 Welcome to America's Endless Counterterrorism War in Yemen, a strategic assessment, New America online event. We're going to hear from Davis Sturman who's written a very interesting new paper, America's Endless Counterterrorism War in Yemen. Appropriately, I think the first drone strike in Yemen was in fact in 2002, so we're still 20 years later. New America also welcomes Dr. Gregory Johnson and Dr. Alexandra Stark to provide comments on the board. Dr. Johnson is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Between 2016 and 2018, he served on the Yemen panel of experts for the UN Security Council. He holds a PhD from Princeton. He's the editor of the Yemen Review and is the author of the excellent book, The Last Refuge Yemen, Al Qaeda and America's War in Arabia, which is a very well-thumbed book in my library. And also our colleague Dr. Stark. She is a senior researcher with New America's Political Reform Program, holds a PhD from Georgetown. Her work has particularly focused on something that is highly relevant to this discussion, which is the proxy warfare strategy of the Gulf monarchies, obviously a key issue in Yemen. And so we'll hand it over to David, Senior Policy Analyst of New America to talk about some of the headlines from his paper. And then Alex, maybe if you want to comment and then Greg comments and then we'll open it up for a wider discussion. David. Thanks. So there's a lot in this report. It covers three administrations plus a little bit of the Bush administration, but I'm going to try and give the quick overview. The core argument of this report is that the counterterrorism war in Yemen, specifically the American counterterrorism war is an endless war. And by that, I mean a war which I define as a war where a belligerent is pursuing objectives that it cannot achieve. Yet at the same time, that belligerent is not at risk of being defeated either by being destroyed itself, nor by being denied access to the battlefield to pursue its war. The impetus for this report is seeking to reply to, in addition to providing an update on the American counterterrorism war, is to reply to a range of commentary over the past couple of years that have contended that the concept of endless war is nothing more than a political slogan or talking point. I believe that arguments in this report provide a strong case that it's important to name the Yemen war or the US counterterrorism war in Yemen as an endless war. And that actually tells us something about the conflict. Two things just for a clear that this report is not. It is not a deep dive into the Yemeni local context. I am not a Yemen expert. This is the report focused on American strategy and decision making. And second, it's not a report on the current internationalized civil war, which is certainly intertwined with the American counterterrorism war. But in my view, the counterterrorism war, what some of terms adjourn war, is really a separate conflict that needs to be analyzed in its own right. So what is the quick history of that conflict? Really quick. In the 1990s, Al Qaeda and Bin Laden start organizing a network hub in Yemen in the 2000s. Or in 2000, you get a couple of tax. Most notably, you have the USS Cole bombing. Then Al Qaeda's networks get a little bit degraded by 2006 to 2008. They're back on the rise. In 2009, as Obama is inaugurated, they announced the merger term with remnants of the Saudi network that have been relatively crushed. They termed that Al Qaeda's Arabian Peninsula. As we know it now, the United States perceives rightly that to be a growing threat to the homeland and other U.S. interests. In December 2009, the United States is conducting direct unilateral airstrikes or cruise missile strikes are the initial ones, I believe. In Yemen, there was one such strike under the Bush administration in 2002. But really, it's as war as we understand it now. And it's more over unilateral form takes off under the Obama administration. The same month, Al Qaeda in Yemen carries out an attack inside the United States where an Nigerian by the name of Umar Farouk Abdul-Mathalib, who had been studying in Britain, travels to Yemen, gets training in a bomb from Al Qaeda's Arabian Peninsula, brings it back to the United States, or brings it to the United States, where he detonates it on a civilian flight over Detroit. The bomb luckily fizzles. If it had not, it would have likely killed 200 plus people. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula then pursues two further attacks on aviation or attack plots on aviation that are disrupted in 2010 and 2012, as well as some other plots. They grow as an insurgency in the wake of the Arabian Peninsula or in the wake of the Arab Spring. They lose some territory. We have the current civil war. Bout of the civil war takes off. They gain some territory. They lose it. US strikes spiked to an unprecedented 131 in Donald Trump's first year. And then they decline to where they may or may not be paused, which is basically where we are now. So that is the rapid fire history of this war, as I'm telling you, I'm sure there's a lot more, but just to situate people. So why do I call it an endless war, and what gave rise to it? Well, I gave the definition above, but I identified this report four factors that I think have given rise to endlessness in this war. The first, as is core to the definition, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and other jihadist groups, including the Islamic State in Yemen, are not capable of destroying the United States. I don't think we need to spend much time on that. Really, no terrorist group is capable of posing an existential threat to the US, but neither are they capable of denying the US access to the