A potential terror sanctuary descends toward civil war.

May 30, 2011
WSJ

Yemen’s political crisis is taking a turn toward conflict and perhaps widespread civil war. Armed clashes between supporters of the embattled president and a rival tribal leader have spread across the country after the collapse of an agreement to end the stalemate and hold free elections. And on the weekend military helicopters attacked the southern city of Zinjibar that was seized by Islamists.

The U.S. and neighboring Arabian peninsula states have tried to coax President Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign for several months. The deal negotiated by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was flawed but worth a try. Its demise last week makes it both harder and more urgent to stop Yemen from unraveling.

In power for 32 years, President Saleh has promised several times to step down within a month and turn power over to his vice president, with elections to follow 60 days later. But he backed out of the GCC agreement each time, most dramatically last week when he refused to sign it at a public ceremony. Mr. Saleh may be holding out for a better deal for immunity from prosecution for him and his family, having watched Hosni Mubarak and his sons land in an Egyptian prison.

Yemen is split along tribal and sectarian lines, and some of Mr. Saleh’s generals have broken with him after a violent crackdown on protestors on March 15. So has the leader of the Hashid tribe, to which the president belongs. But there is no obvious successor to Mr. Saleh. If he does step aside, a fair bet would be that some combination of the military, student and other opposition leaders and Islamists would take over.

This uncertainty isn’t reassuring. The best that the U.S., Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states can probably do is to help resolve the political deadlock and ensure that whatever follows Mr. Saleh doesn’t see the country break up and turn into an even bigger terrorist haven. American leverage over Mr. Saleh is limited. Threats to cut $300 million in yearly U.S. aid—a fraction of the $2 billion the country gets from Saudi Arabia—or censure him at the United Nations may limit our influence and hence our ability to shape the outcome.

The biggest winner in a Yemen civil war would be al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which formed in 2009 from the merger of Yemeni and Saudi branches. Its spiritual leader, the American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, uses the Internet to recruit supporters. The group has tried to attack the U.S. homeland twice since December 2009.

Mr. Saleh has at times worked closely with the U.S., and in 2002 a CIA Hellfire missile strike took out the previous al Qaeda leader in Yemen. But the Saleh government is also an unreliable ally, often cultivating or turning a blind eye to Islamist militancy. After antigovernment demonstrations started in the wake of the Arab Spring, Mr. Saleh redeployed as many as half the elite counterterrorism units to protect the regime.

Places like Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia were once backwaters for American policy makers, but 9/11 changed that and probably for a long time. We have no choice except to engage closely on security with whoever takes charge in Yemen and help them tackle their al Qaeda problem.

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