02/17/11 – Gregory Johnsen – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Gregory Johnson.
He's a former Fulbright fellow in Yemen, is currently a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, and is a Fulbright-Hays fellow in Egypt working on Yemen.
He's written for Newsweek, Foreign Policy, the American Interest, and the Boston Globe, and I think I saw on your blog, Gregory, that you're formerly with USAID as well, is that right?
I was on a conflict assessment team for USAID that they had for Yemen in 2009, so just as a consultant.
I see, and well, you say the title of the blog correctly for everybody, please.
It's Walk on Walk.
Walk on Walk, okay, and that's W-A-Q, all W-A-Q, and that's at bigthink.com.
Think probably, just Google Gregory Johnson in Yemen and you'll find it, but very interesting stuff on your blog there.
Obviously, very well versed in the subject of Yemen, which is in the news, particularly this week in regards to the, is it fair to say, attempted uprising or at least widespread protests in that country in the wake of the revolution in Egypt.
I was just wondering if, first of all, if you could maybe give us a little bit of background on Yemen, a country that most of us know very little bit about, and kind of who's who, and then we can get into who's who on the street this week.
Right, so Yemen is a country that's ruled by a president named Ali Abdullah Saleh, and he came to power in 1978.
He came to power in the aftermath of a very, very violent time in Yemen.
His two immediate predecessors were both assassinated within nine months of each other.
One was gunned down and the other was killed with an exploding briefcase bomb, and so he was able to ride out the early time in the 70s and 80s, and then in 1990, he oversaw a unification where the north, which is largely tribal, joined with the south, which was actually a Marxist republic at the time and heavily dependent on aid from the Soviet Union, which of course by 1990 was really drying up and all but gone, and so they unified in 1990.
It didn't go too well.
President Saleh and the north really dominated the south, and so in 1994, the south attempted to secede, and this is when President Saleh really put down the secession in a fairly bloody civil war in the summer of 1994, and since then, Yemen has sort of, you know, lurched from crisis to crisis.
In recent years, there's been a resurgent al-Qaeda threat.
This is where the attempted attack on Christmas Day of 2009 originated.
This is where the parcel bomb plot a few months ago originated from the al-Qaeda there.
There's also a...
Of course, the USS Cole in the year 2000.
Right, that's correct.
The USS Cole in the year 2000.
In fact, al-Qaeda's first attack, way back in 1992, took place in the southern port city of Aden when some al-Qaeda operatives under the orders from Osama bin Laden, who was in Sudan at the time, attempted to kill some U.S. Marines who were in Aden on their way to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope.
So there's really a long, long history here, but that's just one side of it.
In the north, there's an on-again, off-again civil war that's been going on for the past six, seven years, and in the south, once again, we have a group of people who are once again trying to secede from the north.
So it's into this sort of mix that these popular protests that we saw are really taking off there.
Now, the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA, at the least, that we know of, have been intervening in Yemen, including the drone strikes that Amnesty International wrote up from December of 2009, where so many women and children were killed that seemingly led right up to the Christmas Day attack of 2009.
Do you think that the government's cooperation with the United States on the drone strikes and other intervention in their country on our behalf has helped to drum up this popular sentiment against his dictatorship, or makes no difference because they already hate him that much anyway?
Yeah, it's something, I mean, you're certainly right that on the issue, say, of al-Qaeda with the missile strikes, and I think they were fixed-wing missiles and launched from ships, they did.
They created a real problem for the U.S., and this has been something where the U.S. has been dealing with the blowback of these strikes.
So it's something where al-Qaeda, really in 2006, 2007, 2008, and even into 2009, was making an argument that Yemen was no different from Afghanistan or Iraq.
That is, just like in Afghanistan and Iraq, Yemen, too, was under Western military attack.
And this wasn't an argument that really resonated with very many people in Yemen, but in the aftermath of these strikes, particularly in the aftermath of the WikiLeaks acknowledgment of the strikes that's come out, and President Sallin, some of his days, joking about lying to the people and lying to the parliament about this, this has been something that al-Qaeda's been able to really use to its advantage and turn into a recruiting field day.
So now we have, you know, more than a year after the attempt to bring down the airliner over Detroit, al-Qaeda is much stronger now than they were then when the U.S. carried out those strikes.
But as far as the popular protests go, this is something where, just like we saw in Tunisia and just like we saw in Egypt, people in Yemen have very, very many grievances, and they're really fed up with what it is that they're seeing.
