Accepting New Realities In The Global War On Terror -
Yemen
19 January 2010By Norman Amidu
As Yemen turns into the frontline in the U.S.-led 'War
on Terror' it is becoming clear that there is no exit
strategy in the war against terrorism. It is a war
that will persist and there is unlikely to be a
decisive battle. Accordingly, Yemen is likely to
receive substantial Western military and intelligence
assistance intended to bolster the state's military
and coercive powers. It is disappointing, however,
that yet again the main facet of Western efforts in
the war on terror are largely aimed at beefing up the
executive and the security sector (at the expense of
political reform).
In Yemen the U.S. has decided to implement a strategy
of developing local counter-terrorism capabilities,
consisting essentially of rebuilding and upgrading
Yemeni military and security organisations. However,
the contention here is that this strategy, one that
emphasizes military and security solutions up and
above social and political processes, is neither
consistent nor far sighted, nor free from crises and
contradictions. After all Yemen's security crisis is
essentially a result of political failure and thus
requires a thinking that puts (genuine) political
reform and social and economic development together
with security in a single, all-encompassing strategy.
The human, social and political costs of the 'War on
Terror' are all but obvious. Since the war began in
2001 there has been a growing failure by the both
sides to protect innocent civilians and non combatants
from abuse and unnecessary suffering. More damaging,
however, is the seemingly unrelenting assault on civil
liberties and a deliberate disregard of international
law. Under the cover of the 'War on Terror' the
security services have been arresting and rendering
terror suspects to violent, lawless countries for
interrogation, where suspects are routinely tortured.
They have created a “chain of shadowy detention camps
that includes Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the military prison
at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and other secret
locations run by the intelligence agencies” which are
“part of a tightly linked global detention system with
no accountability in law”.
The problem is that the 'War on Terror' is defined by
US politicians as a threat to be countered with war,
alternatives to which are usually dismissed as much
for reasons of principle as for the prospect of
reshaping international order. This broadens the
motivation towards the use of military force in
international politics, thus making specific types of
intervention and military responses inevitable. Most
of these interventions, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia
and Yemen are premised on the assumption that states
deemed weak, thus viewed as a breeding ground for
terrorist organizations, are tantamount to a direct
threat to international security. This situation
grants the executive and security services huge
amounts of power over their own legislatures, which in
turn allows them to not only define the threat and the
methods of engaging that threat but also the terms of
peace. That is, the world in now functioning in a
situation in which top political executives and
warriors are selling and fighting wars whilst at the
same time masquerading as peace makers and peace
builders.
There is no disguising that there is a contradiction
between the mainly military goals of the 'War on
Terror' including regime change and the political and
social goals of state-building. This was laid bare in
Iraq where it became clear that the mainly US security
services operating there, left to their own devices,
were incapable of negotiating a workable peaceful
solution with the insurgency and thus incapable of
state building. They lacked the patience and subtlety
required for such an endeavor. The military, it seems,
spends most of its time preparing, planning and
fighting wars. And has very little interest in 'local'
issues (those outside the war economy) and shows a
lack of understanding of the needs and grievances of
ordinary civilians and thus has very little knowledge
of the functioning of 'local low level bread and
butter' politics. In short, the military has shown to
posses very little capacity for genuine and long term
peace building.
A recent report by the US military describes its own
military planners as, “ignorant of local economics and
landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and
how they might be influenced, incurious about the
correlations between various development projects and
the levels of co-operation among villagers”. This was
true of Iraq two year ago but it is continuing in
Afghanistan where an 'unpopular' and politically
incompetent government is being kept in power through
a war economy that is perpetuating a “military-tribal
complex”. It is also happening in Pakistan (albeit in
a different context) where the reliance on military
solutions have made the country far much more unstable
and. It happened in Somalia where Ethiopia's military
intervention failed to stabilize the country but only
succeeded in inflaming sentiment.
Given the fact that after more than 8 years of the
'smash and grab' tactics so favored by the military,
war still rages and terrorism is still alive. And by
its own admittance, the military has very little
capacity for peace building. Isn't it time that the
world accept these new realities and have its security
goals supplemented and where possible, preceded by
other tried and tested methods? Methods such as
(genuine) political reform, social and economic
development and 'equitable' distribution of resources.
-- Norman Amidu
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