Time to Break the Cycle in Yemen

The United States has closed several embassies across the world in the last week, ostensibly because of a credible threat picked up by the NSA in "chatter."

The mass closures seem to be a smokescreen for the real threat, which appears to be in Yemen. We've had an extremely active program of drone strikes against al-Qaida in Yemen, but the terrorist network there has only gotten stronger. Why?

Gregory Johnsen, a Fulbright scholar and expert on Yemen has some insights:

I think this is one of the really frustrating things for the United States. It's because, as you point out, [the United States has] been carrying out several air and drone strikes. They have killed people like Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric there in Yemen. They killed AQAP's number two.

And yet what we have seen over the past three-and-a-half years is that AQAP has gone from a group of about 200 to 300 people on Christmas Day 2009 to, according to the U.S. State Department, more than a few thousand fighters today.

Yes, despite intense attacks against al-Qaida in Yemen, the problem has only gotten worse. How can that be?

Well, I think one of the things that explains it is that the U.S. -- not all of these strikes that the U.S. carries out are successful. So there are some mistaken strikes. There are strikes that kill civilians. There are strikes that kill women and children.

And when you kill people in Yemen, these are people who have families. They have clans. And they have tribes. And what we're seeing is that the United States might target a particular individual because they see him as a member of al-Qaida. But what's happening on the ground is that he's being defended as a tribesman.

So you have people flowing into al-Qaida, not necessarily because they share the same ideology of al-Qaida, but just so that they can get revenge for their tribesman who has been killed in a drone or airstrike.

That is, the people in Yemen are mad at the United States because we're callously killing innocent bystanders. Many of the people attacking us in Yemen are driven by exactly the same motivations as Americans who want to stamp out al-Qaida in retribution for 9/11. Both sides feel they are completely justified in their actions because they can point to numerous instances of innocent people being killed.

This is the same trap that Arabs and Israelis have been caught in for the last 50-plus years. As long as we react to violent attacks with more violent attacks, we'll never break the cycle of violence.

The only "lesson" our drone strikes appear to teaching al-Qaida in Yemen is how to goad us into more attacks that produce collateral damage (our euphemism for the deaths of innocent people). Our actions only seem to be helping al-Qaida recruit more members. We're making the same mistakes we made in Iraq at the beginning of that war.

Yemen has a lot of problems. According to Johnsen its new president is weak. There's a separate rebellion in the north. There's a push for secession in the south. The economy is collapsing. People are having a hard time getting basic food and water. And then we throw our war on al-Qaida into the mix.

Our current strategy in Yemen is backfiring. It's is a recipe for a cycle of never-ending bloodshed. And that pretty much describes our involvement in all the countries in the Middle East. We've got to find some common cause with the people of Yemen and stop the arbitrary killings, or we're going to be fighting this nonsense forever.