U.S. Shadow War Will Go On, Whoever Runs Yemen

By the time you read this, huge anti-government demonstrations may already be taking place in Yemen. If U.S. officials are freaked out about instability in Egypt, just imagine the panic over losing a U.S. client as it fights a shadow war against one of the nastiest al-Qaeda franchises on the planet. But even if President Ali Abdullah Saleh actually falls, expect his successor to be just as eager to gobble up U.S. cash — and look the other way when the drones fly overhead. Sure, Saleh is preemptively conceding to the opposition crowds that want him to go. On Wednesday, he said he won’t run for another term and his son won’t replace him. But that’s toothless: Saleh’s term won’t end before 2013.

And yeah, Saleh performs for the U.S. like a circus seal. One of the WikiLeaks cables showed him offering to play dumb when U.S. warplanes wanted to take out al-Qaeda targets. But Saleh is the way he is because Yemen is the way it is, according to regional experts: broke, weak, and in hock to foreign cash. As long as the U.S. keeps its wallet open, a possible successor to Saleh would be just as ready to flap his flippers on cue.

“Generally, when you look at how Yemenis view international partners, they ask how big is your checkbook and what have you done for me lately,” says Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s an economically unviable state and it always will be,” which “maximizes the positioning” of foreign patrons.
Yemen may have its share of Islamic fundamentalists. But that doesn’t mean friends of Anwar al-Awlaki are going to run the place. The powerful Muslim Brotherhood feuds with harder-core Islamist factions, and the Brothers are more influential in Yemen than its rivals. And supporting the U.S. isn’t an ideological issue, it’s a financial one, awkward as that may be for the Islamists.
“The Muslim Brotherhood wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with the things the U.S. government is doing,” says Jillian Schwedler, a Mideast scholar at the University of Massachusetts, “but they would never say so publicly.”
Don’t expect the shadow-war money spigot to close. The U.S. gives Yemen between $200 and $300 million annually in (mostly) military aid, supplying everything from attack helicopters to cargo planes to commando training. In a country with a 35 percent unemployment rate and a weak central government, that aid is happily diverted so Saleh can buy tribal chiefs’ loyalties.
That, in turn, finances a counterterrorism fight against perhaps the most active al-Qaeda franchise in the world. Special Operations Forces and the CIA want to form “hunter/killer” teams to strike terrorists in the remote areas of Yemen. U.S. cruise missiles have already battered the country. Missile-armed drones, not seen in Yemen since 2002, may be next.
Which is great for Yemen, Boucek says, since al-Qaeda is the equivalent of a natural resource — something that attracts foreign cash. “There’s never been a better time to be Yemen,” he says. And even if Saleh is replaced by someone more reluctant to cooperate with the counterterrorism agenda, the U.S. will simply roll over him: “The threat is so imminent in Yemen from [al-Qaeda], there probably won’t be a whole lot of asking the Yemenis to do stuff. Covert action will soon be taking place, if it’s not already.”
More likely, it won’t get to that point. Unlike the other Mideast countries in the throes of turmoil right now, Yemen isn’t urban and it isn’t wired, making it an inhospitable climate for the current mass revolts in the Mideast, at least according to an interesting theory by Tech President’s Micah Sifry. Boucek still fears the protests tomorrow will be “very, very violent.” But that points to the problem with Yemen right now: not a change of government, but a lack of government, allowing terrorists and other extremists to operate.
So however lukewarm President Obama has been in calling for Egyptian democracy, expect cold rhetorical oatmeal when the angry crowds come out in Sana’a. “Of course, we’ll say we want democracy,” says Schwedler. “We’ve said it. But I don’t think we really would like it.”