Let's Admit It: The US Is at War in Yemen, Too
* By <
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/author/attackerman/> Noah
Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman
* Email Author <mailto:noah_shachtman_at_wired.com%3C/a%3E>
* June 14, 2012 |
* 4:00 am |
* Video-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-eZ1x_qRAQ
<
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-eZ1x_qRAQ&feature=player_embedded>
&feature=player_embedded
After years of sending drones and commandos into Pakistan, Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta last week finally admitted the obvious: The US is "
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/drone-war-admission/> fighting a
war" there. But American robots and special forces aren't just targeting
militants in Pakistan. They're doing the same - with increasing frequency
and increasing lethality - in Yemen. The latest drone attack happened early
Wednesday in the Yemeni town of Azzan, killing nine people. It's the
<
http://www.longwarjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php> 23rd strike in Yemen so
far this year, according to the Long War Journal. In Pakistan, there have
been only 22.
Surely, if America is at war in Pakistan, it's at war in Yemen, too. And
it's time for the Obama administration to admit it.
For all the handwringing about the undeclared, drone-led war in Pakistan,
it's quietly been eclipsed. Yemen is the real center of the America's shadow
wars in 2012. After the US killed al-Qaida second in command Abu Yahya
al-Libi earlier this month, Pakistan is actually running out of significant
terrorists to strike. Yemen, by contrast, is a target-rich environment - and
that's why the drones are busier there these days.
The White House has declared al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen is to be the
biggest terror threat to Americans today. The campaign to neutralize that
threat is far-reaching - involving commandos, cruise missiles, and, of
course, drone aircraft. It is also, according to some experts on the region,
completely backfiring. Since the US ramped up its operations in Yemen in
2009, the ranks of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, have swelled
from 300 fighters to more than 1,000.
The congressional foreign relations committees have had some briefings on
the military and intelligence efforts in Yemen, Danger Room is told. But
there's been scant discussion in public of the campaign's goals, or a way
for measuring whether those goals have been reached. Outside of the
classified arena, there's little sense of what our Yemen operations cost,
nor of what the costs would be if they were discontinued. It's an odd
situation, notes
<
http://www.cfr.org/experts/national-security-conflict-prevention/micah-zenk
o/b15139> Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, since
"it's accurate to say we are 'at war in Yemen.'"
"What should be accompanied with any (even unofficial) declaration of war is
a clearly articulated strategy of what America's strategic objectives in
that country are, a cogent strategy for how current US policies will lead to
that outcome, how US airstrikes are coordinated with other elements of
power, and how much it might cost and when we might expect that to occur,"
Zenko tells Danger Room. "Unfortunately, none of that has happened."
There is no definitive accounting of America's operations in Yemen and the
region that surrounds it. But some details of the secretive missions have
been leaked to the press. Here's what we know.
The US has
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/cias-drones-join-shadow-war-over-ye
men/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Previous> two
separate drone campaigns underway in Yemen - one is run by the CIA, the
other by the military's Joint Special Operations Command. Some of the
drones' targets are
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaed
a.html> authorized by President Obama himself. Some just
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/joe-schmoe-drones/> happen to look
or act like perceived threats. According to the tally assembled by the Long
War Journal, only nine of the 155 people killed in Yemen by US drones this
year have been civilians; no innocents were among the 81 slain in 2011. But
it's hard to know how much to trust those statistics. One of those killed in
2011 was <
http://bigthink.com/waq-al-waq/signature-strikes-in-yemen> Abd
al-Rahman al-Awlaki, a
<
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/awlaki-family-protests-us-killing-anwar-awlak
is-teen/story?id=14765076> 16 year-old American citizen whose father was a
notorious al-Qaida propagandist. And the White House "
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaed
a.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&pagewanted=print> counts all military-age males
in a strike zone as combatants," the New York Times reports. Perhaps Awlaki
met that threshold.
The twin drone operations are only one facet of American efforts in Yemen,
however. According to the Los Angeles Times, a
<
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/05/washington-escalation-ame
rican-clandestine-war-yemen-us-troops-.html> contingent of at least 20 US
special operations troops stationed inside the country are using "satellite
imagery. eavesdropping systems and other technical means to help pinpoint
targets" for the Yemeni military. Pieces from American-made
<
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/yemen-images-missile-and-cluster
-munitions-point-us-role-fatal-attack-2010-06-04> BGM-109D Tomahawk cruise
missiles and BLU97 A/B cluster bomblets have been photographed in the town
of al-Majala, where 35 women and children were allegedly killed in a
December 2009 strike. (The
<
http://www.thenation.com/article/166757/why-president-obama-keeping-journal
ist-prison-yemen> Yemeni journalist who documented the attack is now in
prison, supposedly for abetting terrorists.) In neighboring Djibouti, eight
American F-15Es jets are flying missions from the US outpost known as Camp
Lemonnier; the Pentagon just handed out a
<
http://www.defense.gov/contracts/contract.aspx?contractid=4801> $62 million
contract to maintain the base. According to the investigative journalist
Jeremy Scahill, who has spent extensive time in the region, Djibouti is
where "
<
http://www.thenation.com/article/166265/washingtons-war-yemen-backfires>
much of the coordination for Yemen ops" takes place.