Most of the population, about 42% of the population lives below the poverty line.
Many of them are just scraping by on pennies a day.
And even if you get a diploma, a degree from the university, there's no guarantee that you can find any sort of a job.
So would you say then that, well, who are the people on the streets?
Is it like Egypt, where it's the young, kind of secularist, pro-democracy kind of people?
Because it seems like this is a country that's at war with itself all the time.
If the protests are a peaceful kind of thing, like we saw in Egypt, that would be what's so notable about it, right?
Not just that somebody's trying to overthrow the government.
Yeah, no, I think you have a very good point there, Scott.
I mean, this is something where, in Sana'a, what we've seen is, in the initial few after Tunisia, there were a lot of protests.
These were all protests that were really being carried out by this loose political opposition, a coalition that's known in Yemen as the Joint Meeting Party.
And this is a group of six opposition parties.
And they would put 15,000 to 20,000 people out in the streets, and they were very, very peaceful protests.
Now what we're seeing is something different.
And it all started on the night that President Mubarak stepped down, or rather that Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that he was stepping down.
Then you had students in Sana'a who sort of had an impromptu celebration in support of what they called their brothers in Egypt.
And that quickly turned from chanting in support of the Egyptians to chanting against President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
So you have that that's going on in Sana'a, which has largely been student and impromptu protests outside of the umbrella of the political opposition.
In Ta'z, which is really sort of the center of these protests, even though it's not the capital, it's where most of the protests have been going on.
And once again, it's impromptu student protesters.
There are reports today of 15,000 to 20,000 who are gathering there.
And then in the South, you have something slightly different.
You have the people who've been protesting for years, for the past four or five years, in support of seceding from the country.
And they're just there continuing their protests, and their protests are growing a bit stronger.
And in fact, yesterday, we had reports of a couple of fatalities in the protest in the southern port city of Aden.
Well, now, it's I'm not sure what to think when I hear politicians saying, Well, look, what happened in Egypt could never happen here, because that's exactly what the Egyptians said about Tunisia, about say, two and a half weeks before their government fell.
Yeah, you see really interesting rhetoric.
So after Ben Ali left Tunisia, you had President Saleh come out and say Yemen is not Tunisia.
And then once Mubarak left, then they had to add Egypt to that.
So it's now Yemen is not Tunisia, nor is it Egypt.
But and a lot of a lot of people, a lot of people who are very intelligent on Yemen, really doubted that the country was going to go this way, or that there was even much of a chance of popular protests within Yemen.
And then it always seemed a little strange to me, I was looking for two things that at least for myself, I thought would be indicators that that something like this was going to be on the way in Yemen.
And one of those was when and if President Mubarak stepped down.
And the second of those was if we started to see protests outside of the umbrella of the opposition.
And late last week on Friday, when when President Mubarak did step down, we saw both of those things together.
And that for me suggested that Yemen is right now entering into a very critical period of several weeks, even up to three months, in which the regime is going to have to work very, very hard if it wants to to keep and to hold on to power.
What they're what they're facing right now is something unprecedented in a way from what the regime has ever faced before.
And they've seen two examples in Tunisia and in Egypt of how not to do it.
And so now it's up to Ali Abdullah Saleh and the people around him to figure out a way to come to some sort of compromise or work this out so that they can remain in power.
Well, now, so everyone at the State Department and at the Pentagon, of course, their knee jerk has got to be what we must double our efforts to back the government there.
Is that the right thing to do?
Well, in fact, you saw, I think just two days ago, there was an announcement that came out in sort of the almost the usual tenure that the State Department has for these things, where they announced that they were putting in seventy five million dollars to train counterterrorism forces.
Now, that means one thing in the West.
It means, you know, we hear when we hear something like that, that the U.S. is putting money into forces to go out and fight al Qaeda.
But when you're in Yemen and you hear news like that, you don't think about troops going out to fight al Qaeda.
You think that the U.S. is paying soldiers of the president to fight enemies of the president.
And right now, the enemies of the president are people in the street, some of these popular protesters.
All right.
Now, on the issue of al Qaeda, two questions.
First of all, I saw this piece that you wrote in The New York Times seems very important to me.
And I missed it.
It's from last November, a false target in Yemen about Anwar al-Awlaki.
