"It ain't over till it's over" and "It ain't over until the fat lady sings" may be cliches but both have the advantage of expressing self-evident truths. Nowhere are these truths more obvious than in states experiencing violent political unrest or that plus the add-on of foreign military intervention. Currently there are three places (one hesitates to call all three states) where the US is involved in endgames--or, at least, what the administration hopes constitutes such.
Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen are all in what it is hoped by decision makers throughout the West but particularly inside the Beltway to be entering the last chapter of their narratives of violent political unrest. There is no doubt but the people of the US and its allied states are war weary. It is increasingly difficult to muster and maintain support for any further involvement in the messy internal affairs of majority Muslim areas. Not even the dire warnings regarding the AQAP will stimulate any feelings of alarm in We the People. Libya has stalemate and lack of purpose written all over it. Afghanistan is a write off in the minds of many--all the more so since the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The Afghanistan conflict is the only one in which any significant number of Americans is involved. This means it is the only one where we can take decisive action. The action most desired by many in both public and congress is an accelerated withdrawal. The arguments in favor of this are powerful. We have accomplished the main goal of our invasion--the death of bin Laden and the virtual destruction of al-Qaeda. The Afghan government remains inefficient, ineffective, corrupt, and a frightful waste of American money.
The Karzai regime wants to hinder our most effective operational concepts whether night raids or the use of tactical air power. At the same time he is resistant, to say the least, to our requirements that he clean up his house, work harder in the old governance reform thing, concentrate more on developing the Afghan National Force to the level where it can assume security duties on its own. On top of that, he and all those around him appear to be complete ingrates considering the billions of dollars and nearly two thousand lives we have expended in large measure to support the existence of his government free of extremist control.
From the American perspective it seems the Vietnam Syndrome is back in play. Congress using the deficit and federal budget constraints as justification will proceed to write-off the American lives and demand a firm timetable for total American withdrawal. It, and, in essence, We the People, will declare our losses in fisc and lives to have been a poor idea and move to cut our losses, ignore the remaining and threatening loose ends left hanging in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and turn our collective eyes inward once again.
Regardless of what Secretary of Defense Gates said the other day in Singapore, this will introduce yet one more era of neo-isolationism. There are more than a few within us who have surrendered Great Power status to the Chinese. Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) whose district includes Camp Lejune is a potent opponent of the war in Afghanistan as he was that in Iraq. The NYT points out that Jones is no longer a "pariah" in the party or unpopular in the district which he has represented since 1994. This means the Republican neo-isolationist wing is more potent than ever.
The combination of liberal Democrat and deficit hawk Republicans will have the juice necessary to assure that not only will the administration be supported in an accelerated draw down in Afghanistan but that our overall foreign policy will become far less ambitious. It may even carry the water necessary to assure significant, even enervating, cuts in the defense budget.
The net effect of any drastic, rapid cut out from Afghanistan means in real world terms that the US has lost the political will to oppose violent political Islam. To put it more cruelly but no less accurately, we will concede victory to the enemy who will, unsurprisingly, seek even greater success against us and the rest of the civilized world.
There is an alternative to a simple pull out disguised as something rather less humiliating. That alternative would be a combination of open negotiations with Taliban and continued military operations against that group and the ISI proxy, the Haqqani network. As we learned in Korea and again in Vietnam, the requirement for even limited success is the demonstration of continued political will in a both talk diplomacy and its violent twin, war. The will and ability to continue fighting--fighting well and hard--even as the endless palaver over very little continues in a seemingly pointless fashion constitutes the demonstration of continued political will which finally convinces the adversary to settle for the best terms we are willing to grant. There is no doubt that the Karzai government will join in negotiations. All that is needed is to bring the semi-secret limited contacts into the open while keeping our shooters at it in country.
Unfortunately, the probability of the current administration choosing this twin track route is as remote as the president admitting that he was out to lunch with his Libya "policy." Libya is, to paraphrase Omar Bradley, the wrong use of air power against the wrong enemy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had the US and others been serious about removing Gaddafi, troops would have been landed before the smoke and dust of the first air defense suppression missile strikes had blown clear in the desert wind. A quick removal of Gaddafi followed by an immediate withdrawal of foreign forces and the introduction of an international peacekeeping force from, perhaps, the Arab League, would have seen the job done in a timely and clean way. But, the leaders of France, the UK, and the US took counsel of their worst fears based on the inappropriate model of W. Bush in Iraq.
The leaving of Gaddafi is simply the start of the endgame in Libya. Where the endgame in Afghanistan will be some sort of coalition government which includes Taliban, the players in Libya are not so clear. There is a strange assemblage of tribal figures, regionalists, secularists, and political Islamists involved in the so-called transitional government. Their joint agenda beyond the removal of Gaddafi is the to-be-determined department. The same applies to the role to be played in the future by those Libyans who were genuine adherents of Gaddafi's theory of government. The foreign supporters of the rebels including the US have to put a major push on the transitional government to put a post-Gaddafi plan on paper at least.
Even if there is a post-regime change plan, this is no assurance that it will be put into effect. The Western patrons had best realize this. The Libya which comes into existence after Gaddafi may well not be a showplace of Western norms and values any more than will be the case in Afghanistan. The post-Gaddafi Libya will be an economic basket case filled with people with scores to settle. It will not be pretty. And, it will have the correct climate to encourage the emergence of adherents of violent political Islam. We will not be fond of that. But, it may not be preventable. Get a grip on it.