For all of that firepower, there's something rather obvious missing: a sense
of how and why we're fighting there. Yes, terrorists based there have tried
to attack Americans - tried and repeatedly failed. And yes, the
Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed by Congress right after
9/11, gives the military
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/pentagon-isnt-hot-for-a-new-law-ble
ssing-al-qaeda-war/> wide latitude to chase al-Qaida adherents around the
globe. But there's no articulated rationale for why these unsuccessful
militants in Yemen warrant this particular military response. No sense of
what victory looks like.
"
<
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/the_obama_doctrine?page=fu
ll> I don't believe that the US has a Yemen policy," Princeton University
scholar Gregoy Johnsen recently told Foreign Policy magazine. "What the US
has is a counterterrorism strategy that it applies to Yemen."
In this case, however, countering terror also carries the risk of
participating in a civil war. The local al-Qaida group "is joined at the
hip" with an insurgency largely focused on toppling the local government,
one US official told the Washington Post. Take on the wannabe terrorists,
and you may be wind up fighting the area's insurgents, as well.
"In an effort to destroy the threat coming out of Yemen, the US is
<
http://bigthink.com/ideas/drones-drift-and-the-new-american-way-of-war?page
=2> getting sucked further into the quicksand of a conflict it doesn't
understand and one in which its very presence tilts the tables against the
US," Johnsen wrote.
<
http://www.criticalthreats.org/users/kzimmerman> Katherine Zimmerman, an
analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, doesn't believe all this
fighting adds up to the US being at war in Yemen, although she admits it's
"understandable" why others might hold that view. She sees the difference
between the Pakistan war and the Yemen conflict as one of partnership, and
intent. "It's slightly different because of the local cooperation. The
effort in FATA [Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas] are more
heavily driven by Americans," Zimmerman tells Danger Room. "In Yemen, we're
essentially acting as a stop gap until Yemenis can take full responsibility.
We've got a very willing partner in Yemen. We're working on making it an
able partner."
Of course, Yemen is only one part of an even larger regional conflict. The
US maintains <
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/new-drone-bases/>
additional drone bases, not far away in the Seychelles and Ethiopia.
<
http://defense.aol.com/2012/01/10/does-us-navy-need-more-ships-to-counter-c
hina/> The American Navy keeps around 30 warships in the nearby Indian
Ocean, mostly to help fight local pirates. A pair of Lewis and Clark-class
supply ships, possibly used as
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/indian-ocean-shadow-war/> seaborne
military camps for Special Forces, have been spotted in the region of late.
At least one Somali terrorist was
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/floating-gitmo/> held by American
commandos aboard the USS Boxer for weeks.
Over in nearby Somalia, just across the Gulf of Aden, America has backed
proxies from the
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/new-somalia-attack/> Kenyan army to
a "
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/new-american-ally-in-somalia-butche
r-warlord/> butcher" warlord to take on the local terror group, al-Shabab.
But American forces have become directly involved, too. US destroyers have
launched missiles and
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/warships-gunships-spyplanes-somalia
/> fired their guns at terrorist targets. Members of SEAL Team 6 have
dropped in to
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/black-hawk-up-somalia/> rescue
hostages. Then of course, there are the
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/world/africa/foreign-commander-killed-in-
drone-strike-in-somalia.html> drones. Perhaps, by Panetta's standards, this
means the US is "at war" in Somalia, as well.
http://blog-admin.wired.com/dangerroom/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpr
ess/img/trans.gifPart of the bulkhead of a Tomahawk cruise missile taken
following a December 2009 attack on an alleged al-Qaida site in al-Ma'jalah,
Yemen. Photo: courtesy of Amnesty International
Undeclared wars are dangerous wars. Questions about goals and resources can
go unanswered, when there's no need to convince the people or the Congress
of their merits. No one knows how undeclared wars end, or even when they're
won, because no one measures the progress of wars fought in the shadows. The
only way they end is when the US decides to simply walk away - as with the
80s-era shadow war the US helped wage in Afghanistan. Looked like a great
success for a decade; not so much on 9/11.
Of course, missions can drift and resources can vanish in a declared war;
just look at Iraq. But when a fight is kept in the shadows by design, the
chances for shenanigans and miscalculations rise. At least we have some
sense of when and where
<
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/taliban-allies-warlord-flunkies-gua
rd-u-s-bases/> resources were misspent in our open war in Afghanistan of
today; in our secret campaign in Pakistan, there's almost none.
The president doesn't need to address a joint session of Congress every time
he dispatches a warship or a handful of military advisers, naturally. But
this fight in Yemen isn't a disconnected, sporadic series of strikes. It's
wide-ranging and it's multi-pronged. It's costing lives while building up
the ranks of our enemies. It's war. And it's time our Commander in Chief
came out and said it.
If this war is worth waging, it's worth waging openly. And it's worth having
a strategy with a clearly defined, achievable goal. Does anyone know what
that is in Yemen? Is it the end of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula? The
containment of AQAP? A functional Yemeni government that can fight AQAP
without U.S. aid? We've gotten so used to fighting in the shadows for so
long, we barely even ask our leadership what victory looks like.
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Received on Thu Jun 14 2012 - 08:46:19 EDT
