Terrorism: A Weak State Incubates Terror

Jonathan Spyer
November 16, 2010
http://www.gloria-center.org/gloria/2010/11/terrorism-weak-state-incubates-terror

The revelations last week of a sophisticated plot emanating from the Yemen-based al- Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula organization have belatedly refocused attention on this most backward and poverty stricken of Arab states. The sending of explosive packages to synagogues in Chicago is only the latest act of international terror to have emerged from Yemen in the last year.

Yemen today exemplifies the central malaise of the Arab world in particularly acute form. Throughout the Arabic-speaking world, failed development, a political culture in which extremist Islamist ideology thrives and Iranian interference and subversion from outside serve to create a breeding ground for political violence to grow and proliferate. Only in areas where strong and shrewd (though unrepresentative) state regimes exist - such as Egypt, Jordan and, in a more problematic way, Saudi Arabia - is the lid uneasily kept on this boiling cauldron.

Yemen is one of the weakest of Arab state regimes.

As a result, regional forces of subversion have linked up with local Islamists and are turning the country into a hub of instability - playing host today to no fewer than three separate armed insurgencies.

Yemen is the poorest Arab country; 40 percent of its people live on less than $2 a day. The country's steadily depleting oil reserves are unable to generate sufficient income for the government to maintain the tribal patronage system on which it depends. Gas exports are failing to make up the shortfall. Yemen's water supplies are also dwindling.

The regime of President Ali Saleh is autocratic, inefficient and largely ineffectual. Its economic policies have failed to develop the country. It rules in name only over large areas of the country.

Poverty, illiteracy, extremism and discontent are salient aspects of today's reality in Yemen. And like Afghanistan and Sudan before it, Yemen is becoming a key regional base for al-Qaida. Unlike in these other two countries, in Yemen this has come about not because of an agreement reached between the jihadis and the authorities; rather, the inability of the Yemeni authorities to impose their rule throughout their country, coupled with the close proximity of Yemen to Saudi Arabia - a key target for al-Qaida - has made the country a tempting prospect for the terrorists.

AL-QAIDA IN THE Arabian Peninsula is a relatively recent addition to the various networks laying claim to the name made famous by Osama bin Laden. It emerged at the beginning of last year, when the hitherto little-heard-of Yemeni franchise of al-Qaida merged with the Saudi franchise. The Saudi jihadis were facing an increasingly effective counterterror campaign by the authorities, and therefore decided to shift focus to lightly-governed Yemen.

Through its organizing of the failed attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in December 2009, AQAP made its bid for entry to the major leagues of the global jihad. Its guiding spirit, US born Islamist ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki, was in touch with US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the officer who murdered a number of his fellow servicemen at Fort Hood, Texas, a year ago.

The latest bomb plot now confirms AQAP's status as the most powerful "branch" of al-Qaida outside of Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are those who believe that the Yemen-based network has surpassed Bin Laden's group as the primary terror threat to the West in general and the US in particular.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, however, is only one of the insurgencies to have taken root in blighted Yemen.

In addition to its hosting of the most active element of the global jihad, the country faces a separatist campaign in the south. Yemen was only reunified in 1990, and has since suffered a brief civil war in 1994.

The separatist insurgency led by Islamist tribal leader and former Bin Laden associate Tareq al-Fadhli grew in intensity during 2009 and has continued this year, with stormy demonstrations and armed confrontations leading to deaths on both sides.

Probably the most militarily significant of the three Islamist insurgencies was that of the Houthi rebels in the Saada district in the north. The Zaidi Shi'ite rebels of the al-Houthi clan have been engaged in an insurgency against the Yemeni authorities since 2004. Quelling the uprising proved beyond the capabilities of the Yemeni government.

In late 2009, the Shi'ite Houthis extended their activities across the border to Saudi Arabia. Their close proximity to the Saudi border made them a useful tool for Iran to pressure Riyadh. Responding to rebel attacks late last year, the Saudis struck back with aircraft and helicopter gunships. Iran was closely involved in this Shi'ite insurgency, sending regular arms shipments to the Houthis and continuing to stoke the flames of the rebellion.

Saudi involvement and Western pressure led to a cease-fire between the government and the Houthi rebels being reached in February. This was reaffirmed at the end of August, though the underlying causes for the violence remain unresolved.

So the situation in Yemen is one of a near-failed state, notionally aligned with the West but currently unable to effectively impose security throughout its territory. As elsewhere in the region, the resulting vacuum has rapidly been filled by the various, virulent malignancies that affect the regional body politic.

As for the solution, there is no magic formula.

But US President Barack Obama can ill afford yet another ground deployment, with its inevitable cost in American lives. So it is most likely that increased investment in building up Yemen's security forces on the ground, increased deployment of intelligence assets in the country and the occasional use of targeted missile strikes on al-Qaida's infrastructure will be the preferred path.
Saudi intelligence is reported to have played a vital role in intercepting the packages. Saudi involvement also helped to end the Houthi insurgency, at least for now. The lesson here is that for all the problematic nature of regional regimes, the dangers of Iran and the global jihad thrive best where, as in Yemen and elsewhere in the region, strong central government has broken down
The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict
By Jonathan Spyer
Dear Friends,

I am writing to tell you about my new book 'The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict,' which has just been published in the USA and Canada by Continuum publishers.

The Transforming Fire deals with the effect of the rise of radical Islam on the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The book combines analysis and narrative and covers the period from 2000, the collapse of the Oslo process, and the Lebanon War of 2006. It includes a first-hand account of my participation in the 2006 war, and my meetings with individuals on both sides of the conflict.

Finally, I am including a link to a site where the book can be purchased and a short excerpt (below).

