Yemen: all you want (2011-2015)

[AdamG]

Ten pages on the chaos in Yemen

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/ma...k-of-hell.html

[ganulv]

Apparently Saleh wants to be in charge of things in Yemen until the day he dies. Fortunately for him any number of people are interested in helping make that happen.

[davidbfpo]

From the BBC:

US-born radical Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a key al-Qaeda leader, has been killed in Yemen, the country's defence ministry said.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15121879

No doubt much ink will be spilt on the demise. MY interest is the local impact inside the Yemen as it appears to lurch along, with neither of the many sides making gains and bloodshed notably in Sanaa.

[davidbfpo]

The succession struggle in the Yemen has not gone away, although it certainly has faded from the news reporting here, probably the impact of events in Libya and Syria.

So hat tip to FP Blog for this article, which opens with:

After being tricked into believing that Saleh would sign a Gulf Cooperation Council brokered power transfer deal three times, the international community has finally realized that Saleh has no intention of leaving power until at least 2013, the end of his official presidential term of office.

Leaving aside the machinations in the Yemen, which are covered, I was struck by this paragraph:

Short of asking for foreign military intervention, which most protesters reject outright, Yemenis have done all they can to make their struggle known to those abroad. Fully aware of their own lack of coverage in the international media, Yemenis have sought to increase their visibility in the international community from the outset of the protest movement last February by providing English language resources to Western journalists, establishing committees made up of English language speakers to issue press releases and hold press conferences, and making sure every protest sign was in both English and Arabic.

I am sadly not convinced the outside world, let alone English language speakers, are listening and or watching.

As for the freezing of President Saleh's assets abroad, nice diplomatic gesture and of little value beyond a headline.

Link:http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/pos...saleh_s_assets

[Bob's World]

Two self-serving families compete for control of Yemen. Neither represent the will of the populace or show any indication of doing anything other than continuing the very unsustainable status quo. Meanwhile a wide range of nationalist insurgent movements rise from and draw support from the populace as a whole. Both families are willing to work with the West and to profit from the control of this bit of geo-strategically key terrain. This seduces us.

Into this F'd up mix comes AQ, smelling opportunity to get after their top two interests:
1. Take down the Saudi royal family;
2. Hurt the West enough to get us to break our support to the regimes of the region that we have helped sustain for so long.

Meanwhile Saudi insurgents flee to Yemen as the first "covered and concealed position" from Saudi Arabia. One can reasonably assume that those who stay close, rather than travel to Pakistan to work with AQ there, are most focused on nationalist issues at home in Saudi Arabia. Their issues are reasonable, even if their approaches are extreme. Sadly no reasonable approaches are available to them at home, so to Yemen they go (or simply disappear at home).

AQ conducts UW in support of members of both these groups primarily, but I suspect to a number of similarly motivated men from other nations in the region as well.

US "intelligence" lumps all of this under a single banner of "AQAP." They recommend CT against the lot, with little differentiation for purpose for action. I'd give a month's retirement pay as a Special Forces Colonel for a single intel officer above the grade of O5 who could carry on a 3 minute conversation with me about insurgency without reverting to tired cliché's and saying the words "ideology" or "AQ."

This isn't rocket science, it's people science and common sense. That is far too rare a commodity it seems. (Please excuse me a little Veteran's day venting, good men are being employed far less effectively than they could be, and we owe them better.)

[davidbfpo]

During a university-level discussion on US strategy post-9/11 Yemen was cited as an example of where the USA had intervened of late, a point that I would and did contest.

Today FP Blog has a short update on the delicate mix in the Yemen, which illustrates the USA has few options currently and the locals, sorry a local, President / non-President Saleh remains in power - note, not control:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...again?page=0,1

Short of time? This sums up the situation brilliantly:

Somali refugees in Yemen are now returning to Somalia in larger numbers. Perhaps they know something that the international community doesn't.

[davidbfpo]

Yemen appears to have disappeared from the limelight of late, even though President Saleh is bound for the USA, for medical treatment. So it was a surprise to hear a BBC reporter actually in southern Yemen reporting on the growth of jihadist control.

