Waning Vigilance: al Qaeda's Resurgence in Yemen

By Michael Jacobson

This afternoon, the Washington Institute published a piece by Gregory Johnsen, the co-author of the Waq al-Waq Yemen blog, assessing whether Yemen is once again becoming an al Qaeda safehaven. Johnsen also offers his recommendations on what the US government to improve the rapidly deteriorating situation.

Here is an excerpt:

Recent reports suggesting that al-Qaeda fighters are leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the group has suffered serious setbacks, have renewed international concerns that Yemen is reemerging once again as a major terrorist safe haven. Although the assessments of al-Qaeda's resurgence in Yemen are accurate, the deteriorating situation is not due to U.S. successes elsewhere; rather, it is the result of waning U.S. and Yemeni attention over the past five years. Renewed cooperation between Sana and Washington in tackling al-Qaeda and addressing Yemen's systemic problems could help reduce the terrorist organization's appeal in this troubled country.

The Apparent Defeat of al-Qaeda in Yemen

By late 2003, al-Qaeda in Yemen had been largely defeated through the close cooperation of U.S. and Yemeni security forces. This cooperation reached its zenith in November 2002 when the CIA assassinated the head of the organization, Abu Ali al-Harithi, but the Pentagon bypassed the agreed-on cover story and leaked the operation to the press. Washington needed an early victory in the war on terror and the assassination of an al-Qaeda leader was too good to go unacknowledged.

Yemen, however, believed it was sold out to U.S. domestic concerns. Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Salih paid a high price for allowing the United States to carry out the attack -- something al-Qaeda still uses to great propaganda effect -- and it took more than a year for the government to publicly admit that it had authorized Washington to act.

In November 2003, the United States was still paying for this mistake when Yemen arrested al-Harithi's replacement, Muhammad Hamdi al-Ahdal, on the streets of Sana. Instead of being granted direct access to al-Ahdal, U.S. officials were forced to work through Yemeni intermediaries; however, with its leadership dead or in jail, its infrastructure largely destroyed, and its militants more attracted to the insurgency in Iraq than jihad at home, al-Qaeda in Yemen appeared largely defeated.

Al-Qaeda Rebuilds

The United States and Yemen both treated this victory as absolute, failing to realize that a defeated enemy is not necessarily a vanquished one. In effect, al-Qaeda was crossed off both countries' list of priorities and replaced by other, seemingly more pressing, concerns. For Washington, democratic reforms and anticorruption campaigns dominated the bilateral agenda as part of the Bush administration's desire to mold a new Middle East. For Yemen, attention was increasingly diverted by a five-year-old sectarian civil war in the north and more recently by threats of secession from the south. Over the next two years of relative calm, the threat from al-Qaeda, while not necessarily forgotten, was certainly ignored. Tourism flourished, and the U.S. State Department initiated a Yemen study-abroad program.

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