A new model for defeating al Qaeda in Yemen
Editor’s note: The next president is in for a rough welcome to the Oval Office given the list of immediate crises and slow-burning policy challenges, both foreign and domestic. What should Washington do? Why should the average American care? We’ve set out to clearly define US strategic interests and provide actionable policy solutions to help the new administration build a 2017 agenda that strengthens American leadership abroad while bolstering prosperity at home.
What to Do: Policy Recommendations for 2017 is an ongoing project from AEI. Click here for access to the complete series with content from AEI’s Foreign & Defense Policy, Economic Policy, and Education Policy teams.
Key Points
- Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), still likely the most potent al Qaeda terrorist threat to the US homeland, has expanded and strengthened as the Yemeni state has collapsed, and its success buttresses the global al Qaeda network.
- The current US approach to Yemen has failed alongside the Yemeni state because it prioritized a military response to the AQAP threat rather than a more comprehensive strategy.
- A win against al Qaeda in Yemen will last only if it is part of a global strategy against al Qaeda, ISIS, and like-minded groups.
- The US must identify a way forward and lead a coordinated regional response in Yemen, including negotiating a political settlement among Yemeni stakeholders, supporting subnational actors, leading a ground offensive against AQAP, and addressing the immediate humanitarian needs of the population.
Read the report: PDF | EPUB | Kindle | iBooks
Executive Summary
The terrorist threat from Yemen is growing. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), still likely the most potent al Qaeda terrorist threat to the US homeland, has expanded and strengthened as the Yemeni state has collapsed. AQAP’s success buttresses the global al Qaeda network, which remains cohesive despite the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS).
AQAP’s capabilities to conduct transnational attacks—for example, to design bombs that can travel undetected—remain. The question is when, not if, AQAP will strike next. ISIS also now has a foothold inside Yemen that will only increase under current conditions. ISIS may not be plotting an attack against the West from Yemen, but its expansion into Yemen builds the ISIS narrative and will only serve to strengthen ISIS globally.
The current US approach to Yemen, christened the “Yemen model,” has failed alongside the Yemeni state. America’s counterterrorism partnership ran through the Yemeni government and relied on Yemeni military forces to fight AQAP on the ground. In the wake of the collapse of that partnership, the US is now backing a Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen in hopes of returning that government, or some iteration of it, to power in order to pick up where the partnership left off. But the Yemeni military forces are so degraded today that they will not be able to fight AQAP effectively once the current conflict ends, and this effort to resuscitate the Yemen model does not appreciate that the US approach was not working in the first place.
The American strategy to fight AQAP in Yemen prioritized a military response to AQAP’s threat. American air strikes targeted AQAP leadership, and Yemeni forces disrupted AQAP ground movements. Nonetheless, AQAP reemerged after a major offensive against it in 2012 and again in 2014. Part of its resilience has come from AQAP’s ability to exploit local popular grievances, which the Yemeni government has avoided addressing for decades and which afford the group the operational and territorial latitude so vital to its success.
These local grievances are driving Yemen’s own instability. The fundamental and clear lesson from past experience is that the terrorist threat from Yemen is not susceptible to a kinetic solution. As daunting a task as it is, no strategy against AQAP will be successful if it does not address underlying factors key to AQAP’s continued prosperity.
Complicating matters, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran have pulled Yemen into their expanding regional proxy war, a growing challenge for any Yemen strategy. Even more problematic for the United States, both Tehran and Riyadh have picked sides in Yemen’s civil war, and neither is fighting AQAP. Perceptions of the US role from both Riyadh, an important ally in the region, and Tehran, a linchpin of the new Iran deal, mean that most decisions made by Washington will appear to be tipping the regional balance to one or the other player.
The US must identify a way forward and lead a coordinated regional response in Yemen. Specifically, Washington must work with both regional and local partners to defeat AQAP and to negotiate a political solution to the current crisis by
- Engaging in a multitiered effort to negotiate a political settlement among Yemeni stakeholders to end the national-level conflict and signal clearly that the Zaydi Shi’a al Houthi movement must be a part of Yemen’s future;
- Supporting subnational actors to stabilize local dynamics and understand and address underlying grievances;
- Leading a ground offensive against AQAP by coordinating and supporting partnered local forces and conducting direct-action operations to destroy the direct and imminent threat from AQAP; and
- Managing and mitigating a humanitarian crisis by addressing the immediate needs of the population, prioritizing aid delivery to key terrain, and delivering targeted aid through US Agency for International Development channels similar to those run in Iraq or Afghanistan.