A podcast:http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today...00/9685172.stm

A written article:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...lk/9682753.stm

[AdamG]

Al-Qaida's wretched utopia and the battle for hearts and minds

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports from south Yemen on the jihadis offering free water and electricity alongside sharia law

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...dis-sharia-law

[davidbfpo]

A FP Blog article I missed the other day, which concludes:

It is time for the U.S. to stop undermining democratic values and long-term stability in Yemen in exchange for short term counter-terrorism gains and a half-hearted continuation of the status quo. If Washington continues on this path, it will end up at best with another Somalia; at worse, another Afghanistan.

Link:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...oice?page=full

Interesting take on the views of Yemen's richer neighbour.

[davidbfpo]

A sombre assessment by Kings College London-based ICSR is on the attachment; these 'Insights' are emailed out and take a few days to appear on the ICSR website. It did appear on WSJ, but only a summary is provided without registration etc.

I was particularly taken by:

At its core are 100 veteran jihadists, who escaped local prisons in 2006 and 2011. The group also counts on 11 former Guantanamo detainees, who returned to terrorism after undergoing "rehabilitation" programs in Saudi Arabia. Their combined experience is greater than that of all other al Qaeda affiliates taken together.

Then:

Unlike al Qaeda in Iraq, which alienated entire tribes with barbaric and indiscriminate violence, AQAP's policies have allowed it to cultivate local sympathies.... Immersed in the population and protected by the tribes, AQAP is free to raise money and train fighters. CIA drone strikes against its operatives, in turn, are more likely to kill civilians.

My query is if AQAP gains more within the Yemen, extending it's control not cultivating or immersion, there would be an advantage to portray its actions as a local struggle and so curtail attacks on the 'far enemy'. Now whether the USA would curtail it's drone attacks is clearly unlikely. IMO doing more than drones becomes more problematic and with declining local acceptance.

[AdamG]

Sanaa, Yemen (CNN) -- A suicide bomber dressed in a military uniform killed at least 101 soldiers Monday at the central security headquarters in Yemen, Interior Ministry officials said.

More than 70 were injured, with some in critical condition, authorities said.

The blast targeted a military parade rehearsal in Sabeen Square in the capital Sanaa, said Mohammed Albasha, a spokesman the Yemeni Embassy in Washington.

He said that it was too early to know who was responsible but that suicide attacks are "the hallmark of al Qaeda."

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/21/wo...html?hpt=hp_t3

[davidbfpo]

Yemen seems to have receded from the foreground, although the suicide bomber attack on a Central Security Forces (CSF) parade, which killed one hundred did get a mention - missing that the commander of the CSF is a Saleh family member.

The Lowy Institute draws attention to a week-old Frontline report, which has several key sections and ends in a town which has rejected AQ - after they killed a tribal chief - and only the locals fight off AQ's attacks, the army isn't interested. One wonders if this replicates the rejection of AQ in Irag?

Link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtbhFimI8c

Hat tip to Leah Farrell's reactivated blogsite:http://allthingscounterterrorism.com/

The film is highly commended by a US academic expert, Gregory Johnsen, of Waq al-Waq, on the Yemen and I have linked the Q&A after the film was broadcast and this passage struck me:

Over the past two-and-a-half years the US has managed to kill several mid-level commanders within AQAP, but at the same time it has also killed several civilians. In December 2009, AQAP had roughly 200-300 members and controlled no territory. Today it has over 1,000 members and controls significant amounts of territory in Abyan and Shabwa. This begs a very simple question: Why has AQAP grown so strong in such a short time? Now, I don’t think US drone and airstrikes are the only reason for the rapid growth of AQAP – one also has to consider the collapse of the Yemeni state in 2011 – but in my view it is certainly one of the key factors.

