Yemen left with little wiggle room

By Stephen Zunes

The United States may be on the verge of involvement in yet another counter-insurgency war that, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, may make a bad situation even worse. The attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a Nigerian and apparently planned in Yemen, the alleged ties between the perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre to a radical Yemeni cleric, and an ongoing US-backed Yemeni military offensive against al-Qaeda have all focused US attention on that country.

With a population of about 24 million, Yemen has almost as large a population as Saudi Arabia, yet lacks much in the way of natural resources. What little oil they have is rapidly being depleted. Indeed, it's one of the world's poorest countries, with a per-capita income of less than US$600 per year. More than 40% of the population is unemployed and the economic situation has worsened for most Yemenis as a result of a US-backed structural adjustment program imposed by the International Monetary Fund.

The county is desperate for assistance in sustainable economic development. The vast majority of US aid, however, has been military. The limited economic assistance made available has been of dubious effectiveness and has largely gone through corrupt government channels.

Al-Qaeda's rise
The United States has long been concerned about the presence of al-Qaeda operatives within Yemen's porous borders, particularly since the recent unification of the Yemeni and Saudi branches of the terrorist network. Thousands of Yemenis participated in the US-supported anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan during the 1980s, becoming radicalized by the experience and developing links with Osama bin Laden, a Saudi whose father comes from a Yemeni family.

Various clan and tribal loyalties to bin Laden's family have led to some support within Yemen for the exiled al-Qaeda leader, even among those who do not necessarily support his reactionary interpretation of Islam or his terrorist tactics. Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have served as migrant laborers in neighboring Saudi Arabia. There, exposure to the hardline Wahhabi interpretation of Islam dominant in that country combined with widespread repression and discrimination has led to further radicalization.

In October 2000, al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the US Navy ship Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. This led to increased cooperation between US and Yemeni military and intelligence, including a series of US missile attacks against suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

At present, hardcore al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen - many of whom are foreigners - probably number no more than 200. But they are joined by roughly 2,000 battle-hardened Yemeni militants who have served time in Iraq fighting US occupation forces. The swelling of al-Qaeda's ranks by veterans of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Iraqi insurgency has led to the rise of a substantially larger and more extreme generation of fighters, who have ended the uneasy truce between Islamic militants and the Yemeni government.

Opponents of the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq correctly predicted that the inevitable insurgency would create a new generation of radical jihadis, comparable to the one that emerged following the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the George W Bush administration and its congressional supporters - including then-senators Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton - believed that a US takeover of Iraq was more important than avoiding the risk of creating of a hotbed of anti-American terrorism. Ironically, President Barack Obama is relying on Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton - as well as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, another supporter of the US invasion and occupation - to help the US get out of the mess they helped create.

Not a failed state
Yemen is one of the world's most complex societies, and any kind of overreaction by the United States - particularly one that includes a strong military component - could be disastrous. Bringing in US forces or increasing the number of US missile strikes would likely strengthen the size and radicalization of extremist elements. Instead of recognizing the strong and longstanding Yemeni tradition of respecting tribal autonomy, US officials appear to be misinterpreting this lack of central government control as evidence of a "failed state". The US approach has been to impose central control by force, through a large-scale counter-insurgency strategy.

Such a military response could result in an ever-wider insurgency. Indeed, such overreach by the government is what largely prompted the Houthi rebellion in the northern part of the country, led by adherents of the Zaidi branch of Shi'ite Islam. The United States has backed a brutal crackdown by Yemeni and Saudi forces in the Houthi region, largely accepting exaggerated claims of Iranian support for the rebellion. There is also a renewal of secessionist activity in the formerly independent south. These twin threats are largely responsible for the delay in the Yemeni government's response to the growing al-Qaeda presence in their country.

With the US threatening more direct military intervention in Yemen to root out al-Qaeda, the Yemeni government's crackdown may be less a matter of hoping for something in return for its cooperation than a fear of what may happen if it does not. The Yemeni government is in a difficult bind, however. If it doesn't break up the terrorist cells, the likely US military intervention would probably result in a greatly expanded armed resistance. If the government casts too wide a net, however, it risks tribal rebellion and other civil unrest for what will be seen as unjustifiable repression at the behest of a Western power. Either way, it would likely increase support for extremist elements, which both the US and Yemeni governments want destroyed.

For this reason, most Western experts on Yemen agree that increased US intervention carries serious risks. This would not only result in a widespread armed backlash within Yemen. Such military intervention by the US in yet another Islamic country in the name of "anti-terrorism" would likely strengthen Islamist militants elsewhere as well.

Cold War pawn
As with previous US military interventions, most Americans have little understanding of the targeted country or its history.

Yemen was divided for most of the 20th century. South Yemen, which received its independence from Great Britain in 1967 after years of armed anti-colonial resistance, resulted from a merger between the British colony of Aden and the British protectorate of South Arabia. Declaring itself the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, it became the Arab world's only Marxist-Leninist state and developed close ties with the Soviet Union. As many as 300,000 South Yemenis fled to the north in the years following independence.

