Authors: Matthew M. Aid
The next day, one of the National Counterterrorism Center analysts responsible for covering Somalia wrote a brief memo entitled “Is al-Shabaab the Next al Qai'da?” The analyst's conclusion was that given the fact that the Pakistani Taliban, through Faisal Shahzad, had tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square just two months earlier, he wondered if the bombing signaled that yet another local terrorist organization had crossed the Rubicon and “gone global.”
Rarely visited by Westerners, and virtually unknown to Americans save for the most avid readers of
National Geographic
magazine, Yemen is a country steeped in history and legend. Located on the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen can rightfully claim to be one of the cradles of civilization because it lay astride the ancient incense and spice trade routes that ran up and down the Red Sea. Walking through the downtown of Yemen's capital, Sana'a, is to be transported back to the time of the
Arabian Nights
. A small piece of Yemen's former glory can be seen in the medieval Old City of Sana'a, which is dominated by an ornate 2,500-year-old fortified citadel. As they have for centuries, every Yemeni male proudly owns a rifle (there are 65 million guns in a nation of only 18 million people) and wears an ornate curved dagger called a
jambiya
.
As picturesque as it may be, Yemen today is one of the poorest and least developed nations on the planet. Although the Yemeni government is dedicated to trying to modernize the nation, the deeply religious and tradition-bound Yemeni tribesmen have stubbornly resisted the central government's efforts to bring the country into the twenty-first century, becoming a bastion of support for al Qaeda. Yemen is not only the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden's family, but it has produced more al Qaeda fighters per capita than any other country in the world. At one point in time, bin Laden's personal bodyguard was made up entirely of Yemenis because of their loyalty. As of 2009, of all the al Qaeda fighters being held at the U.S. military-run confinement facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the ninety-nine Yemenis made up by far the largest single group.
In April 2002, seven months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a company of 150 U.S. Army Green Berets arrived in Sana'a to begin the process of training Yemeni security forces to hunt down the al Qaeda terrorists hiding in Yemen. According to a former official at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, at the time there were at least twenty top al Qaeda officials and over one hundred fighters hiding in northern Yemen. The top two al Qaeda fugitives in Yemen that the U.S. intelligence community wanted, dead or alive, at the time were Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal and Ali Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, both of whom were suspected of being involved in planning the October 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the destroyer USS
Cole
, which killed seventeen American sailors. But the Yemeni military training program never got off the ground because in late 2002 the last of the Green Beret teams were withdrawn from Yemen as part of the military buildup for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
It took six years before the U.S. intelligence community once again began to pay attention to Yemen. In early 2008, reporting reached Washington from the small CIA station in the U.S. embassy in Sana'a indicating that al Qaeda, long dormant in the region, was beginning to make a comeback in Yemen. In March 2008, al Qaeda operatives launched a mortar attack on the U.S. embassy in Sana'a. The mortar shells missed the embassy and landed instead in the playground of a nearby girls' school. Six months later, on September 17, 2008, a team of al Qaeda militants dressed in Yemeni police uniforms attacked the main gate of the U.S. embassy in Sana'a. After a twenty-minute gun battle with Yemeni police, the attack was beaten back and six of the attackers were killed, but so were six Yemeni policemen and seven civilian bystanders.
A few days before President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, the leaders of the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al Qaeda announced on a Web site that they had just merged their two organizations into a single entity, which they named al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In an instant, Yemen went from a forgotten backwater in the global war on terror to the front of the line. The National Counterterrorism Center in Washington elevated Yemen to the top of the U.S. intelligence community's terrorism watch list.
Washington's newfound concern about events taking place in Yemen was enunciated in a private discussion that Obama's newly appointed deputy national security adviser John O. Brennan had with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh on March 15, 2009, during which Brennan told the monarch that “
the U.S. feared Yemen could become another Waziristan
,” referring to the al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold in Pakistan.
