Letter From Sana’a: On State Failure's Door

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Snapshot

Disorder on the Border

Joost R. Hiltermann

Saudi Arabia’s cross-border attacks on Yemeni rebels were meant to bring down an insurgency. But will they only make this largely ignored conflict even worse?

Snapshot

Saving Yemen

Marisa L. Porges

Yemen is now at the forefront of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. To combat al Qaeda effectively and prevent the country's collapse, the United States will need to balance its security objectives alongside political reform and development initiatives.

The inner courtyard of the traffic-police headquarters in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, resembles an open-air market. Across the sprawling yard, drivers haggle with men in uniform, and money changes hands in exchange for registrations and authorizations. Offices in the two buildings that frame the courtyard are used for more complicated business, such as issuing certifications that only the director general can provide. One afternoon, a Yemeni businessman stood on a balcony overlooking the yard. “This is the problem,” he told me. “I had to bribe the police five times just to report a theft from my car. It is everyone for himself,” he said, scurrying off toward a senior officer, a smuggled bottle of Johnny Walker Black in his briefcase.

Similar scenes showing a lack of state authority and of alternative power structures are found across the city. One morning, I visited the interior ministry and spoke to a senior military officer who was busy on the phone trying to prevent the escalation of a land dispute in Aden that had already left two of his cousins dead. As he explained, although the land issue was being tried in court, the deaths had to be resolved between the families. He was trying to persuade the police to confiscate the feuding families’ arms and to negotiate a deal that would compensate his family for the deaths. “This is madness,” he told me in between phone calls.

In this landscape of competing political and tribal authorities, where officials leverage their individual authority to supplement their meager incomes, interest groups fill the voids. They exploit a situation in which President Ali Abdullah Saleh is able to extend his rule over parts of the country only through the proxy of favored tribal leaders. These groups buy the loyalty of segments of the population and manipulate local domestic conflicts to their perceived interests. For example, they emphasize the fact that the tribes in the resource-rich provinces do not share in the benefits of the country’s oil and gas reserves. And Al Qaeda’s regional offshoot, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) garners favor by helping dig wells and paying for health care for the needy. Benefitting from these organizations’ largesse are a number of tribal, religious and political groups including AQAP; puritan non-political Salafis, who seek to emulate the earliest successors to the Prophet Muhammad; Wahhabis, supporters of Saudi Arabia’s puritan interpretation of Islam; and local tribes.

Conflict rooted in local grievances is inevitable. The absence of a coherent Yemeni government has sparked a bitter war between Houthi tribesmen and Saudi-supported government forces in the north, has led to a secessionist movement in the south, and has provided grounds for powerful tribes to forge alliances with AQAP. Official incompetence and corruption have caused the proceeds of the country’s dwindling oil reserves and water resources to be squandered. As a result, Sana’a is set in the next ten years to become modern history’s first capital to run out of water, according to the Sana’a Basin Water Management Project, which is funded by the World Bank.

After the failed Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner, Yemen became the latest focus of Western efforts to defeat global jihadists such as AQAP. One of the poorest countries in the Arab world, Yemen is a study in the difficulty of containing militants and their ability to capitalize on widespread societal grievances, including those regarding cultural rights, bleak economic prospects, corruption, and gripes with the perceived inequitable distribution of power. It also showcases the problems with the West’s reliance on allies with questionable domestic policies, suggesting how hard it is to ensure that aid provided to a dysfunctional and corrupt government is, in fact, used to improve the population’s quality of life. Meanwhile, addressing the grievances on which militants feed is complicated by widespread anti-American sentiment and distrust of Western policy interventions.

The reemergence of an al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, seven years after the group was believed to have been shattered with the death of its leader Abu Ali al-Harithi in a U.S. drone strike, reveals the limitations of a security-dominated approach to defeating the militants. Al Qaeda in Yemen has reconstituted itself as a decentralized group that is more attuned to local grievances; again, decapitation is unlikely to do the trick.

In the United States and Europe, a consensus is emerging that Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf states will have to play a key political and financial role in coaxing the Saleh government to implement reforms. But this will require Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to change their policies toward Yemen. They would have to stop manipulating Yemen’s domestic conflicts and instead seek to resolve them. In recent months, Saudi Arabia has joined forces with the Saleh government in fighting tribal rebels in the north who are driven primarily by social, economic, and cultural grievances. A ceasefire with Saudi Arabia, declared by the rebels in January and portrayed by the kingdom as a military victory, has so far evaporated in renewed fighting. But an earlier ceasefire, mediated by Qatar in 2008, failed when Saleh refused to implement it on the advice of the Saudis. A recently agreed-on ceasefire between the Yemeni forces and the rebels is likely to be short-lived if the rebels’ cultural and economic gripes are not addressed. To do so, Saudi cooperation is needed.