I hope you find these of interest.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Spyer*

Check out The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict on Facebook!

Excerpt from 'The Transforming Fire'

In the late afternoon of 9 August 2006, the unit received word that the operation into el-Khiam and Marjayoun was on. We would be commencing movement at six p.m. The company was positioned on a field next to an avocado grove, on lands belonging to a border kibbutz. We had been waiting there for three days. Twice, the entry into Lebanon had been postponed. We’d spent the days checking our equipment, eating sandwiches and smoking cigarettes. Waiting. The routine of tense expectation and prolonged inactivity was one you got used to.

You can get used to a lot. You can sit next to a verdant field of avocados, and get used to the endless, sinister booming of our artillery in the morning, and the Katyusha rockets from the other side that started around 11 a.m. You can get used to scrabbling for cover in the rich dirt as the missiles fly overhead, and watching them plow up white smoke in the hills. All of that can, within 72 hours, start to feel like a normal routine. So much so that some poor, domestic animal that lies within you can even feel a little sad when it hears that its time to move on.

All the same, I was aware of the strangeness that had brought us to this point. We had come a long way from the great hopes of the 1990s. From the high-tech boom and the successes on Nasdaq and the New Middle East. All the way down through the collapse of negotiations, the ending of illusions, the return of the suicide bombers to our towns and cities, and now this, war. Who had ever believed that we would be rushing for the bus depot in confusion, like extras in some fourth-rate film about the Yom Kippur War? That we would be taking the polythene covers from the tanks that had waited patiently and motionless for precisely this moment.

The operation was into one of the areas south of the Litani river, as yet untouched by our forces. Everyone was thinking about the huge mines that had devastated a couple of the tanks heading inward at earlier stages of the war.

Nothing much you could do against the mines. I thought about them a lot. They seemed more fearsome than the other ordnance in Hizballah’s armory. Mainly, I was concerned as to whether I would know what had happened. Whether there would be time to realize, with a sort of mild surprise, “We’ve hit a mine, so this is where it ends.” Or whether the process would be too quick, and one would simply switch off. I wasn’t sure which of the two possibilities seemed worse.

There were fewer jokes than usual, and no one was playing cards. We knew that we were going into the killing zone, and that it was not certain who would come out. Lebanon was the adjacent fields a few hundred yards ahead. Topographically identical, and strangely alien. The hills a little balder. No electric cables. Gray, flat roofed houses clustered on the inclines, instead of the familiar beige ones with red roofs.

With the tanks all in line against the setting sun, an elegiac mood came over us as we made the final preparations before moving off. There was time for thoughts, cigarettes, maybe surreptitious final mobile phone calls from home, or last minute adjustments.

The call had come on Friday evening. The phone rang, and after a second or so of silence on the line a recorded woman’s voice was telling me to report to the agreed point from which buses would be arriving to take us north. The peaceful summer evening atmosphere abruptly changed into something cold and urgent. I had a boiling hot shower, perhaps my last for a while, it occurred to me — and dressed in the olive green uniform which I had presciently washed a few days earlier, as the scenes from the war on TV had worsened. I called my parents in London. I wrote a couple of e-mails to friends, and turned off the computer. Then I walked out of the house into the calm Jerusalem Friday evening, and began making my way to the assembly point.

Years before, I had read an interview with the Israeli journalist Amnon Abramovich, who was severely wounded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Abramovich had been a law student in Jerusalem when the war erupted. As I walked to the meeting point, the details of this article returned to me. I remembered his description of the transformation of his life following the severe burns he’d received when his tank was hit by Egyptian Sagger missiles.

It happened during General Avraham “Bren” Adan’s failed counter-attack on 8 October 1973. Abramovich noted how one minute you’re living the good life in Jerusalem, with the girls and the parties and the bars; the next you’re facing surgery to rebuild your face, and burns across 70 percent of your body. The first part of Abramovich’s narrative was not a bad approximation of my own life, at least on a good day. The prospect of becoming acquainted with the second was at the forefront of my mind through the weeks of the war.

The assembly point was in an Ultra-Orthodox part of town. Young secular and national religious Jerusalemites were gathering there when I arrived. The called-up Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fighters and the Ultra-Orthodox men mingled amiably, ongoing enmities put aside due to the strange drama of the event. After a while, I noticed an acquaintance of mine from Jerusalem, whom I hadn’t seen for about ten years. We knew each other when we were students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the mid-1990s and were involved in the campaign against the Rabin/Peres government’s attempts to negotiate away the Golan Heights to the Syrians. In the meantime, Eli had married and had two children. We reminisced about various characters we’d known.

Some men had turned up with their girlfriends, and there were high spirits outside as people prepared to depart. For a while, something resembling the atmosphere of a café at the Hebrew University prevailed. Shouts of laughter, and friendly mockery. Mildly combative humor with the Ultra-Orthodox men, who as usual proved to be possessed of a no less nimble humor of their own.

Finally, at about 11 in the night, a convoy of buses arrived, and there was a crush as people piled aboard. I remember the Jerusalem night outside as we pulled away. The crowd of Ultra-Orthodox men watching us, now mostly in silence.

*Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel, and a columnist at the Jerusalem Post newspaper. Spyer holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a Masters' Degree in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He served in a front-line unit of the Israel Defense Forces in 1992-3, and fought in the war in Lebanon in summer 2006. Between 1996 and 2000, Spyer was an employee of the Israel Prime Minister's Office. His articles have also appeared in the Guardian, Haaretz, London Times, Washington Times,Toronto Globe and Mail, the Australian, British Journal of Middle East Studies, Israel Affairs and Middle East Review of International Affairs.