Link:http://bigthink.com/ideas/frontline-...yemen?page=all

The Australian analyst, Sarah Phillips, provides some context and touches upon the very murky aspects:http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/...y-to-fail.aspx

There's also a short interview with her:http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/...wo-videos.aspx

Want more to read, there's a pointer to this US journalist's blogsite:http://armiesofliberation.com/

[ganulv]

Jeremy Scahill, best known for his book about the LLC formerly known as Blackwater, did a prescient interview on Fresh Air four days before the 21 May attack in Sana'a. I know a lot of people write him off because of his politics (he’s quite the lefty), but as someone who has a real respect for investigative journalism he seems to me to know a lot more about how and why the sausage is made than most contemporary members of the Fourth Estate.

When the Fresh Air host puts the “Well, what would you have us do about AQAP?” question to Scahill his reply amounts to 1) stop acting as if al-Qaeda is an existential threat to the United States 2) stop outsourcing our HUMINT to the Saudis and 3) stop pretending more and better technology can obviate HUMINT. However his politics may shade what is presented in the interview, I found the discussion beginning at 41:49 of the role which attending khat chews played in his reporting to be indicative of a real respect for the sort of work that absolutely has to be done in investigative journalism, ethnographic fieldwork, or intelligence gathering worth calling such. And in the excerpt below he throws out an observation which in my experience is quite indicative of the lack of respect American foreign policy types have for that sort of work.

And I would not have gotten access to the places I went, I wouldn’t have been able to talk to the people that I did, I wouldn’t have been able to travel as freely as I did in Yemen if I wasn’t going to those khat chews and negotiating permissions or talking to people and listening to them. And the reason that I’m so struck by that experience is because the United States bans its employees in Yemen from chewing khat.

[davidbfpo]

I am unconvinced that chewing khat is the way to learn in the Yemen (or Somalia) and several of the authors who appear in this thread I have m' doubts would need to chew khat. Sipping tea, talking and have empathy before making gains is an art that takes time to gain.

Perhaps the US Embassy has banned sipping tea?

[ganulv]

[T]alking and have empathy before making gains is an art that takes time to gain.

From a tiny bit of first-hand knowledge and several second-hand accounts I’m lead to believe that there are quite a few FSOs with a real aptitude for what you are describing but that the structure of and priorities at State are such that it is hard for that aptitude to count for as much as it could.* They’re as a rule on a rotation schedule, for example. I’m sure there are good reasons for that but to keep to it as a rule for that line of work seems absolutely boneheaded to me…

Scahill’s mention of khat chews being off-limits to the embassy staff immediately brought to my mind an interview I had seen with Pik Botha in which he was discussing the negotiations leading to the Tripartite Accords. In his narrative the breakthrough came at the hotel pub when he and Jorge Risquet happened to be taking their board at the same hour. In passing Botha mentioned that the Americans had made the hotel pub off-limits to their contingent from day one of the talks.

*My impression based upon the little that I know is that the good listeners and empaths amongst the FSO corps tend to gravitate towards the positions that deal with aiding Americans in distress abroad.

[Dayuhan]

Scahill’s mention of khat chews being off-limits to the embassy staff immediately brought to my mind an interview I had seen with Pik Botha in which he was discussing the negotiations leading to the Tripartite Accords. In his narrative the breakthrough came at the hotel pub when he and Jorge Risquet happened to be taking their board at the same hour. In passing Botha mentioned that the Americans had made the hotel pub off-limits to their contingent from day one of the talks.

I can see the point in the khat-chewing. Back when I was wearing the journalist hat I got way better information on the local military (as one example) by wallowing in rotgut booze and assorted other vices with a bunch of NCOs than I ever did by interviewing generals. Had more fun, too. Of course the pastimes of the freelance journalist are not always seen as appropriate for embassy staff, no matter how effective they may be.

Is there any place in the world where embassy staff actually go out in the streets and interact with ordinary people... even in the cities, let alone out in the countryside? It would be unthinkable here; their morass of security regulations wouldn't begin to allow it.

*My impression based upon the little that I know is that the good listeners and empaths amongst the FSO corps tend to gravitate towards the positions that deal with aiding Americans in distress abroad.

In the places I'm familiar with American Citizen Services is typically staffed by the youngest of the young. It seems like it's a post nobody else wants, thus pushed off on the least senior as a necessary rite of passage on the way to bigger and better things.