battlefield. The United States conducted at least a single strike, often more, every year between 2009 and 2020. They may have paused strikes in 2021 and so far this year, although it's not exactly clear whether there have been US strikes or not. But if there is a pause, that's not because the United States is not capable of carrying out a strike. And indeed, we still have US personnel on the ground in small numbers in Yemen, at least according to a 2021 War Powers letter from the Biden administration. So we are set up in a condition where Al Qaeda cannot win this conflict. They cannot push the US out absent a decision by US decision makers to do so. And at the same time, the United States has been pursuing wildly expansive objectives, originally set under the Obama administration. You had strategy documents talking about the defeat or total destruction of Al Qaeda, including its affiliates of wide-ranging war to destroy the network. In my view, those objectives are not accomplishable, both if you look at Al Qaeda as a long history in Yemen. And it has the history of resurging and coming back after being diminished, which suggests that this kind of dream of a total victory or decisive victory is probably not possible. At the same time, Al Qaeda and its networks have decentralized in key ways, which raises the question of what even would a victory be when Al Qaeda is able to or people, even if you smash the organization, can brand new rising organizations as it eases the possibility of demonstrating continuity with the former organization, some things that the group has steered into in recent propaganda releases. And then finally, the current conflict and more broadly grievances in Yemen create an environment that is conducive to the grievances that can fuel jihadist organizing as well as just opportunity to engage in armed struggle. There can also be expansive objectives regarding transformative aims of changing the Yemeni context or even disruptive ones, although those tend to be less expansive. But the third factor is that the United States has often adopted unclear or shifting aims, moving between this kind of unlimited vision of destroying Al Qaeda and its entirety and discussion of more limited disruptive aims degrading Al Qaeda's external attack capability. But this has never really been clarified to what specifically is being sought. In addition, at the beginning at least the war was waged covertly, which prevented the kind of public stability of what the objective was. And many of the potentially limited objectives that might accept some continued existence of Al Qaeda were presented as gerunds or processes. So the objective is degrading Al Qaeda or our objective is to degrade Al Qaeda's capabilities. Well, that might sound limited and that it's not the claim to defeat. But if you don't say what the endpoint or how much degradation is necessary, what fills in as the projected endpoint is actually those continued references, however merely rhetorical they seem to be, that the endpoint is actually destroying the group. And then finally, the US has had limited efforts at war termination planning. Its partners are highly constrained and with the functional collapse of much of the Yemeni government limits on its partners and Emiratis and Saudis and basically total lack of any leverage over the Houthi rebels who are increasingly playing a key role in much of Yemen. So those are the conditions I argue have generated endlessness. Another argument of this report is that the threat from Al Qaeda's Arabian Peninsula has declined radically since 2009. In 2009, when this war was escalated or started, depending how you want to count the O2 strike in that early period, there were repeated government statements about credible plots and threats against the United States from Al Qaeda both in South Asia and Yemen. We know about multiple plots, including the actual Christmas Day attack inside the United States, which if it had been successful would have killed hundreds and was not disrupted really by US efforts, but largely by the luck and challenges posed by two Al Qaeda's plotting, but was not detected beforehand. You also had the 2010 and 2012 plots. By 2022 or this year, we find that the US government has repeatedly assessed that it has no evidence of credible specific plotting activity plots against the United States homeland by foreign terrorist organizations, whether Yemen or elsewhere, even as the Islamic State rose in Syria, do an unprecedented side of power for a jihadist organization. The US government continued to assess that that group did not pose a direct credible threat inside the United States, although it's certainly directed attacks in Europe. And then also, if we just look at, there's no examples of recent plots that are similar to the aviation plots out of Yemen against the US homeland, we know of no cases like that. Then finally, the kind of travel that up on the top and a range of other people engaged in where they were able to travel to Yemen, get training, connect with the group, and then return to the West or come to the United States is really not possible today in part because of the Civil War, in part because of greater attentions that began with the Christmas Day attack and in part because of the pandemic. That probably will not be permanent and is certainly not a particularly moral way of degrading the threat from Al Qaeda in Yemen, but it's something that needs to be accounted for when assessing the threat. So today the threat, the war is being waged on what is largely a preventive logic of fears of what Al Qaeda could become rather than degrading the group itself to a specified endpoint, which has both moral and strategic challenges that I explore in the