The US risks becoming embroiled in yet another foreign war that it cannot win if it intervenes in the politically fragile Gulf state, write Simon Tisdall and Brian Whitaker
The attempt to blow up flight 253, the Fort Hood shootings in November and, to a lesser extent, the attempted assassination of the Saudi deputy interior minister in August — all with Yemeni links — have focused Western attention on the obscure state on the edge of the Arabian peninsula.
It is unclear what level of increased intervention United States President Barack Obama is contemplating in Yemen — but that there will be heightened US involvement there for the foreseeable future is beyond doubt.
Last week British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a summit in London for January 28, citing concerns about the “regional and global threat” from Yemen-based terrorists.
That there is an al-Qaeda connection is beyond doubt. It dates back more than 20 years, to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when unemployed jihadis migrated westwards.
But Yemen cannot be treated in isolation. Obama’s bid to secure southern Arabia under his banner risks a destabilisation of the wider region akin to what ensued after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama is many things; Lawrence of Arabia he ain’t.
Like President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh is neither the most reliable nor the most enthusiastic of allies. His rule is challenged by powerful northern and southern tribal factions. And for him the al-Qaeda network in Yemen is not especially threatening — what he fears more is being branded a US puppet.
Like the Pakistani leader, Asif Ali Zardari, whose government has been destabilised by American cross-border raids, Saleh has good reason to play down the level of his government’s complicity.
Al-Qaeda is a mere nuisance compared with the war in the north with Shi’ite Houthi rebels that has cost thousands of lives and made at least 100 000 homeless, the agitation by secessionists in the south, the widespread disaffection with the government, an economy that is in dire straits, and rampant corruption.
And looming on the horizon are the problems of drought and overpopulation — Yemen has the highest birth rate in the Middle East and there is a growing influx of refugees from the Horn of Africa.
Geographically and socially there are significant resemblances with Afghanistan: Yemen is an impoverished tribal society with a weapons culture and many unofficial militias, while the state is virtually non existent outside the cities. This, with its large and porous land and sea borders, makes it relatively easy for al-Qaeda to operate without much interference.
Even before al-Qaeda arrived, Yemen was a recognised haven for extremists. Members of the Baader-Meinhof gang took refuge in the south — then run by Marxists — in the late 1970s, as did Carlos the Jackal in the 1970s and 1980s.
Last January al-Qaeda announced a merger between its Saudi and Yemeni sections, regrouping and centring itself in Yemen — a move probably undertaken as a result of a campaign against the organisation by Saudi authorities.
But crude Western intervention could worsen matters. Yemen will remain fertile ground for al-Qaeda and similar groups unless its wider problems can be sorted out, above all by establishing a stronger and more effective state. It needs help in dealing with al-Qaeda, but the less visible it is, the better. The recent US-sponsored air strikes against al-Qaeda are a case in point: they appear to have killed dozens of innocent people, which inevitably inflames anti-Western sentiment.
Helping to protect the 2000km coastline from an influx of arms and infiltrators is a sensible idea, as Yemen has no navy of significance. It can be done unobtrusively, and the Americans, Saudis and Omanis are said to be engaged in that already.
The US right has other ideas, though, and would much prefer to see Obama go in with guns blazing.
Whatever else is done, it is important to distinguish between measures that benefit Yemen and those that benefit Saleh’s regime. The worst of all outcomes would be to be seen as propping him up when his power is clearly ebbing. He has to step down by 2013, when he will be 71, unless he changes the Constitution.
Saleh has had opportunities for reconciliation with the Houthi rebels, and could have headed off southern secessionists, but he has squandered them. He has made gestures against corruption while allowing it to flourish. His security services seem more interested in pursuing critical journalists than religious fanatics. He has allowed a multiparty system and regular elections but ensured his own party was the only one to get a serious look-in.
Washington’s close ally Saudi Arabia is also running military operations inside Yemeni territory, and Saudi involvement is one aspect of the Yemen “ripple effect”.
It resurrects another Bush-era spectre: the prospect of US operatives in Yemen, whether army special forces, paramilitary CIA or civilians, being drawn into a proxy war with Riyadh’s arch enemy, Iran.
Iran financed, trained and equipped Shi’ite militias (and al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni insurgents) in occupied Iraq. Now it stands accused of similar meddling in support of the minority Shi’ite Houthi rebels in Yemen.
According to Arab media reports, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Lebanese Hezbollah secretly met Houthi leaders in November to discuss escalating the Yemen-Saudi border conflict. Iran is also said to be smuggling weapons to Islamists in Yemen and Somalia via the Gulf of Aden.
The wider implications of direct US involvement in these murky regional intrigues are potentially damaging. Jousting with Iran over Yemen will not assist the arguably more important Western objective of securing a nuclear deal with Tehran.
Similarly, deepening Saudi involvement in a polarising conflict in Yemen may undercut Riyadh’s current efforts to reconcile Fatah and Hamas and thereby facilitate an Arab-Israeli peace deal — a prime Obama objective.
The effect on neighbouring Horn of Africa countries of widening Yemen’s multiple conflicts should also give Washington pause. Somalia’s al-Shabaab Islamist militia said last week that it would send reinforcements to Yemen should the US carry out attacks there. Anarchic Somalia will provide a disruptive backdrop to any attempt to “secure” Yemen.
What the US does next in terms of opening a new Arabian front in the “war on terror”, possibly centred on its military base in Djibouti, will be influenced to a degree by the conference on January 28. Obama may yet opt for a low-profile, partly covert approach.
But the decision is balanced on a knife’s edge. As matters stand, it would not take much to trigger muscular American intervention and, with it, a new desert storm. —