Everything that is true for Libya applies to Yemen--on steroids. This will be true to an even greater degree if Saleh escapes from Saudi Arabia and heads back to San'a. The probability of Yemen becoming a collapsed state is better than fifty-fifty even if Saleh stays in Saudi. It goes to near certainty if he returns. And, there is absolutely nothing the US can or will do directly about this. The most likely "winner" in Yemen will be AQAP which will bode ill not only for Saudi Arabia but the civilized world as well.
The situations in Libya and Yemen make what we do in Afghanistan all the more important. All eyes, particularly those of the adherents of violent political Islam, will be on what we do and don't do. Should we go the accelerated withdrawal route, the Mighty Men of the One True Faith will be emboldened greatly. But, should we demonstrate inexhaustible political will in the dual track of talk while shooting, they will be inhibited in their ambitions.
The choice will be soon in and near the Oval. Given the political imperatives at work it is likely that the wrong decision will be made. In that event we can save a little bit of money while cowering in our Homeland Security guaranteed bunker at the mercy at the next martyrdom seeker with a bomb or even no more than a gun show acquired semi-automatic weapon.
It's the world of the future, welcome to it.
Showing posts with label Abdullah Saleh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abdullah Saleh. Show all posts
Monday, June 6, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Sudden Silence Over R2P
The slow agony of Yemen's collapse was both easy to predict and difficult to watch. At the level of the individual, the failure of Yemen is a tragedy. On the macro level, however, it is a type study in what can happen when no outside force sees anything to be gained by seeking an intervention.
The "international community" is highly selective in its invocation of the Responsibility to Protect convention signed a few years back in a fit of remorse on the part of some states over what happened in Rwanda and in a spasm of me-tooism on the part of governments which desired to be seen as "progressive," "liberal," and "humanitarian" such as China and Russia.
At the time many Western states were in an orgy of self-congratulations over the intervention in Bosnia, an intervention which would serve unfortunately as a prototype for the concept that air power could effectively end atrocious behavior on the part of obnoxious governments. Why this meme took flight is hard to fathom considering that the real impact of air delivered death and destruction had impact only after Serbian civilians died under NATO bombs and missiles.
The presumed efficacy of air delivered "shock-and-awe" stood behind the Sarkozy/Cameron driven UN resolution allowing the imposition of a civilian protection program and no fly zone in Libya. To date the efforts of the operating agent for this R2P based Security Council authorized program, NATO, has been nowhere near as successful as the Bosnian conflict progenitor. Perhaps this is due to the low cost of Libyan civilian lives.
Libya may or may not be the graveyard for the Gaddafi family enterprise. That question is still open regardless of the highly optimistic statements of UK Defense Minister Fox or the NATO Secretary General. Rather more certain is the proposition that Libya is the tombstone of R2P.
The corpse of this well-intended creation of the lofty thinking and tender hearted of the global community may have its grave marker in Libya but its place of burial is Yemen. Yemen is every bit as worthy for the application of R2P as was Libya. Arguably, had the Libyan situation been a bit slower to develop and Yemen a tad more rapid to fall apart, the NATO jets would be hitting targets in and around Sana'a rather than Tripoli.
But, perhaps not. Libya is close to Europe. There are a number of European interests in play there ranging from the economic to the fear of being overrun by hordes of refugees. Yemen has neither. It is small, faraway, lacking exportable resources, and generally without any direct importance to either France or the UK.
Even without the Libyan anchor hanging around the necks of Western leaders, there is no real sense that any national or strategic interest is at stake should Yemen collapse. Without this impetus, moral imperatives of R2P so vocally engaged a few weeks ago in the Libyan context are now seemingly absent. Not even the US can work itself into a flurry of concern beyond the pro forma despite the fact that it has some very real national and strategic interests potentially in play with the collapse of Yemen.
This is at it should be. Even the existence of national and strategic interests--such as the high likelihood that AQAP will find an even finer home than that which currently exists or the potential for the pirates of Somalia to be joined by colleagues from Yemen to the further detriment of maritime commerce--does not override the governing reality that peace imposition in Yemen would be an even greater "mission-impossible" than doing such in either Somalia or the FATA.
Even the Saudis, the people with the most cows in the regional herd, have limited their efforts to a combination of cash and palaver. Whether jointly or individually, these two traditional pillars of Saudi influence have done nothing definite to solve the rapid decay in Yemen. At the same time, the House of Saud knows perfectly well that were it to dispatch a powerful enough ground combat force, the result would not be peace for Yemen but a horrid combination of forever war there and increased domestic instability back in the Kingdom.
The Saudis are not going to risk their internal security by sending troops to Yemen. The Kingdom would be reluctant to lower its internal security capacities in the face of Shiite based threats not only in their Eastern Province but in Bahrain. Experience has shown even the few fire eaters extant in the Kingdom that the barren mountains of Yemen can swallow whole armies without a trace. Well, that is an exaggeration, but the reality remains that the army would be cut up without victory as a payoff.
As any, well, at least most, observers have noted over the months and years, Yemen is a place without any real reason to exist as a state. The Yemeni are people with tribes but without a genuine and compelling national identity--provided you leave aside a very small number of educated members of the elite and Saleh's inner circle. Beyond that, it is a geographical expression currently being torn not only by the out-with-Saleh movement and its tribal adherents but also by two insurgencies, one offensive and the other, in the south, defensive in nature.
This combination means that there simply ain't no way to impose peace let alone a national identity, a national and representative government, or to build a nation-state in Yemen. The attempt would be very, very prolonged, equally lethal, and ultimately crowned by abject failure. In this respect, as in so many others, Yemen is Somalia--on steroids. Even humanitarian relief operations of the Somalia sort would most likely end as did the ill-fated effort there in the early Nineties.