North Yemen, independent since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, became embroiled in a bloody civil war during the 1960s between Saudi-backed royalist forces and Egyptian-backed republican forces. The republican forces eventually triumphed, though political instability, military coups, assassinations and periodic armed uprisings continued.

In both countries, ancient tribal and modern ideological divisions have made control of these disparate armed forces virtually impossible. Major segments of the national armies would periodically disintegrate, with soldiers bringing their weapons home with them. Lawlessness and chaos have been common for decades, with tribes regularly shifting loyalties in both their internal feuds and in their alliances with their governments. Many tribes have been in a permanent state of war for years, and almost every male adolescent and adult routinely carries a rifle.

In 1979, in one of the more absurd episodes of the Cold War, a minor upsurge in fighting along the former border led to a major US military mobilization in response to what the Jimmy Carter administration called a Soviet-sponsored act of international aggression. In March of that year, South Yemeni forces, in support of some North Yemeni guerrillas, shelled some North Yemeni government positions.

In response, Carter ordered the aircraft carrier Constellation and a flotilla of warships to the Arabian Sea as a show of force. Bypassing approval of the US Congress, the administration rushed nearly $499 million worth of modern weaponry to North Yemen, including 64 M-60 tanks, 70 armored personnel carriers, and 12 F-5E aircraft. Included were an estimated 400 American advisers and 80 Taiwanese pilots for the sophisticated warplanes that no Yemeni knew how to fly.

This gross overreaction to a local conflict led to widespread international criticism. Indeed, the Soviets were apparently unaware of the border clashes and the fighting died down within a couple of weeks. Development groups were particularly critical of this US attempt to send such expensive high-tech weaponry to a country with some of the highest rates of infant mortality, chronic disease and illiteracy in the world.

The communist regime in South Yemen collapsed in the 1980s, when rival factions of the politburo and central committee killed each other and their supporters by the thousands. With the southern leadership decimated, the two countries merged in May 1990. The newly united country's democratic constitution gave Yemen one of the most genuinely representative governments in the region.

Later in 1990, when serving as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, Yemen voted against the US-led effort to authorize the use of force against Iraq to drive its occupation forces from Kuwait. A US representative was overheard declaring to the Yemeni ambassador, "That was the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast." The United States immediately withdrew $70 million in foreign aid to Yemen while dramatically increasing aid to neighboring dictatorships that supported the US-led war effort.

Over the next several years, apparently upset with the dangerous precedent of a democratic Arab neighbor, the US-backed regime in Saudi Arabia engaged in a series of attacks against Yemen along its disputed border.

Renewed violence and repression
In 1994, ideological and regional clan-based rivalries led to a brief civil war, with the south temporarily seceding and the government mobilizing some of the jihadi veterans of the Afghan war to fight the leftist rebellion.

After crushing the southern secessionists, the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh became increasingly authoritarian. United States support resumed and aid increased. Unlike most US allies in the region, direct elections for the president and parliament have continued, but they have hardly been free or fair. Saleh officially received an unlikely 94% of the vote in the 1999 election.

And in the most recent election, in 2006, government and police were openly pushing for Saleh's re-election amid widespread allegations of voter intimidation, ballot-rigging, vote-buying and registration fraud. Just two days before the vote, Saleh announced the arrest on "terrorism" charges a campaign official of his leading opponent. Since that time, human-rights abuses and political repression - including unprecedented attacks on independent media - have increased dramatically.

Obama was elected president as the candidate who promised change, including a shift away from the foreign policy that had led to such disastrous policies in Iraq and elsewhere. In Yemen, his administration appears to be pursuing the same short-sighted tactics as its predecessors: support of a repressive and autocratic regime, pursuit of military solutions to complex social and political conflicts, and reliance on failed counter-insurgency doctrines.

Al-Qaeda in Yemen represents a genuine threat. However, any military action should be Yemeni-led and targeted only at the most dangerous terrorist cells. The Yemeni government ought to be pressed to become more democratic and less corrupt, in order to gain the support needed to suppress dangerous armed elements.

In the long term, it would be better for the United States to significantly increase desperately needed development aid for the poorest rural communities that have served as havens for radical Islamists. Such a strategy would be far more effective than drone attacks, arms transfers and counter-insurgency.

Stephen Zunes is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus and a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)




THE ROVING EYE

Empire reloaded

By Pepe Escobar

HONG KONG - One's got to hand it to failed underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab. He is the real Man of the Year. With a single twitch of his lower parts, the now iconic young Nigerian single-handedly not only forced the Barack Obama administration to unleash tight airport security measures, a new virtual striptease craze bound to bolster the fortunes of selected players in the security industry; but he also managed to place no fewer than 675 million Muslims (plus sundry Nigerian and even Cuban Christians) on a Cyclopean terror list of 10 "prone to terrorism countries". [1]

That's quite a feat for an apparently trained-in-Yemen jihadi charged by a US grand jury - no irony intended - with "attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction". But weren't WMDs supposed to be buried in Iraq?

