The Houthis, along with “Yemeni security forces still loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh” (there’s a partnership that’s built to last), are closing in on Aden and President Hadi is nowhere to be found. The Houthis have re-captured Defense Minister Mahmoud al-Subaihi, who had only just busted himself out of confinement in Sanaa. Meanwhile, the Saudis are reportedly massing troops on their Yemeni border (UPDATE: well, it didn’t take long for that buildup to become an intervention), and Yemen’s foreign minister announced that the Gulf Cooperation Council and Egypt had agreed to military intervention, a claim that was almost immediately denied by Egypt.
With Yemen’s civil war now pretty much on, it’s worth reflecting on Barack Obama’s declaration last September that Yemen was a “success story” in the “war on terror.” He was arguing that a mostly hands’ off policy of airstrikes (by drone, even) and counter-terrorism aid to friendly governments was demonstrably working in Yemen. He was, obviously in hindsight (but some analysts said so at the time), utterly wrong. You can diminish groups like Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with airstrikes and by providing aid to corrupt yet friendly autocracies, but you can’t defeat them that way. They’ll simply give up territory and go underground until the inherent instability of such regimes offers them another chance to go on the offensive. ISIS, with its explicit claims to empire-building, may be the exception; if you can take their territory away, it’s not clear they can keep making a case to would-be recruits. But that’s speculation, and anyway it only applies to one group.
What would actually defeat these groups? Does anybody know? The example of the IRA/Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland suggests that the establishment of a stable, self-governing system might work in the long-term, but holy crap is that easier said than done, and very speculative at that (hell, it’s not even clear that it’s working in Northern Ireland, much less anyplace else). The institutions needed to replace a guy like Saleh, or Hadi, with government that co-opts opposition into the political system are incredibly hard to build, and recent history proves that Westerners who try to install them from the outside are, far from simply wasting their time, probably making things worse. Still, does anybody have a better idea? The hope that “democracy can defeat terrorism” is why the situation in Tunisia is so important to watch, but it is very much a hope, not a plan.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 