paper. So one response to this we've seen from the administration is to move a bit away from the logic or focus on defeating Al Qaeda to what it terms sustainable counterterrorism. I do think this may be a first step towards ending the endless wars and there's very many, there are parts of it that require praise. However, my fears that I express in this report is that it does not actually fill the strategic hold regarding what the US objective is. Instead, it dispenses at least somewhat with the language of seeking defeat, but it doesn't specify what short of defeat is desired in Yemen or Somalia. In the speech by Dr. Liz Sherwood Randall that sort of put forth the strategy, Yemen and Somalia do not appear by name in that speech. It also tends to generate or amp up the sort of preventive watch or fear of growing threat tied to military actions that does not require a new authorization or debate over starting a new war and what those objectives might be. It ends up being simply an amping up of the current conflict and it also just tends to assume that over time conditions will get better, which at least to me looks a little bit like the strikes in 2009 where there were similarly a very small number of direct US strikes and an assumption that the US was actually on the way towards victory that then the wave of protests and other destabilizations in the Middle East really collapsed and generated these radical extensions in Yemen and also in Syria and Iraq where strikes and conflicts grew rapidly. So what should the United States do? Well, I think we need to chart a policy approach that seeks to actually end the endless war as distinct from what might be viewed as a sustainable counterterrorism framework or a policy of really amping up the commitment to the unlimited objective of destroying Al Qaeda and the Raven Peninsula. I think that means that the United States needs to limit and specify what its objectives are. Any objectives that have to continue use of military force need to be stated clearly preferably in a presidential speech that should also discuss the actual history of the US war. We need a radical expansion of transparency both on how many strikes and one strikes were conducted in the war over the past two decades as well as reporting after every strike in a timely manner. Currently there appear to be strikes that are recognized by parts of the US government in 2020 that Suncom does not acknowledge partially because they were probably conducted by other arms of the US government covertly but they've been semi-acknowledged by parts of the government yet we don't have a clear record of those. But also we need transparency on what the threat to the United States is from Al Qaeda. We need to repeal or at least reform and restrict the authorization for the use of military force and expand the war termination planning. Finally before I turn it over to Alex, I think it's important to note that each of those things need to be pursued together otherwise you just shift the war into a different form of endlessness that may be driven more by the expansive aim or by unclearing and shifting objectives but if you don't address both and also the war termination issue the endlessness will continue. And with that I turn it over. Alex. Yeah great thanks so much for including me in this conversation David I appreciate it and I enjoyed reading your report so I hope folks will go to the new America website and check it out. I had two kind of thoughts that build off of your findings maybe so I'm really glad that your report draws attention to to the US counterterrorism more in Yemen specifically and I also really appreciated your emphasis on transparency because I think while we do sometimes at least talk about US support for the Saudi-led coalition's intervention in Yemen in kind of popular media and our conversations around Yemen there's comparatively less attention to this aspect to the US in the United States anyway and I study the other dynamics of the war so that's not a knock on that approach but I think this does need more attention. We know from recent reporting and investigations that US counterterrorism operations in places like Iraq and Syria for example Afghanistan have had much larger impacts on civilians and have likely incurred much higher numbers of civilian casualties than has been previously reported or publicly understood so I think we just don't really know nearly enough about the effects of the counterterrorism US counterterrorism operations in Yemen specifically. We also know I think comparatively little from the research side about the utility of drone strikes in a broader framework of counterterrorism so we when you see studies of this we tend to measure effectiveness in terms of you know how many terrorists are killed or is there some kind of short-term change in the tempo of the operations that a terrorist group is able to carry out following a drone strike but we really I think know very little about the the systematic ways that for example civilian populations view drones we don't we know comparatively little about how counterterrorism campaigns have led the US to support repressive dictators like Ali Abdullah al-Sala who was able to you know collect rents from from US counterterrorism support and from that security partnership for a decade so I suspect that if there were to be more investigation if we were to learn more about about the US counterterrorism war in Yemen publicly especially about the civilian casualty side frankly I think there would be much more conversation in the United States amongst policymakers about ending the counterterrorism war and and David exactly as you point out in in your findings this is important because under the Biden