Brian M Downing
A top al-Qaeda commander was reportedly killed on Wednesday by government forces in Yemen’s southern Shabwa province, coinciding with a top United States official suggesting that the US should launch air strikes there and Iran ramping up tensions with Saudi Arabia.
Yemen’s Saba news agency reported that Abdullah Mehdar, described as a leader of an al-Qaeda cell, was killed and four militants captured after Yemeni troops surrounded a house in Shabwa where he and other militants had gathered. On the same day, the chairman of the US Senate Armed Services committee, Carl Levin, said the US should consider using unmanned aerial drones, clandestine actions and air strikes against the “proven threats” of “al-Qaeda extremists” in Yemen.
Fears that the unrest could destabilize the region were strengthened after Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad publicly criticized Saudi Arabian raids against Shi’ite Houthi rebels fighting the Yemen government from bases in north Yemen. “We were expecting Saudi officials to act like a mentor and make peace between brothers, not enter the war and use bombs, cannons and machine guns against Muslims,” said Ahmadinejad on Wednesday after a senior Saudi defense official said Saudi forces had killed a large number of therebels who were holding a border post inside Saudi Arabia.
International concern over the Yemeni government’s ability to deal with a raging Shi’ite insurgency in the north and al-Qaeda cells operating in the south has intensified since a Christmas airline bombing plot was traced to the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which is primarily active in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Yemen’s proximity to oil resources, Iranian involvement in the country and several other geopolitical and humanitarian factors have led to comparisons with Afghanistan.
The political forces that once attracted al-Qaeda to Afghanistan are also apparent in Yemen. The weakness of the government in Sana’a means it has little control over large parts of the country. Many tribes are indifferent to the central government while others are hostile to it and moving toward secession and civil war. Tribal leaders have parleyed agreements with al-Qaeda leaders, much as the Taliban did with Pashtun tribes of the Afghan south and east, much as the US is trying to do there, albeit belatedly. There are many similarities between Yemen and Afghanistan that readily occur, and invite caution.
The movement of al-Qaeda’s center to the Arabian Peninsula is being brought on by external events in Iraq and Afghanistan. American and Saudi efforts turned the Iraqi insurgents against al-Qaeda, which was seen by locals as haughty and disrespectful of tribal customs in the Sunni center. Although many al-Qaeda fighters have found havens in Arab enclaves of the Kurdish north, many others have left Iraq for other opportunities, to the south.
Al-Qaeda has now become a minor player in the insurgency along the Af-Pak frontier, where leader Osama bin Laden and the remnants of his base ensconced themselves after 2001. There, al-Qaeda is much smaller than the Afghan Taliban, Tehrik-i Taliban, Hizb-i Islami, and perhaps even the Haqqani network. Those groups once relied on al-Qaeda, but over the years they have developed independent funding sources and acquired their own skills in bomb-making and other guerrilla techniques.
The Taliban have also recently issued (largely unnoticed) statements distancing themselves from “foreign” militants. After all, al-Qaeda was responsible for the Taliban’s ouster from power in 2001. The Taliban might well see al-Qaeda as a useful bargaining chip in secret negotiations, which some reports assert have already begun. The al-Qaeda leadership cannot readily leave their hideouts in Waziristan and Balochistan, but the rank and file can move on to other theaters and avoid betrayal amid the intrigue along the Durand Line.
So Western successes have displaced al-Qaeda from Iraq and Afghanistan but not eliminated them. Jihadis have been able to exfiltrate losing theaters and find new havens and bases of operation in Yemen. A protracted Western presence in the Islamic world has strengthened concerns that the US seeks to dominate the region and humiliate the faith – all to al-Qaeda’s benefit. Not since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 has the global cause had greater propaganda to exploit. And Yemen is becoming the center of global jihad today.
Interventionist rationales
A host of reasons for increasing the US presence in Yemen are surfacing in policy making circles and the general public. Foremost among them is that AQAP is linked not only the Detroit plane incident, but also to the Fort Hood shootings. Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 fellow soldiers at the army base in Texas, reportedly had ties to radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who lives in Yemen and is believed to be a spiritual adviser to AQAP.
The assassination attempt by a Somali man on Danish cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, known for his infamous caricatures of Muslim extremism, has also been linked to Yemen as has another attempt on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Yemen is close to oil fields and shipping lanes. Iran is backing the Houthi rebellion that straddles the Saudi-Yemeni frontier, which is part of a Shi’ite revival that threatens to destabilize the Middle East from Lebanon to Iraq, especially in oil-producing countries with oppressed Shi’ite minorities. Islamist tribes in Yemen have kith and kin in Saudi Arabia who see the House of Saud and its Wahabbi clerics as Western puppets and defilers of Islam. Prompt action, then, is seen vital to US national security
American idealists see Yemenis in desperate political and economic straits. Their economy is weak; oil revenue (never strong) is diminishing; the state is unable to deliver services; and a drought hangs over the country. This will strengthen American humanitarian concerns and lead to different but no less important calls for intervention. Over the past century or more, geopolitics and humanitarianism have been the yin and yang of American interventionism in many parts of the world, from Cuba to Afghanistan. Yemen offers another dual justification.
Non-Interventionist rationales
At present, calls for further intervention in Yemen are not strong. Escalation of forces will have several adverse effects. A larger US/Western presence will further destabilize the government in Sana’a by making its reliance on Western powers more apparent – and repugnant – to much of the population. Indeed, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has stated as much recently and his assessment should not be lost in the West.
There is a risk of increasing Islamist ardor among tribes on both sides of the frontier with Saudi Arabia from which support for the 1979 siege of Mecca came and upon which many Saudi national guard units are based (and from which the bin Laden family came).
The US would further enmesh itself in the Saudi-Iranian struggle for mastery in the Gulf region – a conflict in which the US is already engaged, whether it realizes it or not, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
A greater presence in Yemen would lead to numerous compassionate reports of suffering people that would make further escalation, or at least nation-building and mission creep, almost irresistible.
More troops will greatly strengthen the perception in the Islamic world that the US is seeking to dominate the Middle East. This perception is one upon which the al-Qaeda movement is based and with which it garners financial support and new recruits from Morocco to Indonesia.
The US can degrade al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula without greater involvement. Though largely unnoticed, the US has had military and intelligence personnel in Yemen since at least 2002 when a Predator drone flown from Djibouti killed a key al-Qaeda figure thought responsible for the attack on the USS Cole two years earlier in the port of Aden.
Similar strikes can be carried out with the present numbers and from ships offshore. The Saudi military can attack al-Qaeda targets, as they have already attacked Houthi insurgents inside Yemen. The US can best achieve its goals by working, as inconspicuously as possible, with Saudi and other regional military and intelligence forces to target al-Qaeda leaders and win over tribal allegiances through aid programs.
US escalation will only aggravate the Saudi-Iranian dimension to the Yemeni conflict and increase the risk of fighting elsewhere in the region. Countries in the Gulf region have, over the years, been skillful in containing the Saudi-Iranian conflict, and today their mediations can be used to ease the Sunni-Shi’ite aspect of Yemen’s troubles. All of them have large Shi’ite populations and none has any interest in seeing al-Qaeda further ensconce itself in the region. The most effective response to Yemen will likely come from regional powers with local knowledge, not distant ones without it.
Brian M Downing is the author of several works of political and military history, including The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam.
Copyright 2010 Asia Times
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