The abject failures of good intentions in Somalia and the less than breathtaking success in Libya to date ought to serve as clear warnings to the high minded and lofty thinking folks who want somebody to rush in and do something, anything, to stop the killing and relieve the misery of the locals. As the neocon ninny crew should have realized from the outcomes to date in both Iraq and Afghanistan, there are very real limits to both doing good and using military force to protect and project the doing of good.
All hands need to get a grip on a foundation truth: Limits of intervention regardless of the precise nature of the intervention are imposed by the intended recipients of the intended good. The locals have to work out their own destiny, their own future, their own systems of society, polity, and economy in their own way and at their own pace--even if this means much suffering, and much spilling of blood. There is no shortcut to this process as we in the West ought to know from our own history.
It may be hard to stand by and watch as people slaughter one another. It is most difficult to do so today without the aesthetic distance and emotional detachment afforded in former days by slower and less comprehensive communications, but it is the only path to final peace and stability.
The most difficult and problematic task of any government is to recognize when neglect is in fact the most benign policy. It is even more difficult and problematic for the monstrous legion of NGOs dedicated to doing good to accept a hands-off approach. It is most difficult and problematic of all for the UN and its inferior agencies to realize the limits of the "international community" and keep out of the local morass.
There are times and places where the least-worst thing to do is let the internal violence of a place and a people drown in its own blood. Yemen is such a place. Now is such a time. Get a grip on it.
The "international community" is highly selective in its invocation of the Responsibility to Protect convention signed a few years back in a fit of remorse on the part of some states over what happened in Rwanda and in a spasm of me-tooism on the part of governments which desired to be seen as "progressive," "liberal," and "humanitarian" such as China and Russia.
At the time many Western states were in an orgy of self-congratulations over the intervention in Bosnia, an intervention which would serve unfortunately as a prototype for the concept that air power could effectively end atrocious behavior on the part of obnoxious governments. Why this meme took flight is hard to fathom considering that the real impact of air delivered death and destruction had impact only after Serbian civilians died under NATO bombs and missiles.
The presumed efficacy of air delivered "shock-and-awe" stood behind the Sarkozy/Cameron driven UN resolution allowing the imposition of a civilian protection program and no fly zone in Libya. To date the efforts of the operating agent for this R2P based Security Council authorized program, NATO, has been nowhere near as successful as the Bosnian conflict progenitor. Perhaps this is due to the low cost of Libyan civilian lives.
Libya may or may not be the graveyard for the Gaddafi family enterprise. That question is still open regardless of the highly optimistic statements of UK Defense Minister Fox or the NATO Secretary General. Rather more certain is the proposition that Libya is the tombstone of R2P.
The corpse of this well-intended creation of the lofty thinking and tender hearted of the global community may have its grave marker in Libya but its place of burial is Yemen. Yemen is every bit as worthy for the application of R2P as was Libya. Arguably, had the Libyan situation been a bit slower to develop and Yemen a tad more rapid to fall apart, the NATO jets would be hitting targets in and around Sana'a rather than Tripoli.
But, perhaps not. Libya is close to Europe. There are a number of European interests in play there ranging from the economic to the fear of being overrun by hordes of refugees. Yemen has neither. It is small, faraway, lacking exportable resources, and generally without any direct importance to either France or the UK.
Even without the Libyan anchor hanging around the necks of Western leaders, there is no real sense that any national or strategic interest is at stake should Yemen collapse. Without this impetus, moral imperatives of R2P so vocally engaged a few weeks ago in the Libyan context are now seemingly absent. Not even the US can work itself into a flurry of concern beyond the pro forma despite the fact that it has some very real national and strategic interests potentially in play with the collapse of Yemen.
This is at it should be. Even the existence of national and strategic interests--such as the high likelihood that AQAP will find an even finer home than that which currently exists or the potential for the pirates of Somalia to be joined by colleagues from Yemen to the further detriment of maritime commerce--does not override the governing reality that peace imposition in Yemen would be an even greater "mission-impossible" than doing such in either Somalia or the FATA.
Even the Saudis, the people with the most cows in the regional herd, have limited their efforts to a combination of cash and palaver. Whether jointly or individually, these two traditional pillars of Saudi influence have done nothing definite to solve the rapid decay in Yemen. At the same time, the House of Saud knows perfectly well that were it to dispatch a powerful enough ground combat force, the result would not be peace for Yemen but a horrid combination of forever war there and increased domestic instability back in the Kingdom.
The Saudis are not going to risk their internal security by sending troops to Yemen. The Kingdom would be reluctant to lower its internal security capacities in the face of Shiite based threats not only in their Eastern Province but in Bahrain. Experience has shown even the few fire eaters extant in the Kingdom that the barren mountains of Yemen can swallow whole armies without a trace. Well, that is an exaggeration, but the reality remains that the army would be cut up without victory as a payoff.
As any, well, at least most, observers have noted over the months and years, Yemen is a place without any real reason to exist as a state. The Yemeni are people with tribes but without a genuine and compelling national identity--provided you leave aside a very small number of educated members of the elite and Saleh's inner circle. Beyond that, it is a geographical expression currently being torn not only by the out-with-Saleh movement and its tribal adherents but also by two insurgencies, one offensive and the other, in the south, defensive in nature.
This combination means that there simply ain't no way to impose peace let alone a national identity, a national and representative government, or to build a nation-state in Yemen. The attempt would be very, very prolonged, equally lethal, and ultimately crowned by abject failure. In this respect, as in so many others, Yemen is Somalia--on steroids. Even humanitarian relief operations of the Somalia sort would most likely end as did the ill-fated effort there in the early Nineties.