It's Pearl Harbor time
As much as 9/11 was the "Pearl Harbor" dreamed of by the neo-conservatives to unleash the American Eagle - which started with the bombing of Afghanistan and morphed into the disastrous invasion of Iraq - Abdulmuttalab's failed attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day in the skies above Detroit is a godsend mini-Pearl Harbor destined to advance the Pentagon's "full spectrum dominance" doctrine.

Yemen could not be a more strategically mouth-watering proposition - with Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, the Gulf of Aden to the south leading to the Arabian Sea, and on the other side, in Africa, Somalia.

As far as the Pentagon's "full spectrum dominance" goes, Yemen falls right into the Pentagon net alongside Somali pirates and the new bogeyman, al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula (AQAP), when it comes to the militarization of a key strategic oil chokepoint, the Bab el-Mandab, no matter the avalanche of denials from the Barack Obama administration of any intention to put US boots on the ground in Yemen.

The Strait of Bab el-Mandab between Yemen, Djibouti and Eritrea is a key strategic oil chokepoint between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, linking the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, through which flows at least 3.5 million barrels of oil a day towards the US, Europe and Asia.

Plus, from Washington's point of view, there's the potential of oil reserves lying in Yemen near Saudi Arabia at the Masila Basin and the Shabwa Basin, which could in the not too distant future fall nicely into US Big Oil's lap, unlike Iraq's. (See Iraq's oil auction hits the jackpot Asia Times Online, December 16, 2009).

So it's no surprise that Obama, on the record, had to expand the never-say-die "war on terror" - the cover narrative for "full spectrum dominance". According to Obama, AfPak is still "the epicenter of al-Qaeda", but the Yemen chapter is a "more serious problem". Thus comes into play still one more rehash of the same old narrative: a fragile dictator, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh (in absolute power since 1978) needs America to defeat the terrorists (AQAP).

In practice, the Obama administration has just wallowed in the mire of an Arab Afghanistan, propping up Saleh against the Southern Movement, an unlikely, popular-based alliance of socialists and Islamic conservatives led by a former jihadi, Tariq al-Fadhli, and now characterized as a full nationalist movement. In addition, the Saleh regime is fighting a Shi'ite rebellion in north Yemen. Saleh is Sunni. The rebels are Shi'ite. Saleh is obviously backed by the Wahhabi Saudi regime. Yemen's current oil, by the way, is crucially in the south.

Saleh predictably will dub all his enemies as "al-Qaeda" and call the cavalry - US Special Forces and legions of counter-intelligence operatives. Not to mention the drones. Few noted that last December 17, Obama ordered the bombing of suspected al-Qaeda positions in Yemen with cruise missiles, an attack in which 49 civilians were reported to have been killed, according to Agence France-Presse. Welcome to yet one more sinister Arab-Afghan amalgam.

United States intelligence admits there are no more than 200 al-Qaeda jihadis in southern Yemen (that certainly beats those 100 in Afghanistan). What AQAP basically wants is to bring down US-propped dictators such as Saleh, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and the House of Saud - a popular agenda across much of the Middle East. So Obama may go to Cairo and talk about democracy in the Muslim world as much as he wants; what the Arab street registers is Obama playing the same old empire game of supporting yet another dictator.

It's the oil ...
"Full spectrum dominance" as applied to Yemen may be - as it always is - about the containment of China, as in threatening China's oil imports (6% of its total) from Port Sudan on the Red Sea, just north of the Bab el-Mandab.

But even if the US eventually controls the port of Aden - the gateway to Asia via the Indian Ocean - China will relentlessly continue to evolve its complex strategy of avoiding chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, or indeed the Bab el-Mandab (See China plays Pipelineistan Asia Times Online, December 24).

The idea of "full spectrum dominance" is about threatening to cut energy flows not only to China but even to the European Union (EU) or anyone for that matter who crosses Washington's policy makers. And it's as much about Saudi Arabia as about China. As Saudi oil exports also have to negotiate the Bab el-Mandab, US "interest" in Yemen means a graphic warning to the House of Saud: don't even think of trading oil in euros or in a basket of currencies including the Chinese yuan.

It also is about isolating Iran - as in using a Sunni dictator to fight a Shi'ite rebellion and in militarizing a useful battleground alongside ally Saudi Arabia. In Washington's scenario, the winners should be the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel's Mossad, and the losers should be China, Russia and Iran. The turbulent Yemeni street was not consulted and certainly has ideas of its own.

Obama is packaging his strategy as a "war on al-Qaeda". It's not a war. And even if the counter-insurgency gang in the Pentagon conducts it, it's destined to fail. Meanwhile, there's not the remotest chance in sight of a real US withdrawal from Iraq, the end of the AfPak war, or a viable, non-apartheid Palestinian state.

Now that would be a real, concerted counter-terrorist operation, to finish once and for all with the ghost of all those "al-Qaedas". It won't happen. The name of the game is "full spectrum dominance" and empire reloaded. Fasten your body scanners; the decade promises a bumpy ride.

Note
1. The countries are Sudan, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen, plus "state sponsors of terrorism" Iran, Syria, Libya and Cuba.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

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