Yemen has been more than happy to take hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. counterterrorism aid over the past year. It may eagerly take over a billion more starting next year. But Yemeni leaders aren’t so keen on completely signing away their sovereignty as a U.S. shadow war against al-Qaeda expands.
Barely a week after an al-Qaeda operative who received his explosives in Yemen tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas, President Ali Abdullah Saleh rebuffed a request from General David Petraeus to embed U.S. personnel inside Yemeni military units for counterterrorist strikes. “You cannot enter the operations area and you must stay in the joint operations center,” Saleh told Petraeus during a January 2010 meeting, according to an account of their conversation disclosed by WikiLeaks.
The Saleh-Petraeus cable has received media attention because it describes Saleh blithely pledging to lie about U.S. complicity in air strikes against al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch. But it reveals much more about the future course of a growing undeclared war in Saleh’s country — namely, a detached leader keen for U.S. military aid but uncomfortable with granting carte blanche for U.S. military operations.
Saleh’s key request for Petraeus is summed up in a sub-headline in the cable: “Helicopters, Helicopters, Helicopters.” Saleh told the then-Central Command chief that all he needs are 12 attack helicopters for his commandos to “capture terrorist suspects and identify victims following strikes,” a sale that he contended would reduce the need for “fighter jets and cruise missiles against terrorist targets.” Petraeus was noncommittal, but Saleh pledged not to use them against Houthi rebels in Yemen’s northern provinces: “Only against al-Qaeda.”
Months later, in September of this year, Central Command askedCongress for $83 million to give Yemen’s Air Force Hueys and Russian-designed Mi-17 ‘copters. But Petraeus had his doubts about Saleh’s flyboys. “Only four out of 50 planned U.S. Special Operations Forces Command training missions with the Yemeni Air Force had actually been executed in the past year,” reads a paraphrase of Petraeus’ discussion with the Yemeni president, who pledged to personally turn the cooperation around.
The Yemeni president also “did not have any objection” to use U.S. fixed-wing bombers “out of sight” on alert “outside Yemeni territory” ready to attack al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Although the stated purpose of the transition to piloted aircraft was to reduce civilian casualties after December cruise missile strikes killed Yemeni noncombatants, Saleh appears not to be so attentive to the problem. He got into a “lengthy and confusing aside” with his defense minister over exactly how many civilians died, suggesting, in the words of then-ambassador Stephen Seche, that “he has not been well briefed by his advisors.”
That’s not an auspicious sign for the U.S.’ creeping campaign against al-Qaeda in Yemen. (Expect Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, to describe the contours of the threat from that group in a speech on Wednesday in Washington.) But after the Yemen-based branch of al-Qaeda sent bombs packed in printer cartridges to the U.S. on cargo planes in October, it doesn’t look like Saleh’s hesitancy over U.S. operations in Yemen is anything but a speed bump. One plan under consideration is to give the CIA operational control over Joint Special Operations Command “hunter/killer” teams and introduce missile-equipped drones to Yemen, allowing U.S. counterterrorism operatives to bypass Saleh (or at least grant him plausible deniability) for counterterrorism strikes. And if that doesn’t sit well with Saleh, maybe $1.2 billion over five years — including his helicopters — will calm his nerves, even as armed drones hover over his country.
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