The abject failures of good intentions in Somalia and the less than breathtaking success in Libya to date ought to serve as clear warnings to the high minded and lofty thinking folks who want somebody to rush in and do something, anything, to stop the killing and relieve the misery of the locals. As the neocon ninny crew should have realized from the outcomes to date in both Iraq and Afghanistan, there are very real limits to both doing good and using military force to protect and project the doing of good.
All hands need to get a grip on a foundation truth: Limits of intervention regardless of the precise nature of the intervention are imposed by the intended recipients of the intended good. The locals have to work out their own destiny, their own future, their own systems of society, polity, and economy in their own way and at their own pace--even if this means much suffering, and much spilling of blood. There is no shortcut to this process as we in the West ought to know from our own history.
It may be hard to stand by and watch as people slaughter one another. It is most difficult to do so today without the aesthetic distance and emotional detachment afforded in former days by slower and less comprehensive communications, but it is the only path to final peace and stability.
The most difficult and problematic task of any government is to recognize when neglect is in fact the most benign policy. It is even more difficult and problematic for the monstrous legion of NGOs dedicated to doing good to accept a hands-off approach. It is most difficult and problematic of all for the UN and its inferior agencies to realize the limits of the "international community" and keep out of the local morass.
There are times and places where the least-worst thing to do is let the internal violence of a place and a people drown in its own blood. Yemen is such a place. Now is such a time. Get a grip on it.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Obama Pivots Again--This Time It's Yemen
The always statesmanlike and deliberative Obama administration has once more demonstrated its uncanny ability to appear totally adrift at the policy level. The instant case is Yemen. For weeks the White House, Foggy Bottom, and the Pentagon have been singing the same song: We support our key ally in the global war on radical extremism, the President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Of course, every lyric of support has been followed by an obbligato chorus, We deplore violence and call upon all sides to show restraint and a commitment to dialogue.
As the bullets have shot downrange and the bodies piled higher on the square near the university in Sana, the lyrics and chorus have remained unchanged. Even as the US aircraft bombed and strafed the forces of Brother Leader in Libya, the song stayed the same. The conventional wisdom became simply that the US had no choice but to stick with Saleh given the threat presented by al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP.) Additional arguments were adduced in support of the basic contention. Among these was the ability of the ever-wily Saleh to dance on the heads of vipers as his decades of survival in Yemeni politics have shown.
Saleh the survivor joined with Saleh the partner. We seemed to be welded to the guy come what may. There didn't seem to be any alternative. We had to hang together else Yemen would join with Somalia as one more failed state in the grasp of a group espousing violent political Islam.
Well a funny thing happened on the way to our eternal relationship with Saleh. As the NYT reported, the Obama administration did what it has been so good at of late--changing its mind. Quietly, without taking the American public into its confidence, the Deep Thinkers of the current administration shifted its message to Saleh. The new word is: "Time for you to saddle up and get out of town, pardner."
The policy seems to have been a low visibility version of what the Obama folks did in Egypt. "We are with you all the way, Hosni" on Monday. On Tuesday it was all about, "We are with the people of Egypt and we always have been."
The gales of derisive laughter which met the new Obama position within the ranks of the Egyptian demonstrators may be the reason the approach in Yemen has been low key. This way when the belated change from pro-status quo to pro-opposition did not buy any good will from the men and women who had done the heavy lifting, faced the gun fire of snipers, and bled for what they believed in would not be so embarrassing.
The Obama administration's support for the Saleh status quo defies rational understanding. The most cogent explanation is the Deep Thinkers became overly fixated on a lesser problem--Saleh's lack of general legitimacy--and overlooked the larger, catastrophic one--Yemen is a collapsing state. Period. (This dynamic, obsessive focus on a lesser problem which prevented appreciating a larger, fatal one, was at work in the crash two years ago of Air France flight 447.)
The obsession with AQAP has resulted in tunnel vision regarding the totality of Yemen. While the Western looking youthful demonstrators in Sana have captured the photos and imagination of the West, these individuals, many of them quite secular, are not representative of Yemen taken as a whole. Nothing, no one set of individuals, no one group, no single ideology, religious or secular, certainly no leader can be taken to represent Yemen as a whole.
Why? You ask.
There is no such political entity as Yemen. Get a grip on it. You cannot take Yemen as a whole because there is no such critter. At best Yemen is a geographical expression in which several different polities, societies, ideologies coexist in an environment of friction and animus.
It was the inherent divisions which typify Yemen which allowed Saleh to hang on to power for so long. He understood and exploited the differences, the rivalries, the animosities between tribes and within tribes, between and within regions, between and within religious groups well enough to stay in power, dancing, as he once said, on the heads of vipers.
When the predominantly young, very often Western looking and leaning youth of the Yemeni Khat Revolution came hot on the heels of the paradigmatic Jasmine and Lotus revolts, it introduced not simply a new snake of a different color to the nest of vipers on which Saleh danced, but also perturbed the delicate balance between the older, larger rivals with results which constituted a cascading failure for the status quo. The longer and less successful the suppression campaign became, the more the ancient opponents of Saleh saw prospects for change.
Old and trusted comrades, members of the status quo in good standing, suddenly had a great desire to embrace the goals of the young men and women serving as targets for Saleh's snipers. Tribes whose leadership had battened fat and rich from the troughs controlled by Saleh felt the warm winds of freedom and without warning had a yearning to breath longer and deeper of the heady new atmosphere.
The vipers no longer were bunching together in a fine dance floor for Saleh's nimble feet. They parted company, each looking for advantage. Each showed a very real willingness to exploit the fruits of change growing from the blood of the kids of the Khat Revolution. Saleh may have been both willing and able to keep on dancing--but there were no longer any snakes upon whose heads he might.
