverage has never been properly developed, so it is no surprise that the Salih government will not make painful compromises to secure fairly minor U.S. rewards.

State Failure, Regional Security, and Counterterrorism

Yemen's terrorism challenge is complicated by the strong possibility that Yemen will gradually succumb to state failure. Yemen's economy is steadily collapsing, and during the 2012-2018 timeframe, fuel and power shortages will further reduce the living standard of the fast-growing population (set to double by 2020).

From the perspective of broader regional security, it is critical to prevent Yemen from becoming a failed state. Yemen faces a very active terrorist threat from al-Qaeda affiliates, an intermittent tribal insurgency in the north, and growing tension across the country related to economic and political grievances. A collapsed Yemen would function as an arms market, terrorist haven, and economic migrant route that could complicate security in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa.

U.S.-Yemen counterterrorism cooperation is also threatened by a weakened Yemeni state. As Salih's rule becomes weaker, his government is reaching out to radical Islamist allies to prop it up. Since 2004, the government has made use of former jihadists to fight the Houthi clan rebels in northern Yemen, with such fighters receiving releases from house arrest, payment, and even control of Houthi land and mosques. Sheikh Abd al-Majid al-Zindani, named as a specially designated global terrorist by the U.S. Treasury Department in February 2004, plays a senior role in the Islah political party, which Salih's junta of generals are likely to turn to as a political partner when his third and (by law) final term comes to a close in 2013.

Rebuilding U.S. Leverage

When Yemen's current crop of experienced militant leaders is ground down -- a moment that is approaching -- it may appear that the "job is done" once again, and U.S. policy is likely to focus on Yemen's shortcomings: its unwillingness to convict Yemeni returnees who served in Iraq; its tendency to loosen arrest conditions and overturn terrorist charges as soon as international attention has turned elsewhere; and its failure to hand over terrorists wanted by the United States or to guarantee that the 108 Yemenis being released from Guantanamo Bay will be kept from reoffending. All these complaints are valid, but reiterating them is less valuable than finding practical ways of restoring U.S. leverage and influence over the Yemeni government.

It may be that U.S., British, and Saudi aid can be linked to greater oversight of Yemeni terrorist prisoners, but this is essentially a tactical detail. An increasingly weak Yemeni government is unlikely to make painful compromises as long as U.S. nonmilitary aid is far lower than that of countries that provide much more and impose no conditionality. Aside from ensuring counterterrorism cooperation, there is a strong strategic rationale for the United States to ramp up its nonmilitary aid to help prevent state failure. Historically, the chances of receiving counterterrorism cooperation from a collapsed Yemen are zero, and the cost of rebuilding a failed state far outweighs the costs of preventing such a collapse.

Michael Knights is a Lafer international fellow of The Washington Institute, specializing in the military and security affairs of Iraq, Iran, and the Persian Gulf states.

A Timeline Of Attacks Against the U.S. In Yemen

September 2008: Gunmen launch a suicide attack against the U.S. embassy in San'a, leaving at least 16 people dead.

March 2008: Attackers fire mortar rounds at the embassy compound but miss, striking a nearby girls' high school. The attack killed a Yemeni security guard and wounded more than a dozen girls.

2006: A gunman opened fire outside the embassy but was wounded and captured by Yemeni guards.

2004: Two Yemeni men were arrested for an attempt to assassinate then-U.S. Ambassador Edmund James Hull. They set off two bombs near a shop where the ambassador had stopped earlier.

2003: Police guarding the embassy fired into a crowd of demonstrators who were protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, killing two people and wounding dozens more.

2002: A Yemeni man threw a sound grenade onto the embassy grounds just a day after Vice President Dick Cheney stopped in San'a for talks with government officials.

2000: Suicide bombers in a small boat pulled alongside the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole in the harbor at the Yemeni port of Aden, detonating a cargo of explosives and killing 17 American sailors.

Yemen is facing an economic and political crisis as the country's oil resources near exhaustion, a report by a London-based think-tank says.

The Royal Institute for International Affairs warns that instability there could expand a zone of lawlessness from northern Kenya to Saudi Arabia.

It describes Yemen's democracy as "fragile" and points to armed conflicts with Islamists and tribal insurgents.

One diplomat says that the country's prospects get worse every month.

The World Bank predicts that Yemen's oil and gas revenues will plummet over the next two years and fall to zero by 2017 as supplies run out.

Given that they provide around 90% of the country's exports, this could be catastrophic.

An unnamed energy expert is quoted in the report as saying that this points to economic collapse within four of five years time.

Democracy 'distorted'

Although Yemen was the first democratic nation on the Arabian peninsula, its democracy is described as fragile and distorted by what the report calls the northern tribal system of patronage around President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The president is already facing Islamist insurgents as well as conflicts with tribal groups, and must stand down in 2013 after 35 years in power.

The report concludes with a grim warning that a failed state in Yemen could threaten stability across the region.

It says it could open the way to piracy, smuggling and a flourishing jihad with implications for the security of shipping routes and the transit of oil through the Suez Canal.