Center for a New American Security

This weekend's news has already generated a lot of comment, and as I am not a bona fide Yemen expert, the best I can do in terms of analysis is point toward Greg Johnsen's piece in Foreign Policy as well as Leah Farrall's post on AQAP. (Two other people whose opinions I would be seeking right now would be Chris Boucek at Carnegie and April Alley at ICG.) The last thing I myself wrote on Yemen, with Rich Fontaine, I wrote a year ago, but as I read through it this morning, I think it is still pretty solid. (Like all things I write for CNAS, I sent it out for some external review beforehand to avoid saying something stupid.)

A few things have bothered me about the way in which the media has reported the bombing plot thus far, though. You'll remember that last week, concerning Central Africa, I wrote that policy-makers should ask four questions -- in sequence -- before considering an intervention:

1. Will an intervention make the situation better, or worse?
2. If better, should the U.S. government participate in this intervention?
3. If yes, should the U.S. government lead this intervention?
4. If yes, what should the U.S. government do?

Reading the Wall Street Journal on the way into work this morning, I could not help but notice the focus has been almost exclusively on Question #4. Typically, we Americans are always asking ourselves, What is our government doing? (And why isn't it doing more!)

Though I am not a Yemen expert, I have spent more time in 2010 elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula than in any other year, including two trips to Saudi Arabia and one to the UAE. I got the opportunity, during both of these trips, to speak to a variety of policy-makers in each country, and one of the things I wish U.S. reporters would do more of is ask some of Yemen's neighbors how they would solve the problems of Yemen. This latest plot was apparently tipped off by Saudi intelligence (BTW: shukran, ya ikhwani) and involved bombs passing through both Qatar and the UAE. So the other nations in the region have a bigger interest than we do in shepherding the demise of AQAP. I guess what I am trying to say here is that I want fewer articles with datelines from Washington and more articles with datelines from Doha and Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. (One of the reasons I'm still feeling pretty good about that policy paper written last year is the stress it put on regional engagement and solutions.)

Also, we have now dodged two bullets from Yemen, but that does not mean we do not have the time to slow the bleep down and first gather a little situational awareness before screaming for policy makers to DO SOMETHING. As an Afghanistan expert tweeted this weekend, "Whenever something like the Yemen event the amateurs scream for revenge or bombs or ninjas. But people need to take a step back and THINK."

Leaving aside my stated policy preference for pirates over ninjas, I think that's pretty good advice.

I am hardly the pro's pro on Yemen, but I want to call two things to your attention. The first is this excellent reported essay from yesterday's New York Times Magazine by Bobby Worth, who I can say has done some solid reporting from Yemen for the past year at some personal cost. It's great to read a talented reporter -- and all-around good guy -- like Bobby in long form. Second, I cannot find anything about this on the Washington Institute's website, but April Alley and Chris Boucek are supposed to be speaking there at an event tomorrow on Yemen which I would most definitely attend if I did not have other business. Those two would be at the top of my list on people to consult on matters relating to Yemen (residing in or around the 202 area code), and I am sick to miss the event. So if you have the chance, work in DC and can find the details, do attend.

Tom Friedman's column today about how we can build more schools and defeat terrorism is one of those things that sounds right but probably isn't. Leave aside the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab -- by Friedman's own admission, the only reason he is in Yemen right now -- is a graduate of University College London and the product of a superb secondary education before that. Alan B. Krueger and others have shown that the causal relationship between education and terrorism is weak. Very well-educated men and women can fall under the sway of extremist ideologies and go on to do evil things -- like blow up airliners and buy Coldplay albums.

This is no reason not to build schools. Building schools is a lovely thing, and as the great Greg Mortenson pointed out to me in Kabul once, when you teach little girls to read, you teach entire villages to read. (Because the girls teach their mothers.) And female literacy then leads to a healthy drop in birth rates and less poverty. That's all wonderful. Education transforms societies. But education only has a place in counterinsurgency -- most naturally a subfield of stabilization operations -- if you can prove that a lack of schools is a driver of conflict. And as far as counter-terrorism is concerned, well, the idea that more schools will lead to a drop in terrorism remains one of those things that sounds good when discussed at dinner parties but has yet to be proven and is, if we are to trust our research thus far, most likely false.

[All that having been said, allow me to stress once again that building schools in underdeveloped societies is something we should all support. Maybe not for reasons of counter-terrorism or counterinsurgency but for more altruistic reasons. So everyone buy Greg Mortenson's new book to help the cause, okay?]

There was a good article in the Independent today about the situation in Yemen. Keeping in mind the recent discussion on this blog about what to do, two paragraphs particularly stood out.

"But, in an office guarded by soldiers with AK-47s and crowded with lieutenants and allies including a uniformed army brigadier, he added: "There are no new troops, no new army." The governor said he lacked helicopters needed to pursue militants if there was an incident outside the capital.

Mr al-Misri went out of his way to stress that "social development" help from the international community was urgently needed for his country, the poorest in the Arab world. Airstrikes and military force were not the "solution", he added. "We need more help to get the tribes to kick them [al-Qai'da] out. The government does not have the resources to do that."