administration so far we have seen a decline in the number of drone strikes kind of across the board as the administration it seems like is undergoing this internal policy review but it's not at all clear that though that that that kind of steady state will be institutionalized or will be carried forward in any way the second thing that comes to mind is I think this this is a really important moment to be rethinking US counterterrorism policy you know as the US presence in Afghanistan drew down last year as the Biden administration is conducting this internal review there's also a push in the the national defense strategy and perhaps in the national security strategy when it eventually comes out to kind of prioritize great power competition over other competencies in other areas of the world so I think all of that means that this is potentially a really important moment for for that kind of fundamental rethink the current approach is exactly as you outlined looks like a military first light footprint approach where the US is at least from the US side is using drones and partnering with governments to carry out counterterrorism combat operations but but this approach doesn't really account for the underlying factors that led to the emergence of terrorist groups or allow them to flourish and it doesn't have a long-term component looking at how to actually help to stabilize societies how how to invest in sustainable economic development for example and it also ignores the voices of people on the ground which I think is really important to note so you know maybe we can be asking how can we look to local peace building processes and local ways of building societal resilience to terrorism and to other kinds of political violence and then how can we maybe support those efforts or expand on those efforts to build a longer term more sustainable approach that isn't just kind of predicated on on violence on decapitating decapitating terrorist leadership kind of that over and over again approach that you outlined. Thank you Alex. Greg? Yeah thanks so much thanks to both David and Alex and of course you Peter um yeah so I just want to make a couple comments and then end with with a couple of questions for David that I think build on on some of his some of his work in this paper so first I think it's a great paper I would encourage everybody who is listening if you haven't read it do read it I think what David does that adds a lot of value here is so often when you read these types of papers you get one side or the other you get a very US centric focus or you get a very AQAP centric focus and I think what David has done very well is is balance that and give us both a really good and concise history of of Al Qaeda and not only a history of how the organization is waxed and waned over time but also evaluating the threat that that organization poses particularly to to the west and so I think that's that's one of the real strengths of this paper another strength is that he really interrogates and I think doesn't does an excellent job at getting at sort of how the US has been in really a reactive posture over the past two decades in Yemen with with constantly shifting policy goals and aims as as he does a really good job of of laying out in the paper so I'll just make a couple of points on on each of those things and then go into my question so one I think when you when you read this paper and and it's something that you know someone sitting in David's position I think has a really excellent viewpoint because you can look back and we have the benefit of retrospect now and so in 2009 as David talked about in his remarks as he covers in his paper AQAP is presenting this threat to the Obama administration it's not an existential threat but certainly it's a threat that is a challenge to the US administration and to the Obama administration policy and what they want their focus to be on and as David rightly points out if the underwear bomber had been successful in bringing down the the airline or over Detroit we're looking at a much different situation probably today than we were then I think that David does a really good job of laying out how since that point from 2009 to really 2020 that basically what happened is that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula their international terrorist wing the the the sort of node of the organization that was focused on threats in the US is atrophied and I think David points out a couple of good reasons for this one is that you have all these US drone strikes yes there were a number of civilian casualties as Alex rightly points out but also a number of leaders within AQAP were killed in drone strikes from Anwar al-Awlaki to Nasr al-Wahishi Sayyid al-Shihri Qasem al-Rami the list goes on and on and on and so you have the eradication of these key Al Qaeda leaders and at the same time as David points out with the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria you have sort of a shrinking of the recruiting pool so AQAP basically has a weak bench that these key leaders are being removed and nobody else is coming in to into replace them I think the question that this then leads to and I think one of the things that I'd be interested in David talking about a little bit further is there seems to be an assumption here that AQAP is in decline and I absolutely agree with you David I think AQAP is fracture it's fragmented the organization can't agree on who the new leader is there's splinter groups there's bickering back and forth there's a lack of trust frankly within the organization about other members within the organization because it's been so well infiltrated by Saudi spies electronic intercepts signal intelligence all of these things