Not that the rapid disintegration of the Saleh dance floor really mattered. All it did was to hasten the day when the basic reality of Yemen's non-existence had to be recognized by the US and others. Right now, today there are at least four Yemens within a common border.
There is Houthi-land in the north. This Shia derived sect has been waging defensive insurgency for several years now with the long range goal of reconstituting the historic Houthi monarchy in at least some of its former range.
There is AQAP-stan in the southeast. In that part of Yemen AQAP has come into the open. It operates as the de facto government. Its' fighters control at least some of the towns and all of the interurban roads. It collects taxes, administers "justice," and generally behaves as a government. To say that AQAP has ambitions not limited to the hot and sandy wastes of the southeast is to belabor the obvious.
In the southwest is to be found the remnants of the old Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) which existed as a soviet style independent sovereignty for decades only to be more or less forcibly folded into greater Yemen while Bill Clinton warmed the Oval. The aging one time commissars of the PDRY may have wrinkled with the passage of years, but they have not lost the dreams of youth--as their armed insurgency has demonstrated repeatedly in recent years.
This leaves "Yemen." In the center of the map, this "Yemen" is the fighting ground of several tribes each of which seeks to be first among equals. This "Yemen" bests represents the cynical but accurate description once applied by an Egyptian observer to Arab states generally--"An assemblage of tribes under a common flag."
The profound centripetal forces afflicting Yemen assure its collapse. Saleh himself recognized this as he manifested a while back when he eschewed reelection ambitions. All the events of recent weeks have done is to accelerate the process. The support or non-support of Saleh by the Obama administration is utterly irrelevant.
The policy pivot will not gain the US any particular influence over whatever government emerges in the post-Saleh days. Even if the belated embrace of the protesters' cause did gain influence for the US, it wouldn't matter. That is because no successor government will be any more able to overcome the powerful impetus to disintegration so deeply embedded in the political, social, and cultural matrices of the place and the people.
Yemen as it exists on paper is an artifact. It is the creation of outsiders along with a miniscule number of Yemenis, most of whom were in closer touch with the West than the tribal majority at home. Like Sudan or Somalia or Iraq or Libya, Yemen is not an organic creation, a product of strictly local manufacture. As such, Yemen has been a collapsing state in the making since the day of its creation.
As if the internal frictions and rivalries were not sufficient to make Yemen an ungovernable place and the Yemenis an ungovernable people, there are other considerations of more recent vintage. Yemen is poor. Well, it worse than simply poor. It is a desperately impoverished place in which poverty is exacerbated by exceptional mal-distribution of the riches that do exist.
Worsening the situation is the reality that Yemen's microscopic oil reserves are dipping rapidly to empty. The oil bucks will stop flowing in the very near future.
Then there is water. More accurately there is the lack of water. The combination of normal drought, overuse of subsurface water, and the waste of water in non-productive agriculture (the growing of khat) have combined to present Yemen with the stark possibility of running out of this most essential of materials in the near future.
The lack of economic development--caused in large measure by the corrupt diversion of oil revenues to personal pockets rather than generally beneficial projects--combined with unsupportable population growth has assured that the best employment opportunities for Yemenis are to be found outside of Yemen. More and more Yemeni economic success will be measured in the amount of the remittances sent home by Yemeni working elsewhere.
Considering the totality of the circumstances (as lawyers are wont to say) there are ample reasons for Yemen to collapse. At the same time there are few, if any, reasons to argue that a mere regime change will benefit either the place or the people.
The policy conclusion is not hard to make. The US and other countries (such as Saudi Arabia which has the biggest bull in the herd here) can pump money beyond count into Yemen in the hope of purchasing some fair simulacrum of stability. Or, the US can wait on the sidelines. Wait for the inevitable, the official collapse of Yemen.
The second course of action implies that the Yemen Question will be dropped on the laps of (1) the Arab League, (2) the Gulf Cooperation Council, (3) the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and, (4) the UN. In the event that one or more of these groups decides that the collective interests of its members requires a nation-building effort in Yemen, the result will be a future very much like the past--an artifact imposed from outside which will be inherently non-stable.
The only direct interest of the US and other Western states in the Yemen Question is that of security against terror threats from AQAP. This implies that the policy of the US and other similarly situated states must focus narrowly on preventing such acts or punishing the actors and their facilitators after the fact. The US would bear no responsibility for the political, social, economic, or cultural "rehabilitation" of Yemen and should vigorously reject any such involvement as the result would be a replay of the past few years.
Yemen, like Libya, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan and numerous other "states" demonstrates the futility of building a nation-state. Only nations can build a state--and then only their own. For Yemen to become a nation-state it must first become a nation--not a group of tribes with a single flag. Yemen has a far piece to go before it can be called a nation. That means it has a long, long way to go before it can claim the status of nation-state.
It is very important for our future as well as that of the Yemeni that the US (and other well-intentioned states) get a grip on a very compelling but equally unpleasant truth: You cannot build a nation or a nation-state from the outside.
As the bullets have shot downrange and the bodies piled higher on the square near the university in Sana, the lyrics and chorus have remained unchanged. Even as the US aircraft bombed and strafed the forces of Brother Leader in Libya, the song stayed the same. The conventional wisdom became simply that the US had no choice but to stick with Saleh given the threat presented by al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP.) Additional arguments were adduced in support of the basic contention. Among these was the ability of the ever-wily Saleh to dance on the heads of vipers as his decades of survival in Yemeni politics have shown.