These efforts, particularly the ground offensive against AQAP, will generate a reaction. US personnel deployed to Yemen will be in harm’s way, although there are steps to take to minimize that risk. AQAP and ISIS will both probably seize the opportunity to kill Americans, and we must prepare ourselves for casualties. It may be much more appetizing to fight from the sky, but the only way to win will be on the ground.
A win against al Qaeda in Yemen will last only if it is part of a global strategy to operate against al Qaeda, ISIS, and like-minded groups. The proposed approach should not be taken as a model for such a global fight, as experience shows that there is no single answer to this complex problem. Instead, similar concepts must be developed for all the theaters in which al Qaeda and ISIS operate today, which together will comprise a comprehensive strategy to defeat al Qaeda and ISIS.
Introduction
The United States needs a new strategy in Yemen. Its current approach to combating al Qaeda there has collapsed as the country has slid deeper into civil war. Yet the al Qaeda threat is growing, fed by regional dynamics that are driving radicalism and sectarianism. Yemen has become a third battleground for the Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy war. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) are already dominating forces in Iraq and Syria, and the global jihadist movement, in which the two compete, is on the rise. So also in Yemen both the al Qaeda affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and an ISIS franchise are growing. US strategy in Yemen must be robust enough to not only defeat both groups, but also de-escalate the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, at least in the Yemen theater.
Current US strategy seeks to defeat the threat to American interests from AQAP through a counterterrorism partnership and drone strikes. Drone strikes alone have never defeated an al Qaeda group. Furthermore, the Yemeni military forces on which US strategy relied to fight al Qaeda on the ground are divided, degraded, and fighting one another. In fact, none of the ground forces in Yemen are fighting al Qaeda. The government that was the US counterterrorism partner fled the country in March 2015. The Yemeni state has fractured, and the US, among other countries, is trying to put it back together to salvage what is left of a counterterrorism strategy.
The prospects are grim. Yemen has been in a slow downward spiral since at least September 2014, and external factors are accelerating its demise. A coup d’état by the Zaydi Shi’a al Houthi movement, openly backed by Iran, ended in January 2015 with the resignation of Yemen’s executive branch. Local militia forces resisted the al Houthis’ expansion from their northern stronghold into central and southern Yemen. A Saudi-led military intervention only recently broke a six-month stalemate but in the process destroyed critical infrastructure, including parts of the Yemeni military. It also exacerbated a growing humanitarian crisis that could become a mass refugee crisis, potentially spreading the al Qaeda contagion throughout the region. Ongoing mediation efforts among key stakeholders show few signs of real progress. A rapid resolution to the conflict in Yemen is improbable.
The Yemeni state no longer exists. The al Houthi movement controls northern Yemen, including the capital, Sana’a, and al Hudaydah, one of three major port cities. The al Houthis are allied with a former nemesis, longtime president and US partner Ali Abdullah Saleh, with whom Saudi Arabia refuses to negotiate. The nominal Yemeni government, led by recent counterterrorism partner Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, has cobbled together a factionalized resistance force to roll back al Houthi gains. That force, which includes Saudi and Emirati components, now controls Yemen’s southern port city of Aden and is pushing northward.
But the supporting factions include southern secessionists, who may see an alliance with Hadi as only temporary. It depends on the quiescence of the southern tribes, among some of which AQAP has embedded itself. And al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate controls the third major port city, al Mukalla, in the country’s east where it has expanded its safe haven. Even should the al Houthis, Saleh, and Hadi find a compromise, they are unlikely to focus on AQAP or be able to control its current sanctuaries any time soon.
AQAP has expanded and strengthened without opposition and is growing stronger ties to an insurgency in Yemen. It is adept at exploiting local grievances for its own gains. Similar to al Qaeda’s growth in Syria, AQAP is integrating into local governance structures and, in some places, has gained support as the de facto military power. It will be much more difficult to separate AQAP from the population today than it was in 2012, when AQAP last controlled terrain in Yemen.