but there does seem to be an assumption that the group is in decline and it's going to continue to decline and as I think you rightly point out in your paper we've seen AQAP from 2004 to 2006 for instance look like the organization had been defeated in Yemen and then something happens and it sort of comes back and so the question that I would have at least on this side of the on the AQAP side is if something does happen if say Saudi you know imagine a scenario in which Saudi Arabian the UAE withdrawal the war in Yemen sort of devolves almost solely into a local civil war where you have all these various sides so AQAP hasn't really been strengthened by the current war where we just entered the eighth year of this war if you start it from sort of this the Saudi beginning of military operations AQAP has been fractured and fragmented but imagine a scenario in which there's a local civil war and all of a sudden just like in say 2009 2010 2011 Yemen once again becomes a destination on the jihadi circuit and AQAP begins to sort of resurrect itself up from the ashes of earlier defeats very much like what we've seen from history so I that would be my question is A can AQAP sort of reverse this decline and B if it does that what what does that mean for us policy so that's one question and then I'll just talk on the US side really briefly ask another question and then sort of end my remarks I think you do an excellent job and again I would really encourage everybody listening to to check out the paper David does such a great job of interrogating what the US has been doing and how the US has been so sort of back footed for the last two decades particularly in Yemen and looking at okay this might be an issue so now our policy is this and our policy is never really articulated we're just reacting in this particular way and that that part of the paper for me was I think really well written really strong how it is that the US has these shifting goals that it can never quite reach and the question that I would have as I think Alex rightly said talking about the national defense strategy there's been this shift away from sort of CT counterterrorism toward great power competition or a realization that as you point out David these asymmetric threats are not an existential challenge to the United States but I wonder what you would say to someone in the defense community who says look we can't just repeat this sort of boom and bust when it comes to counterterrorism that everything is counterterrorism and now everything is great power competition we have to learn and actually institutionalize some of the lessons over the last two decades and so we don't want to forget all these hard you know so much blood so much treasure has been lost over the last two decades these have really been hard earned lessons and we don't want to lose those capabilities that institutional knowledge and that capacity and at the same time we realize yes AQAP is not the threat that it once was but it may it may once again emerge as a challenge and so the the policy that we have right now which is basically an over the horizon you know we have some drone bases when we see a threat we'll take it out but it's really as you point out there there've been very few strikes in 2021 I don't think there've been any maybe one reported or at least rumored strike in 2022 so it's a very very low level and I wonder what you would say to someone in the DoD who says look this war is basically already ended what we have right now is simply an institution and a management of what will be a chronic condition in the Middle East and so yeah we're shifting our focus to great power competition but we're doing that in a responsible way that means that we're not going to throw out the counterterrorism lessons of the last 20 years and so those would be my two two questions to you and again just you know great I think it's a fantastic paper so so please read the paper so kudos to you David on really a well-written and tightly argued paper. Yeah thanks to you both I guess I'll start with a quick reply to those two questions that I think are really core to the argument and I think also we'll touch on Alex's key points as I answer them as well first to the first question I I take very seriously it's a potential and I'll cut into raping peninsula resurgence in the future I think that is a very real risk one of my complaints actually with the sustainable counterterrorism approach is I don't think it actually takes that risk seriously it just projects forward a constant low level of strikes or even no strikes with the AUMF ongoing into the future but no reckoning with what would be the response if there is a substantial increase in the threat or if political conditions change and I think one of the issues with some discussion of endless war some useless of the frame in my view is that it can come to equate endless war with any sort of military planning or preparation or the potential for renewed wars in the future and I think the United States and Americans should be very much considering that it is likely the US will fight more wars in the Middle East against job as terrorist organizations in the future I mean hopefully I think in a hopeful world maybe trends point us away in a sustainable fashion from the past two decades but I certainly wouldn't bet heavily on that but when it comes to US policy my I think it's important when considering those potential to separate them into new wars because otherwise what we end up with is this sort of wars or military action that sufficiently degrades the threat to the point where it begun it falls below the level of threat that initiated the violence or violent response to begin with and then it sort of falls