But then I wonder if you could assess al Qaeda in Yemen or al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as I guess they call it, as a force to be reckoned with in Yemen.
Because, of course, the theory is if there is an AQAP, then we have to go there to fight it.
But then, of course, the obvious thing is everywhere we go to fight it, we end up making more of the insurgent math of General McChrystal for one way of expressing it.
As you're well aware, you explained the blowback principle earlier.
So I wonder if you can kind of talk about what al Qaeda in Yemen really represents compared to, say, maybe what we hear in the United States about it.
And then secondly, what's the right level of intervention, if any, that you would recommend?
Right.
So certainly, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a serious threat to the West.
This is an organization that's demonstrated that it not only has the ambition, but it, in fact, has the capabilities to carry out attacks into the West.
I mean, the U.S. has been lucky two times with attacks on itself, and the organization seems to have grown stronger in recent years, largely as we talked about earlier, as a reaction to U.S. missteps and miscues in Yemen.
One of the real frustrating things about studying al Qaeda in Yemen is when you really start to look at the history, you realize that the U.S. and the Yemeni government had actually defeated this organization, al Qaeda in Yemen, in 2003.
And then it was only because of lapsed vigilance on the part of the U.S. and Yemeni government that allowed the group to resurrect itself back in 2006.
And that resurrected group, the group that brought al Qaeda in Yemen back up from the ashes, is really what we're dealing with today.
And so the U.S. is really in a very difficult situation.
It doesn't have a lot of good options.
Certainly invasion, I think everyone is well aware of, and certainly the people that I've spoken with in the U.S. government seem to be very well aware that invasion isn't an answer to this.
Putting U.S. troops into Yemen is only going to make it worse.
But at the same time, the Yemeni troops don't really seem to be up to the task of really taking the fight to al Qaeda in a way that prevents the organization from having the time and space to use Yemen as a launching pad for attacks into the West.
And so with that, the U.S. really hasn't come up with any good options.
There doesn't seem to be a way that the U.S. has articulated or thought about that can really put pressure on al Qaeda.
And so right now the U.S. is just sort of casting around after bad option after bad option.
Well, you know, in the New York Times, they like to pretend to sound smart over there, the White House team.
And they say things like, well, you know, we've learned how not to do it from the Bush team.
And so instead of a hammer, we're going to use a scalpel.
But then to them, a scalpel means cluster bombs and dead women and children everywhere and more of the same.
Right.
Yeah.
You're referring to the I think it was the December 17 strike on a village in Abyan called Al Mujadda, which, yeah, there were a number of innocent women and children killed in that.
And not only is the civilian toll, you know, just outrageous to anybody who's listening, but it's had very real then national security implications for the U.S. in the fact that when you read al Qaeda's journals, that they continue to put out their audiotapes, their videotapes that they put out on Internet jihadi chat rooms.
This village, that attack on December 17th, 2009, has really become a rallying cry for them.
And it's been something that they've used to really bolster the ranks of their organization in Yemen.
Yeah.
And yet a few days later, when someone supposedly put on a plane in Yemen to come and attack the United States on Christmas Day, did so.
He was identified as having done so because of how extreme his Islam was rather than as an obvious direct result of what had been going on in Yemen for the past three weeks.
Right.
I mean, he's someone I mean, al Qaeda had been even before Al Mujadda.
I mean, let's make no mistake.
Al Qaeda wants to wants to carry out attacks on the U.S., regardless of what it is that the U.S. does.
But with the real problem with it was something like Al Mujadda is that it it it widens the circle of potential recruits that Al Qaeda has.
So now instead of dealing with a pool of, you know, 300, maybe they're dealing with a pool of a thousand that they can recruit from people who've been radicalized by by U.S. actions.
And that's the real danger.
I think with with Omar Farouk, Abdulmutallab, he actually led the the bomber on the or the would be bomber on the on the flight over Detroit on Christmas Day.
He actually left Yemen slightly before the attack happened.
So it wasn't in direct retaliation.
But the long term consequences are, as you pointed out, I think very similar.
Well, we've been at antiwar.com reporting on the American and wink wink, as we know from the WikiLeaks for a fact now, so-called bombings by the government of Yemen during November and December and probably three, four weeks leading up to that attack.
So I don't know exactly when it was that he left.
But and, you know, I hate to bog down your interview with this, but and it's my fault for bringing up that particular attack.