Abu Muqawama and Richard Fountaine rode into this argument early on in their On the Knife Edge policy brief arguing for a "whole of government" approach while Marc Lynch has said that we should we careful of expensive and potentially pointless blundering (yes, it's fun linking to the Tehran Times re-print of his piece).

Steve Tatham and Andrew Mackay support a point David Kilcullen makes when addressing these Yemen-style conflicts we are bound to see more of in the future:

"‘(W)e typically design physical operations first, then craft supporting information operations to explain our actions. This is the reverse of al-Qaida’s approach. For all our professionalism, compared to the enemy’s, our public information is an afterthought. In military terms, for al-Qaida the “main effort” is information; for us, information is a ‘supporting effort'."

In Londonstani's opinion, this really hits the nail on the head and is absolutely relevent to Yemen. Al Qaeda chose to establish themselves in Yemen. The success or failure of the underwear bomber was probably not judged to be as important as the spotlight it will cast on a country with multiple problems which play into the hands of AQ strategists. In the international game of Judo playing out over multiple timezones, AQ is  making the West use its force against itself again and again.

Londonstani has a little experience of Yemen, and remembers it as being very similar to Pakistan and Afghanistan's Pashtun territories in many ways. The danger is that AQ will be able to do what it has done in Pakistan. It has failed to make the population rise up in its support but it has succeeded in allowing the Western world to make itself so deeply unpopular that in the longer term the outlook of AQ is changing the ideological structure of the society.

Reading Tatham and Mackay and relating their arguments back to Pakistan, Londonstani is increasingly convinced that the answer will come from information and influence and building that into aid and diplomacy. If Washington and London can convince Yemenis (and others) that AQ "isn't probably right" and its allies and domestic supporters aren't the only people who can provide justice, peace and security that would be a good start. It can't be about "tricking the natives with plastic beads" but effectively communicating your intentions and achievements. It sounds easy, but even that start is pretty far off.

UPDATE: Also, take a very good look at al Qaeda's own "comprehensive approach"

"Only a fraction of pledged Western aid has been disbursed because of serious corruption and capacity problems in Yemen's government, with the result that per capita development aid is significantly below that of some poor African countries...

...Saying the jobless toll in Abyan is 50 per cent, compared with an estimated national average of 40 per cent, in a country where 45 per cent live on less than $2 a day, he describes how al-Qa'ida adherents insert themselves into local tribes, often nomads who do not see TV and know little of the movement's existence. First, he asserts, a member who belongs to the particular tribe will introduce others who will bring financial and practical help – like the digging of water wells – to the local community.

"Say the government is paying someone $50, they will pay $100. At the same time al-Qa'ida Islamic "scholars" will "collect" some of the tribe's young people, jobless and naturally religious, to begin "training", while also providing them with occasional financial help. Mr al-Misri says he cannot tell how many adherents it has but adds: "they are growing because the environment in Abyan helps the groups to grow because of the economic and employment problems."

Nearly two years ago, Londonstani wrote his first post for this blog. It was based around an interview Londonstani conducted near one of the Palestinian camps in Lebanon with a young al-Qaeda fighter returning from Iraq. The camp itself looked like a transiting station. Londonstani saw young Arab fighters buying military clothing, handing out ammunition, testing weapons and picking up documents. During the conversation about al-Qaeda's strategic rationale when it came to deploying WMD, the fighter mentioned that al-Qaeda was re-deploying its fighters.

"When Haider first entered Iraq through Syria, there had been about 2,000 foreign fighters like himself inside the country. Now they were leaving and only about 150 remained. Most of the foreign fighters inside Iraq had always been Saudis and Yemenis, a few other nationalities, such as Turks were also present, he said. The Saudis and Turks were mainly going to Afghanistan and the Yemenis to Yemen or Somalia, where al-Qaeda was keen to establish a presence."

As the fighting picked up in Afghanistan, Londonstani often thought back to the fighter's off-hand comment about the Saudis and Turks. His off hand reference to Somalia made some sense, but Londonstani often wondered what the Yemen thing had been about. The Christmas Day airline bomb attempt snapped the months' old conversation into focus.

Now we know that al-Qaeda is operating from Yemen, a number of commentators have said the loosely controlled, troubled country is an ideal stomping ground for Osama Bin Laden's followers. In Londonstani's opinion, the retroactive attention shouldn't be limited to Yemen as a country. It's also worth looking at Western policy in countries where extremism is growing.

Yesterday, the U.S. announced a doubling of counter terrorism aid to Yemen. London has said it will work with Washington to provide counter terrorism assistance to Sanaa. But like in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the problem will not be solved by military means alone. Yemen suffers "crushing poverty" to quote the president and the state hardly functions and where it does it has a reputation for corruption mismanagement and brutality. There is also a Shia/Sunni conflict going on. All in all, it really is an AQ haven waiting to happen. But countering this situation with an immediate military response plays straight into AQ's hands.

US Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism John Brennan says AQ probably has "several hundred members". Yet, concentrating on a military response is likely to increase that in weeks. Al Jazeera English reports:

"Al-Shabab, the leading anti-government armed group in Somalia, said on Friday that it was ready to send reinforcement to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula should the US carry out retaliatory strikes, and urged other Muslims to follow suit."