off the radar and I think once you hit that low level there is both strategic concerns about are you actually sustainably achieving objectives if you're just pushing it down to that but you have to keep your finger and by finger I mean ongoing drone strikes and targeting over decades but also I think there's moral concerns about the dominating position that puts the United States and over Yemenis to constantly keep the threat of drone strikes already authorized in case we in the DC choose to view a potential threat as increasing and I think that as moral concerns about whether actual members of al-Qaeda as new renish argues are actually legitimate targets according to western theories of just war I think it also undermines our moral claims about why terrorism is immoral or wrong if the US conducts violence in such a low level threat while also having this asymmetry where we're not targetable so those those are some substantial concerns I have with the constant aspect I think it also can undermine if the US does need to wage a war for a truly transformative aim we need to be able to talk about exactly what that is and what that transformation looks like and the sort of constant military posture of ongoing twilight war prevents analysis of what can the United States actually achieve and I fear with pursuing some of that is I question whether some some of those aims are really achievable by the United States in Yemen or in the US interest and particularly in the context where the bigger threat to Yemenis and others as the current internationalized civil war and I don't think a sort of ramp up to a large-scale transformative approach via warfare would be productive I do think clearly there needs to be work that's not war-oriented as Alex pointed out and is a failure of a significant amount of the anti-Andalus war commentary on Yemenis it leaves that out I think not all of it and I think it's often dismissed how much of that is going on but it is a problem with some representations great we'll be using Slido to submit questions Slido's the box located right at the video if you want to submit a question so question for Alex and for Greg now that we have this ceasefire in Yemen you know how does this how does that affect a Yemen and be this discussion Alex maybe if you stop yeah so the the ceasefire the truce that you mentioned just came into effect over the past weekend for Ramadan it should is supposed to last two months and could be renewable it has in addition to pausing the the fighting itself there are some other elements there are I think two commercial flights that will be allowed into Sana'a airport per week which is significant because that the air space is controlled by the coalition and by the internationally recognized government even though the airport on the ground is controlled by the Houthis in the north and there's also an agreement to let a certain number of fuel ships into Hodaida port which is also important because about 70 percent of Yemen's imports of food fuel other other stuff comes in through that port and and the international inspection mechanism has kind of been held up as a way to block to block imports coming in so I think I usually think of these two wars as kind of they're happening in the same space or two wars many wars depending on to what level you get to as happening in the same space but kind of in parallel because Al Qaeda isn't really a combatant involved in that internationalized civil war necessarily it's between two sides that aren't particularly amenable to a QAP frankly so I think as Greg pointed out the the concern that this conflict could kind of lead a vacuum that could help Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to flourish what was there at the beginning but actually did not necessarily prove to be as much of a problem as some had thought. AQAP did occupy Makala for example but the United States and Emiratis worked together to push back against that so I think of them as not being entirely kind of politically connected if that makes sense but I do really maybe I'm too optimistic I really hope that the truce will end up supporting a more long-term peace process around that conflict and that I think could help in turn kind of help lead to a reassessment of the US counterterrorism war in Yemen. Yeah I mean those are great points Alex I think the truce I'm not particularly optimistic that it'll last all two months there've been some violations already comes at a really interesting time obviously it began it coincided with the first day of Ramadan as as as Alec mentioned it also it also comes at a time when US Gulf relations are at a particular low point Saudi Arabia and the US obviously both with Ukraine but also with the US pulling out Patriot missile batteries and sending them back the UAE and in the US there's a I think a real crisis in the relationship right now you have a situation where then the head of sent com general Mackenzie visited the UAE Muhammad bin Zaid refused to meet with him and then a couple weeks later Muhammad bin Zaid the de facto ruler of the UAE is meeting and greeting publicly Bashar al-Assad and this is a this is a really interesting point in this war where both Saudi and the UAE I mean Saudi Arabia went into this war saying it'll be over in six weeks we've just entered the eighth year of the war that was obviously wildly over optimistic and the Biden administration has made it clear that they really want to end the war the Biden administration has been putting a lot of pressure on both Saudi Arabia and the UAE to end this war but what the Biden administration I think is realized is that when you only have leverage on one side and you're pushing hard on one side what that means is that