The U.S. & Yemen: A "lethal blend"

The U.S. & Yemen: A "lethal blend"

 

by Conn Hallinan

 

submitted to Portside by the author

 

Foreign Policy in Focus

 

August 5, 2010

 

http://www.fpif.org/blog/Yemen_JSOC_civil_war_President_Saleh

 

How involved is the U.S. military in Yemen, and is the Obama

Administration laying the groundwork for a new foreign

adventure? According to several news agencies, including

Agence France Presse, UPI and the Washington Post, very

involved and likely to be more so in the future.

 

"U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply

involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops,"

says Dana Priest, the Post's ace intelligence and military

affairs reporter, including "the U.S. military's clandestine

Joint Special Operations Command, whose main mission is

tracking and killing suspected terrorists."

 

The quarry of these assassination teams are supposed leaders

of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), but the

deepening U.S. alliance with the authoritarian government of

Yemen may soon entangle it in two complex civil wars-a

rising by disenfranchised Shiites in the north, and an

increasingly powerful secession movement in the country's south.

 

According to UPI, the White House is quietly expanding "the

footprint" of "elite forces inside Yemen." One military

official told the news agency, "The numbers are definitely

going to grow." The Obama administration increased

"security" funds for Yemen from $67 million to $150 million.

 

Navy Seals, Delta Force troops, and intelligence units are

working closely with the government of President Ali

Abdullah Saleh, providing weapons, training and

intelligence. And sometimes more.

 

On Dec. 17, 2009, a U.S. BGM-109D Tomahawk cruise missile

attacked the village of al-Maajala in south Yemen, killing

55 people, the bulk of them women and children. The

Tomahawk-launched from a U.S. surface ship or submarine- was

armed with a cluster warhead that spread a storm of razor

sharp steel and incendiary material over 500 square feet.

 

Amnesty International's Mike Lewis said his organization was

"gravely concerned by evidence that cluster munitions appear

to have been used in Yemen," because "cluster munitions have

indiscriminate effects and unexploded bomblets threaten

lives and livelihoods for years afterwards."

 

The target was a supposed al-Qaeda training camp, but the

Saleh government draws no distinction between AQAP and the

Southern Movement (SM), a group advocating an independent

south Yemen. The SM has a long list of grievances reflecting

problems going back to 1990 when North Yemen and the

southern Democratic People's Republic of Yemen were unified.

 

That merger between the conservative north and the better

educated and socialist south was never a comfortable one and

led to a particularly nasty civil war in 1994. The north won

that war by using jihadists freshly returned from fighting

the Russians in Afghanistan. Since the end of that four-

month war, the SM charges that the north siphons off the

south's oil without adequate compensation, discriminates

against southerners on access to jobs, and has cornered the

country's vanishing water supplies. Southern protests are

met with tear gas and guns, and, according to SM leaders,

some 1,500 "secessionists" have been imprisoned and more

than a hundred killed.

 

According to UPI, "The [Saleh] regime's heavy-handed

response to the southerners has only fueled the demand for

independence and encouraged the disparate southern groups to

come together."

 

Saleh claims the SM is closely tied to AQAP, which

immediately gets Washington's attention, and has allowed his

government to tap into the resources of the American "war on

terrorism." Southern independence leaders, like Tariq al-

Fadhli, deny any ties to AQAP and say the Southern Movement

is non-violent. Whether it will remain so under the Saleh

government's continued assaults is an open question. The

December cruise missile strike is not likely to encourage pacifism.

 

The fighting in the north between the Saleh government based

in the capital, Sanaa, and the Shiite Houthi, who inhabit

the north's forbidding terrain, is long-standing. While

Saleh and his supporters in Saudi Arabia say Iran is

stirring up the trouble, there is no evidence for ties

between Iran and the Houthi. The tensions between the Saleh

government and the Houthi are local and generally have to do

with access to political power. But by bringing Iran into

the picture, Saleh can claim he is fighting terrorism, thus

making his regime eligible for arms, intelligence, and training.

 

The U.S. is ratcheting up the use of Special Operations

Forces (SOF) worldwide. The administration has increased the

number of countries in which SOFs are deployed from 60 to

75, and upped the SOF budget 5.7% to $6.3 billion for 2011.

The White House also added an additional $3.5 billion for

SOFs to its 2010 budget.

 

One military official told the Washington Post that the

Obama administration had given the military "more access"

than former President George W. Bush. "They [the Obama

administration] are talking publicly much less but that

are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much

more quickly."

 

In a recent talk that sounded very much like the Bush

administration's doctrine of pre-emptive war, the White

House's counterterrorism expert John Q. Brennan said that

U.S. strategy was not to just "respond after the fact to

terrorism," but to "take the fight to al-Qaeda and its

extremist affiliates, whether they plot and train in

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and beyond."

 

If the U.S. does increase its military footprint in Yemen,

it will be expending hundreds of millions of dollars in the

poorest country in the region, a country where 40 percent of

its 22 million residents are jobless and where water is

becoming a scare commodity. The U.S. shares much of the

blame for the current economic crisis in Yemen. When Yemen

refused to support the 1991 Gulf War against Saddam Hussein,

Saudi Arabia expelled 850,000 Yemeni workers, and the U.S.

cut $70 million in foreign aid. The effect of both actions

was catastrophic, and Yemen never recovered from the one-two blow.

 

U.S. support for the Saleh regime will inevitably draw it

into the conflicts in the north and the south, with

disastrous results for all parties.

 

"In Yemen the U.S. will be intervening on one side in a

country which is always in danger of sliding into a civil

war," says the Independent's Middle East reporter Patrick

Cockburn. "This has happened before. In Iraq the U.S. was

the supporter of the Shia Arabs and Kurds against the Sunni

Arabs. In Afghanistan it is the ally of the Tajiks, Uzbeks

and Hazara against the Pushtun community. Whatever the

intentions of Washington, its participation in these civil

conflicts destabilizes the country because one side becomes

labeled as the quisling supporter of a foreign invader.

Communal and nationalist antipathies combine to create a

lethal blend."

 

===

Conn Hallinan is currently a columnist for Foreign Policy

In Focus (FPIF.com), a "think tank without walls." FPIF is

associated with the Institute for Policy Study and draws

together more than 600 foreign policy analysts from around

the world to examine U.S. foreign policy. Hallinan is also a

columnist for the Berkeley Daily Planet, and an occasional

free lance medical policy writer. He is a recipient of a

Project Censored "Real News Award." He formally ran the

journalism program at the University of California at Santa

Cruz, where he was also a college provost. He holds a PhD in

Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley,

and lives in Berkeley, California.

 

Read more of Conn Hallinan essays can at Dispatches from the

Edge, where he can also be contacted.

 

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