Saleh the survivor joined with Saleh the partner. We seemed to be welded to the guy come what may. There didn't seem to be any alternative. We had to hang together else Yemen would join with Somalia as one more failed state in the grasp of a group espousing violent political Islam.
Well a funny thing happened on the way to our eternal relationship with Saleh. As the NYT reported, the Obama administration did what it has been so good at of late--changing its mind. Quietly, without taking the American public into its confidence, the Deep Thinkers of the current administration shifted its message to Saleh. The new word is: "Time for you to saddle up and get out of town, pardner."
The policy seems to have been a low visibility version of what the Obama folks did in Egypt. "We are with you all the way, Hosni" on Monday. On Tuesday it was all about, "We are with the people of Egypt and we always have been."
The gales of derisive laughter which met the new Obama position within the ranks of the Egyptian demonstrators may be the reason the approach in Yemen has been low key. This way when the belated change from pro-status quo to pro-opposition did not buy any good will from the men and women who had done the heavy lifting, faced the gun fire of snipers, and bled for what they believed in would not be so embarrassing.
The Obama administration's support for the Saleh status quo defies rational understanding. The most cogent explanation is the Deep Thinkers became overly fixated on a lesser problem--Saleh's lack of general legitimacy--and overlooked the larger, catastrophic one--Yemen is a collapsing state. Period. (This dynamic, obsessive focus on a lesser problem which prevented appreciating a larger, fatal one, was at work in the crash two years ago of Air France flight 447.)
The obsession with AQAP has resulted in tunnel vision regarding the totality of Yemen. While the Western looking youthful demonstrators in Sana have captured the photos and imagination of the West, these individuals, many of them quite secular, are not representative of Yemen taken as a whole. Nothing, no one set of individuals, no one group, no single ideology, religious or secular, certainly no leader can be taken to represent Yemen as a whole.
Why? You ask.
There is no such political entity as Yemen. Get a grip on it. You cannot take Yemen as a whole because there is no such critter. At best Yemen is a geographical expression in which several different polities, societies, ideologies coexist in an environment of friction and animus.
It was the inherent divisions which typify Yemen which allowed Saleh to hang on to power for so long. He understood and exploited the differences, the rivalries, the animosities between tribes and within tribes, between and within regions, between and within religious groups well enough to stay in power, dancing, as he once said, on the heads of vipers.
When the predominantly young, very often Western looking and leaning youth of the Yemeni Khat Revolution came hot on the heels of the paradigmatic Jasmine and Lotus revolts, it introduced not simply a new snake of a different color to the nest of vipers on which Saleh danced, but also perturbed the delicate balance between the older, larger rivals with results which constituted a cascading failure for the status quo. The longer and less successful the suppression campaign became, the more the ancient opponents of Saleh saw prospects for change.
Old and trusted comrades, members of the status quo in good standing, suddenly had a great desire to embrace the goals of the young men and women serving as targets for Saleh's snipers. Tribes whose leadership had battened fat and rich from the troughs controlled by Saleh felt the warm winds of freedom and without warning had a yearning to breath longer and deeper of the heady new atmosphere.
The vipers no longer were bunching together in a fine dance floor for Saleh's nimble feet. They parted company, each looking for advantage. Each showed a very real willingness to exploit the fruits of change growing from the blood of the kids of the Khat Revolution. Saleh may have been both willing and able to keep on dancing--but there were no longer any snakes upon whose heads he might.
Not that the rapid disintegration of the Saleh dance floor really mattered. All it did was to hasten the day when the basic reality of Yemen's non-existence had to be recognized by the US and others. Right now, today there are at least four Yemens within a common border.
There is Houthi-land in the north. This Shia derived sect has been waging defensive insurgency for several years now with the long range goal of reconstituting the historic Houthi monarchy in at least some of its former range.
There is AQAP-stan in the southeast. In that part of Yemen AQAP has come into the open. It operates as the de facto government. Its' fighters control at least some of the towns and all of the interurban roads. It collects taxes, administers "justice," and generally behaves as a government. To say that AQAP has ambitions not limited to the hot and sandy wastes of the southeast is to belabor the obvious.
In the southwest is to be found the remnants of the old Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) which existed as a soviet style independent sovereignty for decades only to be more or less forcibly folded into greater Yemen while Bill Clinton warmed the Oval. The aging one time commissars of the PDRY may have wrinkled with the passage of years, but they have not lost the dreams of youth--as their armed insurgency has demonstrated repeatedly in recent years.
This leaves "Yemen." In the center of the map, this "Yemen" is the fighting ground of several tribes each of which seeks to be first among equals. This "Yemen" bests represents the cynical but accurate description once applied by an Egyptian observer to Arab states generally--"An assemblage of tribes under a common flag."
The profound centripetal forces afflicting Yemen assure its collapse. Saleh himself recognized this as he manifested a while back when he eschewed reelection ambitions. All the events of recent weeks have done is to accelerate the process. The support or non-support of Saleh by the Obama administration is utterly irrelevant.
The policy pivot will not gain the US any particular influence over whatever government emerges in the post-Saleh days. Even if the belated embrace of the protesters' cause did gain influence for the US, it wouldn't matter. That is because no successor government will be any more able to overcome the powerful impetus to disintegration so deeply embedded in the political, social, and cultural matrices of the place and the people.
Yemen as it exists on paper is an artifact. It is the creation of outsiders along with a miniscule number of Yemenis, most of whom were in closer touch with the West than the tribal majority at home. Like Sudan or Somalia or Iraq or Libya, Yemen is not an organic creation, a product of strictly local manufacture. As such, Yemen has been a collapsing state in the making since the day of its creation.
