Day: February 4, 2015
Yemen: failed policy in a failing state
Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, former ambassador to Yemen, Barbara K. Bodine, took a critical view of current U.S. policy in Yemen. While President Obama in September was praising U.S. successes in fighting Al-Qaeda in Yemen as a model for the ISIS campaign, Ambassador Bodine argued that US policy has largely failed to achieve its aims in the country, and has corroded its relationship with Yemen’s government and people. At a time when Yemen is once more teetering on the edge of disruption, Bodine called for broader US engagement on development and governance.
Yemen, argued Bodine, is a country that has wobbled on the margins of collapse for a long time. Historically, the country has been the host of other states’ proxy battles, from the war between Nasserists and Saudi monarchists in the 1960s to the ongoing war on terror. Domestic challenges have also been prevalent, with Yemen having the youngest population in the Middle East. It is severely lacking in natural resources, including access to water.
At the same time, Yemen has a tradition of pulling itself back from the brink. The former ambassador pointed out that in the aftermath of the 2011-12 uprising that ended the reign of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen emerged relatively successful. The crisis ended in the negotiated transfer of power, the confirmation of the new president (Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi) in a referendum and the establishment of a National Dialogue Conference that was broadly inclusive. Compared to the rest of the region, Yemen seemed to have fared relatively well in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
At the same time, challenges have haunted the Yemen transition, leading to the current collapse. The Houthis had been excluded from the political process in the GCC transition plan, along with a number of other political actors. The inability to proceed also led to extension of the terms of the feckless transition government, while criticism of government corruption grew louder within the country. In launching their campaign on the capital in September of last year, the Houthi rebels were kicking in an open door.
Initial steps taken by the Houthis were also largely constructive, including the establishment of a capable technocratic government that could implement the promises of the 2012 political transition agreement. Since then however, the political situation has been spiraling out of control, culminating in the Houthi occupation of the presidential palace and the resignation of president Hadi’s government two weeks ago. Yemen, on the verge of political – and financial – collapse, is now rapidly running out of options.
In light of the bleak political situation, the former ambassador called upon the US administration to alter fundamentally its approach to Yemen. Bodine lamented the use of drones “as a strategy rather than a tool” of Yemen policy, pointing out that since the use of drones was escalated in Yemen under Obama, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) numbers had swelled from the hundreds to the thousands.
Instead, the US needs to make a commitment to governance and economic development a more explicit part of the its strategy. This would not require a significant change in the resources at the administration’s disposal. Sadly however, neither Americans nor Yemenis seem to be aware of these efforts. Increased publicity abouit this aspect of American policy would be a cheap and effective way to support fragile transition efforts.
Bodine warned against accepting the Saudi narrative of the Houthi rebels as Iranian stooges. While Iranian support of the rebels is evident, the Houthi movement is in essence an indigenous movement, and should therefore be approached as local political actors first and foremost. The prospect of a failed Yemen, with the potential for AQAP expansion in the south, would be a far more threatening scenario to the Saudi monarchy and its Western allies than the specter of increased Iranian influence.
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Why pay attention to Kosovo?
If you stick around international affairs long enough, some of the people you met in the earlier years are likely to turn up in high places later on. I first met the still youthful Hashim Thaci, a two-term prime minister who is now foreign minister, in 1999, when the US Institute of Peace hosted a post-war meeting of Kosovo Albanians at Lansdowne in Virginia.
The issue at the time was not so much conflict between Serbs and Albanians. With notable exceptions, NATO brought large scale interethnic violence to a fairly quick end after the war, until rioting in 2004 unsettled things again. At Lansdowne we were concerned with Albanian on Albanian violence, as different factions vied for post-war dominance. The dialogue and the Lansdowne Declaration they agreed on that occasion are often credited with ending an incipient civil war and turning both the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and its more peaceful rivals in the direction of political rather than military competition.
Hashim Thaci was a key figure at Lansdowne, representing an important faction of the KLA that had fought the Serbs from the mid 1990s until the war ended in June 1999. His role was mainly a political one. He had also been a key figure at the failed Rambouillet negotiations that preceded the war and played a role in the UN administration of Kosovo, though he remained out of power until he was elected prime minister in 2007. He presided over independence in 2008 and governed until this year, when his party won a plurality in parliament but failed to be able to put together a majority without giving up the prime ministry.
His talk here today focused on Kosovo’s post-war transition, its increasing role in the region, Russian efforts to influence the Balkans, Kosovo’s efforts to counter violent extremism, and the importance of keeping the country on its democratic and European trajectory. He is looking for American help to keep the doors to NATO and the EU open, as well as private sector American investment.
I asked the foreign minister about the firing yesterday of a Serb minister from the government. He underlined that the minister was fired for inappropriate remarks he had made, not because he is a Serb. That’s the right thing to say, even if it is a bit of distinction without a difference in this circumstance. No Albanian would have made the same comments. I also asked about the special tribunal Kosovo is supposed to create to prosecute in The Hague crimes committed during and after the NATO/Yugoslavia war. He said he thought there was no need for it to convene in The Hague, but the legislation will pass and the court will be created, enabling EULEX to proceed with indictments.
Thaci pledges cooperation in countering the flow of extremists to Iraq and Syria and the influence of Russia, both of which are inimical to Kosovo as well as the US. Moscow is now more active than in many years in Serbia, Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, Macedonia and even Montenegro, which has rejected the Russian overtures. The number of Kosovar “foreign fighters” is not huge–hundreds rather than thousands–but it represents an important qualitative shift in a country that has generally not taken religion too seriously. The government is now cracking down and has arrested more than 130 returnees.
Washington has a hard time even remembering that it once saved Kosovo from a Serbian onslaught that made half the Albanian population refugees. With threats throughout the Middle East and in Ukraine, few care much about Kosovo. But it behooves us to remember that a bit of diplomatic dynamism to help Kosovo to get into the EU’s visa waiver program and to sign a Stabilization and Association Agreement as well as enter NATO’s Partnership for Peace could go a long way to preventing further radicalization and ensuring that Kosovo becomes the consolidated European democracy it aspires to be.
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