opens up a lot of space for the Houthis and we've seen that as the Houthis are moving eastward into moderate in an attempt to take the oil and gas fields there and basically take all of North Yemen which would eventually essentially lead to a de facto partition and so this there's I think guarded optimism when it comes to this is the first time we've had a nationwide ceasefire in six years but realistically I think the sides are still very very far from from peace and I think both all sides really because it's a it's a much more complicated conflict than just two sides all sides still are under the impression that they can reach their their goals by continued conflict and you have a situation in Yemen where the economic pie continues to shrink as the number of armed groups and armed actors continues to increase and that's a really really difficult situation then to try to get a comprehensive peace treaty in which everybody feels that their needs and their desires and goals are met I can ask you a quick question before I turn to David which is you know it strikes me that I mean these these Houthi attacks on Abu Dhabi which are killing people and landing on the airport are very provocative and you know it's like what does what what are they trying to other than just sort of you know what's the purpose of these strikes because it seems that you know the Emiratis pull out right and and and you know why could have antagonized them further if indeed as Greg is indicating you know that there is US pressure and perhaps self self-generated pressure to sort of basically to get out of this thing that really didn't really serve their purposes yeah so I think it's important to note that the Emiratis drew down their forces in 2019 they didn't completely leave and that's that's I think just useful framing to think about their continued kind of interest in the direction of the conflict and their support for some of the the militias on the ground even though there aren't as many Emirati forces kind of directly involved in the conflict anymore I think I see the those dynamics as actually more closely related to what's going on what was happening on the ground in the conflict in Yemen so as Greg alluded to there's this ongoing Houthi offensive in Marib and Shabwa that had taken some territory and it seemed like the Houthis had some battlefield momentum it seems like the Emiratis kind of facilitated one of the groups that they support the Giants Brigade redeploying from where they were up to Shabwa a few months ago and that really pushed back against the Houthis advances and so chronologically we saw that happen and then right after we saw the Houthi strikes that targeted the UAE so and so my interpretation of that is because of you know the order in which things happened that it was the Houthis kind of signaling to the UAE not to to to further ramp up their support for the counter Houthi fighting around in northern Yemen and in Shabwa and Marib and indeed the Giants Brigade did then redeploy back to the south as I understand it so David so picking up on something that Greg sort of I think alluded to it you mean so do the thought experiment where you know the United States says it is ending its involvement in the war in Yemen is that and what is the mechanics for that is that to say the AUMF for the authorization for the use of military force doesn't apply to Yemen is it how would that be achieved? Yeah I think one of the problems we've written ourselves into over two decades of war is that it's not entirely clear how you would do that because there's been such a proliferation of authorities but I think at least the primary leverage point is the authorization for use of military force and would involve and I think would need to involve not just discussion of Yemen but a broader repeal of the AUMF and then for any wars the US wishes to continue chooses to view as in its interest a rewriting of authorizations that are geographically and preferably temporarily limited to those particular cases but I think even with that there's a lot of questions about other authorities that have been cited so I think it's a large unwinding job but I would begin with the AUMF as the primary authorizing force and also a useful leverage point for forcing a broader discussion of what wars the US is waging what their objectives are and why those objectives are achievable. But from a political point of view I mean there's been much discussion about winding down the authorization for use of military force and I guess Senator Tim Kaine and others but there aren't the votes for that as I understand it so I mean is there a more limited kind of way of saying well you know that that's still in effect but we're going to country X and country Y let's say country Yemen is no longer you know is sort of is there a way of taking that authorization and sort of narrowing it in a way that you know it makes it more politically sustainable for the outcome that you're hoping to achieve. Yeah I think to really make the change needed you need both presidential and congressional action on the AUMF I do think in the absence of that the president could come out and give a speech about these were our objectives in Yemen we have either achieved them or we have not if we have not achieved them they're not worth pursuing anymore we're not conducting strikes we won't conduct strikes and then write that into the various strategy documents coming out of DOD and elsewhere which I mean I would argue is somewhat what we did in Afghanistan where there's like clearly the war in Afghanistan is not occurring or the US war in Afghanistan it's quite cool to say is not occurring in the same way that it was a year or two years ago on the other end I