As if the internal frictions and rivalries were not sufficient to make Yemen an ungovernable place and the Yemenis an ungovernable people, there are other considerations of more recent vintage. Yemen is poor. Well, it worse than simply poor. It is a desperately impoverished place in which poverty is exacerbated by exceptional mal-distribution of the riches that do exist.
Worsening the situation is the reality that Yemen's microscopic oil reserves are dipping rapidly to empty. The oil bucks will stop flowing in the very near future.
Then there is water. More accurately there is the lack of water. The combination of normal drought, overuse of subsurface water, and the waste of water in non-productive agriculture (the growing of khat) have combined to present Yemen with the stark possibility of running out of this most essential of materials in the near future.
The lack of economic development--caused in large measure by the corrupt diversion of oil revenues to personal pockets rather than generally beneficial projects--combined with unsupportable population growth has assured that the best employment opportunities for Yemenis are to be found outside of Yemen. More and more Yemeni economic success will be measured in the amount of the remittances sent home by Yemeni working elsewhere.
Considering the totality of the circumstances (as lawyers are wont to say) there are ample reasons for Yemen to collapse. At the same time there are few, if any, reasons to argue that a mere regime change will benefit either the place or the people.
The policy conclusion is not hard to make. The US and other countries (such as Saudi Arabia which has the biggest bull in the herd here) can pump money beyond count into Yemen in the hope of purchasing some fair simulacrum of stability. Or, the US can wait on the sidelines. Wait for the inevitable, the official collapse of Yemen.
The second course of action implies that the Yemen Question will be dropped on the laps of (1) the Arab League, (2) the Gulf Cooperation Council, (3) the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and, (4) the UN. In the event that one or more of these groups decides that the collective interests of its members requires a nation-building effort in Yemen, the result will be a future very much like the past--an artifact imposed from outside which will be inherently non-stable.
The only direct interest of the US and other Western states in the Yemen Question is that of security against terror threats from AQAP. This implies that the policy of the US and other similarly situated states must focus narrowly on preventing such acts or punishing the actors and their facilitators after the fact. The US would bear no responsibility for the political, social, economic, or cultural "rehabilitation" of Yemen and should vigorously reject any such involvement as the result would be a replay of the past few years.
Yemen, like Libya, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan and numerous other "states" demonstrates the futility of building a nation-state. Only nations can build a state--and then only their own. For Yemen to become a nation-state it must first become a nation--not a group of tribes with a single flag. Yemen has a far piece to go before it can be called a nation. That means it has a long, long way to go before it can claim the status of nation-state.
It is very important for our future as well as that of the Yemeni that the US (and other well-intentioned states) get a grip on a very compelling but equally unpleasant truth: You cannot build a nation or a nation-state from the outside.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Woosh! There Goes Yemen Down The Potty
You know things must be bad when Somali refugees start leaving. This is happening in Yemen, so there is little hope that the place will escape failed state status. Of course you can't blame these hyper vigilant survivors of a war without fronts. They learned up close and personal that he who hesitates is dead.
The Yemeni army is fractured. Several units have "mutinied" with the result that former comrades-in-arms are now shooting each other. The army is reflecting the other divisions which have occurred in Yemen subsequent to the quite ill-advised use of highly trained and skilled snipers to kill dozens assembled outside the University of San'a last Friday protesting the thirty-two year old dictatorship of Abdullah Saleh. As Talleyrand once observed of a particularly stupid bit of political murder committed by his boss, Napoleon, "Sire that was worse than a crime. It was a blunder."
How much of a blunder Saleh has been discovering the past forty-eight hours. The chief tribe in this tribal assemblage, his tribe, has called for his ouster. Several cabinet members--including fellow tribesmen--called it quits over the killings as did ambassador after ambassador. Now the army has joined in with a senior officer, a commander of the northern district among others and a half-brother who has carried heavy internal security freight among others, leading the parade to opposition.
On the international scene, France continuing its leadership of the free and democratic countries, has become the first state to demand Saleh step down ASAP. How long will it be before other countries in the West, for example the UK, join the chorus?
According to assorted "experts" the continued collapse of Yemen places the US in the space between a rock and a hard place. After all, we are reminded, Yemen is a key ally in the fight against Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.
Sure it is.
When evaluating the role of Saleh and Yemen in any contest with AQAP, it is critical to recall that Saleh took over South Yemen, the former Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen, with the assistance of tribesmen who fought under the banner of violent political Islam. Subsequently, these same folk have constituted the majority of the high command of the anti-terrorist units and a heavy percentage of the actual security force trigger pullers. This ground truth along with Yemen's tribal nature may be the reason that Yemen has had a singular lack of success in suppressing AQAP.
It can be argued with some legitimacy that a failed Yemen right across the narrow straight from the long failed Somalia will exacerbate greatly the menace to navigation presented by the Merry Buccaneers Of Puntland. A large grain of truth resides in that contention, but not a large enough one to make of it a pearl of wisdom.
The Yemeni coastguard rivals the Yemeni counter-terrorist forces for ineffectiveness. This has not been remedied in the slightest by US aid.
Yemen is, has been and will be, whether or not Saleh stays in power, a source of jihadists and pirates alike. The reason for that is the nature of the human terrain of Yemen. The deep tribal nature of the place, the extreme poverty which besets the majority, the appeal of the most austere form of Islam, the cultural imperative of tribal solidarity against any outsider combine to assure Yemen is a fertile breeding place for jihad of all sorts.
Nor is the situation in Yemen going to be altered in any meaningful way by the introduction of democracy or any other form of exported "nation-building" including massive economic assistance. It is critical, foundational, to remember that Yemen is not a nation in any recognizable sense of the word. Rather it is a collection of rival tribes collected under a single flag which none recognize as being real.
