“We’ve mishandled Yemen terribly,” former top Pentagon official David Sedney says. “Al Qaeda is stronger today in Yemen than it was a year ago.” The U.S. anti-terror policy of a “light footprint”—drones, special-ops units and training for local forces—isn’t working there, or in Libya, Somalia or the tribal areas of Pakistan, he says. - As Yemen’s Government Falls, So May a U.S. Strategy for Fighting Terror - TIME
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As the nation awaited President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday—and any new decision on how he plans to wage war on Islamic fundamentalism—one of his key approachesseems on the verge of collapse in Yemen.
Shiite Houthi rebels attacked the home of Yemen’s president as they rushed into the presidential palace in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital. Government officials said a coup against President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi was underway. “The President has no control,” a Yemeni government spokesman told CNN.
Hadi is a key U.S. ally in the war against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but his grip on power has been pounded by Houthi forces over the past four months. Fighting between Hadi’s Sunni government and the Shiite Houthis has created a vacuum that experts fear AQAP will exploit to expand its power base in the increasingly lawless nation.
Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi, French brothers of Muslim descent, said they carried out their attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, on behalf of AQAP. “Tell the media that this is Al Qaeda in Yemen!” the Kouachi brothers shouted outside the magazine after their massacre.
Washington has cited its relationship with Yemen as breeding success in the war on terror. On Sept. 10, as Obama announced the start of a bombing campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, he heralded his lighter approach to dealing with terror by citing Yemen.
“I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he told the nation from the White House. “This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.” But 11 days later, Hadi’s government was driven from parts of the capital of Sana’a by the Houthis, who have since gained control of several ministries.
“We’ve mishandled Yemen terribly,” former top Pentagon official David Sedney says. “Al Qaeda is stronger today in Yemen than it was a year ago.” The U.S. anti-terror policy of a “light footprint”—drones, special-ops units and training for local forces—isn’t working there, or in Libya, Somalia or the tribal areas of Pakistan, he says.
“That kind of activity can temporarily suppress the threat to the United States and our allies,” says Sedney, who from 2009 to 2013 ran the Pentagon office responsible for Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia. “But it doesn’t solve the problem, and it also creates countervailing forces that actually make the problem worse in the long run” because such remote attacks serve to motivate survivors to seek revenge.
Christopher Swift, a Yemen expert at Georgetown University, says U.S. efforts in Yemen have been lackluster. “Our relationships, whether they’re political or military, don’t extend beyond the capital,” he says. “The bad guys are out in the field, far away from the national capital, and to the extent we claim to have relationships out in the bush, they’re based on third-party sources or overhead surveillance.”
U.S. goals in Yemen have always been tempered. “We’ve been playing for very limited, very modest objectives in Yemen,” Swift says. “Yemen is still a place where people who want inspiration, or training, or a place to hide can go. AQAP isn’t going away. The Yemenis are not in a position to make it go away, and we’re not willing to help them defeat AQAP decisively.”
Between 2011 and 2014, the U.S. pumped $343 million into Yemen, largely to fight AQAP. The U.S. is slated to provide Yemen with $125 million in arms and military training in 2015, in addition to $75 million in humanitarian aid, according to the nonprofit Security Assistance Monitor website.
“Despite their aggressive actions against AQAP, the Houthis have continually expressed anti-American rhetoric,” Seth Binder of the Security Assistance Monitor wrote Jan. 9. “And AQAP has used the Houthi’s Zaidi-Shi’a roots, a sect of Shiite Islam, to frame their battle as a Sunni-Shiite conflict. Recent reports indicate the tactic may be working as an increasing number of disenchanted Sunni tribesman are joining AQAP.”
Sedney says the only way of transforming a society like Yemen’s is full-bore nation building, with the time and money required to make it work. “We always want to have an exit,” Sedney says, “and the problem with real life is there’s no exit.”
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KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian soldiers came under attack from Russian regular forces in the north of the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday, a Ukrainian military spokesman said.
BERLIN (Reuters) - A new round of peace talks on the conflict in eastern Ukraine will be held in Berlin on Wednesday evening with the foreign ministers of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France taking part, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin said.
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(JAKARTA, Indonesia) — An AirAsia plane that crashed last month with 162 people on board was climbing at an abnormally high rate, then plunged and suddenly disappeared from radar, Indonesia’s transport minister said Tuesday.
Ignasius Jonan told Parliament that radar data showed the Airbus A320 was climbing at about 6,000 feet a minute before it disappeared on Dec. 28.
“It is not normal to climb like that, it’s very rare for commercial planes, which normally climb just 1,000 to 2,000 feet per minute,” he said. “It can only be done by a fighter jet.”
He said the plane then plunged and disappeared from radar.
Jonan did not say what caused the plane to c.
In their last contact with air-traffic controllers, the pilots of AirAsia Flight 8501 asked to climb from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet to avoid threatening clouds, but were denied permission because of heavy air traffic. Four minutes later, the plane disappeared. No distress signal was received.
An excessively rapid ascent is likely to cause an airplane to go into an aerodynamic stall. In 2009, an Air France Airbus A330 disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Investigators were able to determine from the jet’s “black boxes” that the plane began a steep climb and then went into a stall from which the pilots were unable to recover.
Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon said Tuesday that it was too early to comment on possible similarities between the two crashes.
Survey ships have located at least nine big objects, including the AirAsia jet’s fuselage and tail, in the Java Sea. The plane’s black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder — have been recovered but are still being analyzed.
The plane was en route from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, to Singapore.
Only 51 bodies have been recovered so far. Rough sea conditions have repeatedly prevented divers from reaching the wreckage.
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Associated Press writer Greg Keller in Paris contributed to this report.
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French Police Arrest 5 Chechens, Thwart Attackby webdesk@voanews.com (Reuters)
Police arrested five Chechens in southern France on suspicion of preparing an attack, a police source said on Tuesday, nearly two weeks after Islamist militants killed 17 people during three days of violence in the French capital. The source said four of them were arrested in Montpellier or nearby, and a fifth in Beziers. Midi Libre newspaper reported a cache of explosives was found during police searches. The case has not been passed on to the anti-terrorist section of the Paris...
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