But heightened interest in Washington did not translate into effective action in Yemen itself, as has been too often the case in the war on terrorism. In order to go after al Qaeda in Yemen, the first problem that the U.S. government had to overcome was the country's colorful and fast-talking sixty-eight-year-old president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who according to a former CIA station chief “runs his country like [TV game show host] Bob Barker.”
The glib Saleh, at least on the surface, has professed to be eager to cooperate with the U.S. government in the war on terror, telling one delegation after another of visiting American officials of his profound desire to eliminate the scourge that is al Qaeda. But dozens of leaked cables from the U.S. embassy in Sana'a show that Saleh's enthusiasm for the war on terror is directly commensurate with how much money he could shamelessly extract from Washington and other countries by playing the “al Qaeda card.”
Senior Obama administration officials have privately admitted that they have real concerns that Saleh and his top aides are really in it for the money and do not take the threat posed by al Qaeda very seriously. This was made abundantly clear in a May 2009 meeting outside the city of Taiz, where Saleh initially told the deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, that there were three insurgencies in Yemen, one by rebel Shiite Houthi tribesmen in the northern part of the country, a secessionist tribal movement in the southern part of the country, and a third in the form of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, all of which in his opinion were “on the same level.” He then realized who he was talking to and quickly changed his tack. According to a leaked State Department cable, he “corrected himself to prioritize AQAP as the most severe threat.” The U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Stephen Seche, realizing that what Saleh was doing was essentially telling the U.S. government what it wanted to hear, cabled Washington that “
Saleh's decision to reverse himself
and characterize AQAP as the most serious threat facing Yemen was almost certainly taken with his USG interlocutors in mind.”
According to 2009 and 2010 interviews with a number of Yemeni government and security officials, from their perspective the lowest priority is for the Yemeni Army to hunt down the two hundred or so al Qaeda fighters who operate freely in seven desolate southern provinces where the Yemeni government has virtually no presence. According to Yemeni security sources, Shabwah Province in the south has become the de facto capital of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. U.S. and European intelligence sources generally agree that the fugitive American-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is probably hiding somewhere in Shabwah, where he is protected by heavily armed tribesmen from his family's Awliq clan.
The same Yemeni officials believe that the White House has greatly exaggerated the threat that al Qaeda poses to the Yemeni government in order to get what Washington wants from Sana'a. In a 2010 interview, a senior Yemeni national security official close to President Saleh said, “You Americans say that al Qaeda is under every rock here. But there are only a couple hundred of them down in the south [of Yemen] ⦠We do not think they pose much of a threat to us. And we have other problems here which are far more serious.”
The Yemeni official was probably correct when he said that the two other insurgencies are a far more dire threat to the Yemeni government than al Qaeda. Since 2004, the Yemeni Army has been trying to subdue a rebellion by a group of Shiite tribesmen called the Houthis in the northern part of the country. Despite facing the Yemeni Army's best units, the Houthis have not only held their own but have captured large parts of Sa'ada and Amran provinces along the border with Saudi Arabia. In the southern part of the country, for the past several years the Yemeni Army has been unsuccessfully trying to put down a rebellion by secessionist tribesmen, who now control huge chunks of territory in the mountains north of the port city of Aden. According to a U.S. Army Special Forces officer who has been a frequent visitor to Yemen over the past three years, “Most of the southern part of Yemen is presently outside the control of Sana'a.”
Reversing the situation and helping the Yemenis restore a semblance of order in the country may very well be impossible. The Yemeni government and military bureaucracy is corrupt, inefficient, and ineffective, in part because President Saleh has stacked the entire government bureaucracy, the military high command, and the top posts of all the intelligence and security services with members of his extended family or political cronies. For example, Saleh's half brother commands all Yemeni forces in the northern part of the country; and his eldest son, Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is widely seen as being groomed to succeed his father as president, commands both the Yemeni Republican Guard and the special forces.
Virtually all Yemeni division, brigade, and battalion commanders were chosen for their posts based on their political loyalty to the Saleh regime rather than their military command expertise. Corruption runs rampant throughout the top echelons of the Yemeni military. According to a senior U.S. Army Special Forces officer who served two rotations in Yemen, “You could never find the [Yemeni Army] commanders at their desks because they were absentee landlords, spending most of their time on outside business interests rather than leading their troops.”