Senior American decision makers headed by Defense Secretary Gates have warned that fragmentation of existing states will not contribute to stability. While he made that warning with specific reference to the notion of a Libya partitioned into western and eastern components, his proposition is flatly wrong. When a state, be it Libya, Yemen, or Somalia, is the artifact of well-intentioned Western diplomats, it is not an authentic affair. Having never been a reality in the minds of most people living there, fragmentation along tribal or cultural lines is a viable option.
It can be argued on the basis of history, both European and non-Western, that nations and the states they create emerge slowly, painfully, and organically from internal imperatives and external pressures. Only a nation and concomitant state so created can withstand stresses such as those seen in Libya or Yemen.
This suggests strongly that the collapse of Yemen into its component parts is not a bad idea even if the near-term consequences bear no resemblance to a stroll though paradise. Only by falling apart will there be any hope of Yemen ever coming together in a stable way.
The best policy for France, the UK, or the US is to stay away. Even if Saleh becomes a perfect imitation of Gaddafi, which is unlikely given the internal dynamics of Yemen, the West must restrain its impulses to impose peace, craft a settlement calculated to keep Yemen intact under some sort of imitation Western liberal government.
There is a lesson from Afghanistan which may be learned once more in Libya. Outsiders cannot create a nation-state from a traditional, tribal society for which the entire notion of the nation and the state are literally unthinkable. As was once said, "Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It won't work. It will annoy the pig."
The Yemeni army is fractured. Several units have "mutinied" with the result that former comrades-in-arms are now shooting each other. The army is reflecting the other divisions which have occurred in Yemen subsequent to the quite ill-advised use of highly trained and skilled snipers to kill dozens assembled outside the University of San'a last Friday protesting the thirty-two year old dictatorship of Abdullah Saleh. As Talleyrand once observed of a particularly stupid bit of political murder committed by his boss, Napoleon, "Sire that was worse than a crime. It was a blunder."
How much of a blunder Saleh has been discovering the past forty-eight hours. The chief tribe in this tribal assemblage, his tribe, has called for his ouster. Several cabinet members--including fellow tribesmen--called it quits over the killings as did ambassador after ambassador. Now the army has joined in with a senior officer, a commander of the northern district among others and a half-brother who has carried heavy internal security freight among others, leading the parade to opposition.
On the international scene, France continuing its leadership of the free and democratic countries, has become the first state to demand Saleh step down ASAP. How long will it be before other countries in the West, for example the UK, join the chorus?
According to assorted "experts" the continued collapse of Yemen places the US in the space between a rock and a hard place. After all, we are reminded, Yemen is a key ally in the fight against Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.
Sure it is.
When evaluating the role of Saleh and Yemen in any contest with AQAP, it is critical to recall that Saleh took over South Yemen, the former Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen, with the assistance of tribesmen who fought under the banner of violent political Islam. Subsequently, these same folk have constituted the majority of the high command of the anti-terrorist units and a heavy percentage of the actual security force trigger pullers. This ground truth along with Yemen's tribal nature may be the reason that Yemen has had a singular lack of success in suppressing AQAP.
It can be argued with some legitimacy that a failed Yemen right across the narrow straight from the long failed Somalia will exacerbate greatly the menace to navigation presented by the Merry Buccaneers Of Puntland. A large grain of truth resides in that contention, but not a large enough one to make of it a pearl of wisdom.
The Yemeni coastguard rivals the Yemeni counter-terrorist forces for ineffectiveness. This has not been remedied in the slightest by US aid.
Yemen is, has been and will be, whether or not Saleh stays in power, a source of jihadists and pirates alike. The reason for that is the nature of the human terrain of Yemen. The deep tribal nature of the place, the extreme poverty which besets the majority, the appeal of the most austere form of Islam, the cultural imperative of tribal solidarity against any outsider combine to assure Yemen is a fertile breeding place for jihad of all sorts.
Nor is the situation in Yemen going to be altered in any meaningful way by the introduction of democracy or any other form of exported "nation-building" including massive economic assistance. It is critical, foundational, to remember that Yemen is not a nation in any recognizable sense of the word. Rather it is a collection of rival tribes collected under a single flag which none recognize as being real.
Senior American decision makers headed by Defense Secretary Gates have warned that fragmentation of existing states will not contribute to stability. While he made that warning with specific reference to the notion of a Libya partitioned into western and eastern components, his proposition is flatly wrong. When a state, be it Libya, Yemen, or Somalia, is the artifact of well-intentioned Western diplomats, it is not an authentic affair. Having never been a reality in the minds of most people living there, fragmentation along tribal or cultural lines is a viable option.
It can be argued on the basis of history, both European and non-Western, that nations and the states they create emerge slowly, painfully, and organically from internal imperatives and external pressures. Only a nation and concomitant state so created can withstand stresses such as those seen in Libya or Yemen.
This suggests strongly that the collapse of Yemen into its component parts is not a bad idea even if the near-term consequences bear no resemblance to a stroll though paradise. Only by falling apart will there be any hope of Yemen ever coming together in a stable way.
The best policy for France, the UK, or the US is to stay away. Even if Saleh becomes a perfect imitation of Gaddafi, which is unlikely given the internal dynamics of Yemen, the West must restrain its impulses to impose peace, craft a settlement calculated to keep Yemen intact under some sort of imitation Western liberal government.
There is a lesson from Afghanistan which may be learned once more in Libya. Outsiders cannot create a nation-state from a traditional, tribal society for which the entire notion of the nation and the state are literally unthinkable. As was once said, "Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It won't work. It will annoy the pig."
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