Book of Sand: How America’s Yemen Policy Has Come to Resemble Salih’s Disastrous Rule
The “war on terror” has, since its birth in the smoldering horror of 9/11, carried within it the seeds of deep, cynical irony. The battle cry against the enemies of freedom turned into an exercise in torture and surveillance, set against a bored backdrop of reality TV and economic catastrophe. During this wasted decade-plus, America has turned to a series of unreliable partner governments who frequently made a mockery of its goal to eliminate transnational terrorism while promoting America’s values of democracy and human rights. They illuminated the horrible paradox of being the lone superpower in a time of global dislocation.
Perhaps no one represented this difficulty more than former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Salih. Salih was one of the first allies in the “war on terror,” and one of the most confusing and unreliable friends a country can have. The U.S. never understood Salih, and in its official imagination assumed that any of his behavior was born of a particular anti-Western or pro-terrorism animus. It is therefore one of the stranger ironies that the U.S. has essentially adopted Salih’s style of crisis management in its Yemen policy.
The motivations come from different, essentially opposite places- Salih’s from a deep understanding of how to survive in Yemen’s fractured historical landscape, and the U.S.’s from a strange blend of ignorance and optimism—but they will end up producing the same failures.
U.S. policy, as shown by the recent dramatic ratcheting up of drone strikes, is to destroy an ascendent al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and then hope that doing so allows Yemen to pull itself together, politically, at which point our non-military help will find fertile soil. This, so far, has been a failure on a few levels. On one level, the continuing strength of AQAP demonstrates that drone strikes, even the one that killed Said al-Shihri, are not by themselves enough to destroy the franchise. It is, however, not impossible to think that drone strikes can be effective. The old saw about how for every terrorist killed five take his place is probably correct, but it also overlooks a central fact: Terrorism is hard. Replacing a skilled, trained, perhaps even brilliant operative or leader with five untrained farm boys isn’t a 1:1 replacement. So, from a certain narrow lens, the U.S. policy makes sense.
But in a broader context the policy has been a failure, as Yemen has continued to fall apart and any dreams of unity and peace it has are slipping away. Drones are not the primary cause of this, but they are exacerbating the problem. A few articles this week illustrate the failure better than I can. In the Guardian, Brian Whitaker talked about the folly of viewing Yemen entirely through a counter-terrorism lens, ignoring that there are real people living there who for not-entirely-selfish reasons don’t want to be shluffed off to the side by our counter-terrorism obsession.
Taking it further, Gregory Johnsen argued in Foreign Policy that the U.S. has lost Yemen—a focus on terrorism, a blanket approach to fighting al-Qaeda, and a lack of real commitment to helping ease the conditions in which AQAP could flourish have not only strengthened the organization, but have engendered a very real and understandable mistrust of Americans by the very people from whom we needed the most help. In short, every move we made was self-defeating.
Johnsen and Whitaker are both correct but, I can’t help but feel, a little ungenerous. After all, what the U.S. is doing is trying to solve one immediate crisis and hope that things work out in the end. It is trying to buy breathing room before it deals with the immensity of Yemen’s problems. It is kicking the can down the road, and, in doing so, it is imitating precisely the leadership style of Ali Abdullah Salih.
There are two ways to look at this. One way, of course, is that Salih’s rule left his country in ruins, with separatist movements in both the north and the south, a shattered economy, a pervasive terrorist threat, and an ecological catastrophe. That isn’t a model to emulate. On the other hand, while he didn’t leave office in the manner he desired, it is impossible not to have at least grudging respect for his ability to simply outlast the hell out of everyone. His main goal was staying alive and maintaining power, and he managed to do so for over three decades in a country where his predecessors ended their terms quickly and, well, dead. Just as impressive as staying in power, Salih stayed alive, even out of power. Barely, at times, but still alive.
What Salih understood is that he was never running one Yemen, even after unification. There are many Yemens, many factions, innumerable constituencies to please, and so he endeavored to stay one step ahead of them, and no one understood how to do so better than he. He had a genius for it, based on a deep understanding of what made his country work, and what all the individual power centers wanted. It wasn’t a good way to run a country, but it was a good way to accomplish the singular goal of staying in power.
The U.S. doesn’t have Salih’s understanding of how Yemen works. There are good and knowledgeable people working for the U.S. who understand what we should do, but in the upper levels of foreign policy, the U.S. doesn’t have a broad enough imagination to work at a granular level. I have argued, as have others, that the U.S. should work on a ground level with tribal leaders and other local power centers, avoiding as much as possible a corrupt, ineffective, and non-representative central government. This is a workable plan in theory, but while we might have people who can implement it on a day-to-day level, it seems impossible for a country so far away and with such little high-level knowledge to make it work on a consistent and long-term basis. We are not Salih. This is not to say we shouldn’t try, because even marginal gains are important, but that we should expect failure.
Which is why I think critics of U.S. Yemen policy (and I include myself here) are somewhat ungenerous. Given the size of the U.S., its footprint around the world, it might be silly folly to imagine that it can somehow do better and understand more than Ali Abdullah Salih, a man who, in any developmental respect, was a massive failure.
But this illustrates the double folly of having one ridiculous notion—that AQ can be defeated by drones—and doubling and tripling down on it. All that does is speed up the cycle of failure and defeat and bring problems to a head. The problem is that our politics don’t allow us any other option except success, even if that success if impossible. And drones, because they can be successful in a very narrow field, are the only option our politics have left us. Even if they extend rather than eliminate the terrorist threat and hasten Yemen’s dissolve, we will always be able to say we are fighting terrorists. It is a perpetual motion machine.
The U.S. may never understand Yemen, a country that existed in its own odd way long before the idea of the nation-state, and will exist in its own idiosyncratic manner long after that is another of history’s memories. But it should be able to understand itself.
The drone wars are not working. For any good that is done, it is outweighed by the bad. The U.S. will never have a perfect Yemen policy. It needs to do what its critics say—less focus on drones, more on rebuilding Yemen so it is no longer a safe haven. But that would mean accepting a slow process riddled with missteps and failures, and that might not work at all in the long run. But the attempt to speed things up in order to move past the worst parts are foolish, and will only ensure that our difficult relationship with a country over which we have little leverage and of which less knowledge, will only make that relationship longer and more painful.