But it can't be left without saying that this guy had helped changing planes in the Netherlands by apparently some intelligence agency or another.
And there's very credible witnesses to that and including Brian Ross at ABC News, verifying that the FBI was looking into who were the who was the man in orange and who was the well-dressed man who helped this guy change planes and were suspicious at the airports and so forth.
So, I mean, that that whole attack was very suspicious, it seemed like to me.
And they never did really prove, did they, that he was put on the plane in Yemen in the first place?
Right.
They just sort of said so.
Well, I mean, he he came out his there was a statement released by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that shows him in training in Yemen.
It shows what would have been his sort of last will and testament.
Oh, I see.
I wasn't aware of all that.
Yeah, that was released with Al-Qaeda.
But I mean, certainly, as you mentioned, there's there's a lot of as with any terrorist attack.
I mean, there are a lot of pieces of evidence that get very, very murky.
And it's difficult to sort of, you know, really drill down and find where all the loose ends go.
And some of these loose ends go to very, you know, frightening places.
Yeah, 28 blacked out pages worth, for example.
All right.
Well, so now there's a couple more things.
On one hand, I want to get back to the revolution and the war parties narrative.
We all know we can all sing along that if our dictator falls, the bad guys will take over like Iran 1979.
But then I also would like to give you a chance, if you'd like to talk a little bit about Anwar al-Awlaki, who is the American citizen marked for death by Barack Obama over there in Yemen right now, supposedly.
Right.
So no one, I don't think, is really sure in Yemen what would potentially come after President Saleh.
Certainly Yemen's a very conservative society.
It's a very tribal society.
The last three presidents, President Saleh and the two preceding him, were all military men.
The problem is, is that now the military and the intelligence command structure in Yemen is really very closely aligned with President Saleh's clan and tribe.
And so it's not at all clear who would be the next person to step in.
And there's really been a generation of would-be leaders who've been largely silent for fear of government oppression or anything like that, if they were to actively speak their minds.
And so it would be wide open.
And I don't think anyone has very good guesses on what comes after President Saleh in Yemen, which, you know, not knowing is, I think, one of the things that worries many of the governments in the West.
As far as Anwar al-Awlaki, the point I was trying to make in the New York Times op-ed is that it seems as though the West, and in particular the U.S. government, has really focused on Anwar al-Awlaki to the exclusion of other, and I would argue more dangerous people within al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
So I think there's almost this assumption that's been put out by many people in the administration that if the U.S. were somehow to kill or to capture Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. would be somehow safer.
And I just think that that's really a false equation.
I think the killing or the capturing of Anwar al-Awlaki will do absolutely nothing to keep the U.S. safer from attacks from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
There are many people, as I talked about in the op-ed, who have not only more skills, but are also higher up in the organization, who are able to do much more damage to the U.S. than is someone like Anwar al-Awlaki.
All right, well, and one last question.
What if I had my way, and I just said the way to win the war on terrorism is to call it off completely, to get every American soldier and CIA agent out of the Middle East, declare independence on their behalf, and call the whole thing off, and then just focus on good police work to keep any people with leftover grudges from being able to get here?
What would you think of that?
Well, I mean, personally, I don't think that doing that would do anything to dissuade al-Qaeda from carrying out attacks on the West.
Al-Qaeda, particularly in Yemen, they've made it quite clear that they're going to continue to attack the United States.
And so what the U.S. has to do, at least in my opinion, is attempt to not only defeat this current generation, but help to really sustain an environment in Yemen that prevents the rise of future generations of al-Qaeda fighters from taking their place.
And that's been a task that, at least to this point, most in the Western government and most people like myself just don't have a very good roadmap for how it is to accomplish that.
Yeah, so rather than declaring independence on their behalf, annex them as the 59th state or whatever in our union, huh?
Well, I mean, I certainly wouldn't go that far, but it's a very tricky situation.
It's a very delicate situation.
And I think, as you rightly point out, there are a lot of lives at risk.
Right.
Well, I'm a very black and white sort of guy.
I don't like grays very much.
So that's reasonable, a reasonable disagreement, I guess.
All right.
So we'll leave it at that.
Thank you very much for your time, everybody.
That's Gregory Johnson.
You can find him at foreignpolicy.com and at a website called bigthink.com.
The blog is called Walk All Walk.
That's W-A-Q is how that walk is spelled.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's been good.
Yeah.
Thanks so much for having me.