This time, there is no Yemeni military to speak of to prosecute a counterinsurgency offensive in Yemen, a key component of the US strategy. AQAP also remains focused on transnational attacks, a capability that shot it to the top of the terrorism threat list. Targeted strikes and intelligence of whatever quality the US maintains in Yemen may be able to disrupt AQAP’s efforts, but they will not defeat them. There will be another AQAP attack against American interests.
The endurance of AQAP in Yemen is crucial for the global al Qaeda network. AQAP preserves al -Qaeda’s Yemen sanctuary, which has supported al Qaeda operations for more than two decades. That sanctuary overlaps with a major smuggling network that runs northward into the heart of the Arabian Peninsula and westward into East Africa. Recently, al Qaeda has run its transnational attacks through AQAP, probably in recognition of AQAP’s attack capabilities but also because of the ability to move through the region. AQAP has supported al Qaeda’s primary fight in Syria, too. Senior members within al Qaeda’s hierarchy have also been leaders within AQAP as the senior al Qaeda leadership has become increasingly decentralized.
A strategy to defeat the AQAP threat will also deal a significant blow to the al Qaeda network if that strategy is nested in a global effort. The past 14 years have proven that the US counterterrorism strategies are not working. A full-scale military invasion risks worsening the problem and generating an insurgency that empowers al Qaeda. Delegating the fight to local proxies, such as the George W. Bush administration did in Somalia in 2006, can have the same effect.
A counterterrorism partnership that runs through the central government, which the Obama administration prefers, has generally been ineffective, as in Yemen, or counterproductive, as in Nigeria, at least until recently. There is no cookie-cutter approach. Instead, there must be a theater-by-theater approach of tailored strategies that work in synergy globally. Until then, the al Qaeda threat will remain.
Developing such a strategy requires understanding the situation in Yemen objectively and in detail. AQAP is growing because of Yemen’s internal political and military crises, which spring from deep-rooted grievances among the population. No meaningful strategy to defeat AQAP can ignore those crises or grievances, however superficially appealing it might be to focus only on killing terrorists.
Therefore, this report starts by considering the current crises in Yemen and the state of play on Yemen’s many battlefields. The situation is fluid and will certainly have changed by the time of publication, but it is not likely to have been fundamentally altered. The effective change in American strategy in Iraq in 2007 resulted from a paradigm shift. The new approach not only focused on providing security to the Iraqi population, but also recognized that the sectarian nature of Iraq’s government and security forces was a central part of the problem creating space for al Qaeda in Iraq to flourish.
A new strategy for Yemen requires a similar, suitably modified paradigm shift that begins by recognizing that the political and military struggle among the al Houthis, Saleh’s forces, the Saudis and their allies, the Iranians, and local Yemeni tribes and groups is central to the challenge of coping with AQAP. This report therefore considers those struggles in considerable detail.
The paper additionally presents a modified implementation of the military decision-making process used by the US armed forces to develop concepts and plans. It evaluates AQAP according to four key characteristics of any armed forces: Critical Capabilities, Critical Requirements, Critical Vulnerabilities, and Centers of Gravity. The purpose of this analysis is to identify the key tasks and objectives that US and allied forces must achieve to defeat the enemy, preferably in the most efficient manner possible.
The analysis of enemy characteristics then considers five possible courses of action (COAs) the US could adopt, evaluating each based on its strengths and weaknesses. This analysis produces a recommended COA and enables the consideration of the key tasks and some of the military and nonmilitary requirements for accomplishing them. The analysis concludes by considering possible enemy courses of action in response to this strategy and, finally, by identifying key planning assumptions that must remain true for this strategic concept to remain valid.
The result is an initial strategic/operational concept, not a military or political-military campaign plan. Only professional staffs in the US military, intelligence community, and US Department of State can produce meaningful and executable plans that specify exactly how many forces, people, dollars, and other resources will be required to execute them. The aim of this paper is more restricted: simply to describe the problem in a way that facilitates the evolution of a new approach to solving it.