A military element has its place, but by looking like they are ready to support a government with questionable competence at a moment's notice, London and Washington again fit themselves neatly into the unofficial AQ public relations playbook. Presently, the strongest message AQ has states that Western powers pull the strings of dictatorships across the Muslim world that line their own pockets while serving foreign domination. The message works because none of these governments have proved very good at governing. When efforts to address the governance issue (like the Kerry Lugar bill) in Pakistan finally do appear, they are enacted too late to counter the perception. In the case of Pakistan, they are seen as another plank of the same policy.

It's not realistic to aim to be able to "fix" every country that AQ lands in. But proving the group's point is not the answer either.

I have not been posting much recently, enjoying my retirement from daily blogging, but Richard Fontaine and I got name-checked in the lead editorial from today's Washington Post on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on account of this policy paper we wrote on Yemen for CNAS, so if you have not read it, do. I re-read it today to make sure I still agree with what we wrote and ... yup, I still do. My friend Gregory Johnsen is the real subject matter expert on Yemen, though, and since he's the guy I turn to for a sanity check whenever I say anything about the Arabian Peninsula, you could do worse than to follow his blog for more information on Yemen and AQAP.

In other news, I read and greatly enjoyed Stefan Aust's page-turning history of the Red Army Faction this Christmas holiday. If you watched and enjoyed the movie (like Tom did), you need to read the book. Watching just this trailer, you could be forgiven for thinking a tour in the Baader-Meinhof gang must have been a lot of fun. The reality, as Aust chronicles, was a lot less romantic.

A few readers have sent me Sean Naylor's unbelievably damning article in the Army Times on the Stryker Brigade in southern Afghanistan. Friends like Gian Gentile are worried good battalion and brigade commanders are being slandered for not bowing to the COIN orthodoxy, but while I have some sympathy for that lament, the relevant question about Col. Harry Tunnell is is not whether or not COIN is the correct or incorrect operational response to the problems facing U.S. forces in Afghanistan but whether or not the commander is following the pretty explicit guidance issued by the commanding general in Afghanistan. Sean has been a friend of mine since he embedded with my platoon during Operation Anaconda in 2002, and he's not the kind to go hunting the scalps of tactical commanders for the sake of it. What he saw in southern Afghanistan, though, raised a lot of questions for him, and it segues in nicely with Noah's worry about whether the U.S. Army can or will even do what's being asked of it.

Now I'm trying to catch up with some work while listening to the Nosaj Thing remix of Charlotte Gainsbourg's "Heaven Can Wait", which has the second most bizarrely awesome video for any song to which I have ever listened. First prize in that category goes to Bat For Lashes for "What's a Girl to Do?":

The trick with bad news in Washington is to release it on Friday afternoon so no one notices. That's the idea behind a new paper I wrote with Richard Fontaine on Yemen. Combined with Yezid's recent paper on SSR in Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen, this should make for some cheery weekend reading.

In the coming decades, Yemen will suffer three negative trends – one economic, one demographic, and one environmental. Economically, Yemen depends heavily on oil production. Yet analysts predict that its petroleum output, already down from 460,000 barrels a day in 2002 to between 300,000 and 350,000 barrels in 2007 and down 12 percent in 2007 alone, will fall to zero by 2017. The government, which receives the vast majority of its revenue from taxes on oil production, has conducted virtually no planning for its post-oil future. Demographically, Yemen’s population – already the poorest on the Arabian Peninsula with an unemployment rate of 40 percent – is expected to double by 2035. An incredible 45 percent of Yemen’s population is under the age of 15. Environmentally, this large population will soon exhaust Yemen’s ground water resources. Given that a full 90 percent of Yemen’s water is used in highly inefficient agricultural projects, this trend portends disaster.

Now go drink heavily.

Yezid Sayigh, to whom this blogger owes both a dissertation chapter as well as an interim progress report, has a new white paper out from the Carnegie Institute on secutiry sector reform (SSR) in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen (.pdf). Considering Yezid's background, the section on the Palestinian Territories will be especially worth reading.

Aside from being a great Caitlin Cary album, that phrase is as good a way as any to break the news that Saudi Arabia is now bombing Yemen. 

The Saudi air force has bombed strongholds of Houthi fighters in northern Yemen, officials have said. The attack on Thursday came a day after Saudi authorities accused the fighters, who want autonomy from Sana'a, of killing at least one of their soldiers on the countries' border. The Reuters news agency reported Saudi officials as saying that the air force had attacked fighters who had seized a border area, killing about 40 Houthis.

Bobby Worth and Bryan Denton were kind enough to let me crash at their place in Beirut for a few nights, and I have been talking with Bobby about Yemen since he's one of the few English-language journalists to have spent a lot of time there reporting of late. Many smart analysts, though -- like Brian O'Neill, Christopher Boucek and Greg Johnsen -- have been sounding the alarm for some time. In that vein, the Natural Security Blog at CNAS has a good five-question interview with Greg on natural resources in Yemen and how the scarcity of water is fueling conflict. Worth reading.  

And yes, it is good being back in Lebanon.