By J. Dana Stuster
Best Defense Not-So-Felix Arabia bureau chief
"Yemen is not a
surprise," former National Security Advisor Gen. Jim Jones, USMC (Ret.)
began by saying at a recent panel discussion on "Yemen: The Next Egypt?"
"As a matter of fact, what it is is not yet completely defined." On
the brink of a potential coup, this remains true, and likely will for weeks or
months to come.
Here in Washington, there are two major concerns about Yemen
today: the ongoing threat from Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
(AQAP) and the governance of the embattled Gulf state. Yemen' s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has been the United States' ambivalent ally in combating AQAP, but his
regime is collapsing under pressure from a popular opposition movement that has
gained momentum from Saleh' s efforts to suppress it.
At the seminar, held by the Bipartisan Policy Center on
March 1, Thomas Krajeski, senior vice president of the National Defense
University and a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, gave Saleh 50/50 odds of
finishing his term, which has two years remaining before he has pledged to step
down. Now, three weeks later, it is questionable whether Saleh' s term will extend
through the end of this week. Since a violent assault on protesters in the
capital on Friday, in which snipers shot at protesters from rooftops, leaving
52 dead as of Monday, Saleh' s government has been decimated by high-level
defections. Most notable have been announcements from the leader of the nation'
s largest tribal federation and the premier general in the Yemen Armed Forces
that they have joined the opposition movement. Saleh has declared a state of
emergency and the still-loyal Republican Guard, commanded by Saleh's son, have
deployed tanks in the streets of Sanaa.
Washington' s concerns are linked. For the past decade,
since the attack against the USS Cole
at Aden in 2000, Saleh has been a reluctant ally in the war against al Qaeda.
This commitment has been reaffirmed over the past couple years, since al Qaeda'
s Gulf affiliates consolidated to form AQAP and began attempting a new spate of
attacks, including the failed assassination of the Saudi head of
counterterrorism, the "underwear bombing" plot, and most recently,
the October 2010 attempt to detonate parcel bombs disguised as printer
cartridges.
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