So it should not come as a great surprise that the Yemeni military is, in the words of a former U.S. Army military adviser, “a duck that cannot quack.” A 2010 survey by the Pentagon found that the Yemeni Army had virtually no fighting capability whatsoever. Only a few of the Yemeni Army's thirty combat brigades were sufficiently trained and equipped to conduct independent operations, and these units never left Sana'a because their primary mission was to guard the Saleh regime. The survey found that Yemeni troops, 80 percent of whom are illiterate, were poorly trained, infrequently paid, suffering from low morale, and equipped with fifty-plus-year-old Russian military equipment that should have been consigned to a museum decades ago. Only a handful of the Yemeni Air Force's Russian-made MiG fighters and helicopters were found to be airworthy. The chewing of the narcotic leaf qat (or khat) by the military's enlisted men was so widespread that all daily operations and training activities had to be completed by noon, after which most of the troops were comatose in a drug-induced stupor.
All of the weaknesses of the Yemeni Army have been on display in recent years in the war against the rebellious Houthi tribesmen in northern Yemen. In August 2009, the Houthis captured a Yemeni Army company and stole all its heavy weaponry before releasing the soldiers. Later that month, the rebels routed the Yemeni Army's 82nd Infantry Brigade, capturing huge quantities of heavy weaponry, including tanks and armored personnel carriers. In December 2009, Houthi tribesmen surrounded the Yemeni Army's 107th Infantry Brigade for two weeks. Cut off and out of food, the brigade commander was forced to sign a humiliating agreement with the rebels, whereby his troops were allowed to withdraw in return for surrendering all of their tanks, armored vehicles, and heavy weapons.
Frustrated by the string of defeats that his forces had suffered, President Saleh tried repeatedly to get the U.S. government to provide military equipment for his forces fighting the Houthis, telling John O. Brennan in September 2009, “
The Houthis are your enemies too
.” But the Obama administration has consistently refused, with the U.S. embassy repeatedly telling Saleh that it was al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who was the main enemy, not the Houthis.
With no assistance coming from Washington and desperate to stem the tide of losses in the north, in September 2009 Saleh's elite Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU), which had been trained and equipped at great expense by U.S. and British special forces specifically to combat al Qaeda since 2003, was deployed instead to Sa'ada Province to combat the Houthis. The decision infuriated American government and intelligence officials, who had for months begged Saleh to send the CTU to the south to find and kill the al Qaeda fighters that U.S. intelligence had tentatively located in the region. When the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Stephen Seche, and the CIA station chief in Sana'a registered a formal complaint on December 9, 2009, about this flagrant misuse of the Yemeni military's sole counterterrorism asset, Colonel Akram al-Qassmi, the deputy commander of Yemen's small counterterrorism agency, the National Security Bureau, told them that “
the war against the Houthis is not a distraction from the CT [counterterrorism] fight
. It is the CT fight.”
The CIA station in Sana'a has had a tense and sometimes acrimonious relationship with its Yemeni counterparts since 9/11. While the CIA has had generally good relations with the National Security Bureau, headed by a polished former diplomat named Ali Muhammad al-Anisi, the same cannot be said of its relations with Yemen's more powerful internal security service, the Political Security Bureau, which is headed by an aged Saleh loyalist named Ghalib Mutahi Qamish.
Over and over again since 9/11, the Political Security Bureau has withheld information from the CIA
and even denied CIA and FBI investigators access to captured al Qaeda operatives and documents. In the minds of many CIA and State Department officials, the obstructive behavior of Qamish's organization has become the principal obstacle to success against al Qaeda in Yemen, with a leaked cable from the U.S. embassy in Sana'a complaining that “
there continue to be frequent and troubling lapses in the [Yemeni government's counterterrorism] performance
, including the release of extremists and failure to share information.”