don't think it's accurate to say the head of the US counterterrorism war in Afghanistan has truly been ended there's reporting we continue to conduct sort of drone reconnaissance there's been statements about tracking down and striking the ISIS or ISK cells so there's still really a lot of this continues there but I think you could see something like that approach to the middle ground in Yemen I think we really do want to make it politically possible to change the actual authorization and do the work of authorizing in a real public debate any decision to return to strikes in Yemen. Greg did sort of raise the day factor question so I mean there are some costs in going out there and giving you speeches saying hey we're we're ending this thing particularly if two years down the road something happens and but as a practical matter and David you know these numbers better than anybody the drone program is more or less done under the Biden administration with like one exception in Somalia that I think you elicited from Africa home relatively recently so I mean what is the status of the drone program writ large under the Biden administration. So the drone strikes have been largely paused in Yemen we've tracked one report in 2021 I believe that hit the sort of wire services and western press I think there's a couple more contested claims from various local media or social media in Somalia we've had a couple of strikes under Biden but nowhere near the high there's occasional things going on in Syria and Iraq the one caution I would have which goes to my worry with the sustainable counter terrorism framework is a lot of people attributes us to a policy decision by Biden but if you track the numbers most of these trends had actually begun before the Biden administration so strikes in Yemen have been falling ever since the 2017 peak Somalia was escalating and then Biden specifically paused it but critically it's increasing again or we're can we went back to conducting strikes so it's not a total pause and there's discussion of a potential significant increase seemingly going around DC at the moment and Afghanistan of course you have the withdrawals that has sort of cut them off at least for now so I think and in Iraq and Syria they're largely down but that's because the caliphate was or the territorial caliphate was destroyed and therefore there's not as much need for airstrikes and fewer targets so my worry is that I think some of this might be policy decision but I think people are overestimating how much is policy decision versus the current conditions on the ground of these wars and then underestimating the potential for these to rise under whoever is the president if the conditions on the ground person it is but I'm going to take a question from the audience and probably direct it at Alex and Greg as international humanitarian law not caught up with adequately regulating the conduct of 21st century hostilities particularly as it relates from civilian protection this question comes from Dinesh so I don't know Alex or Greg wants to knew for instance Alex raised I think the very good point that we have really no idea how many civilians have died in Yemen compared to other some of these other conflicts of course Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal that both new america fellows have done a lot of pioneering work in Iraq and elsewhere to to really try and determine but so what's your reflection on the question of international humanitarian law which it relates to this obviously we're seeing this in Ukraine as well right now yeah I'm not I'm not an expert on international humanitarian law in particular so I don't want to misspeak about that I think but I think the question does point to this really important point about accountability and needing to really have accountability at the end or as these conflicts continue and at the end of these conflicts on the counterterrorism side I think as David said we need a lot more transparency we need to understand what actually happens in the wake of these these strikes and these operations what the civilian effects are from from the perspective of the internationalized civil war the unfortunately the UN Human Rights Council voted late last year to end a mechanism of high-level experts basically who were tracking human rights issues and and potential war crimes in the conflict and after that happened we saw a sharp kind of rise in the number of coalition air strikes in Yemen which is partially due to the dynamics of the conflict itself but is certainly an interesting kind of trend so I think that that is a as an unfortunate kind of decrease in accountability but we we would really need to see more accountability for all sides of the conflict and if there's going to be any kind of sustainable end to the to that war Greg you were the UN official working on Yemen I mean was that part of your remit yeah so we were I was on the the Yemen panel of experts which is separate from the the panel that Alex just mentioned which is the group of eminent experts which is under the Human Rights Council and we were under the Security Council there was an international humanitarian law expert that worked with us and I would agree with what it is that Alex said the the problem often is not documenting these cases so you know there there are numerous cases in Yemen for the civil war of we have documentation that war crimes that torture existed there's the case in Afghanistan though that the US was involved in the drone strike that killed somebody who was not who the US believed that person was the US initially said it was a righteous strike then the military had to walk that back thanks to the reporting of Asma Khan and others as you mentioned Peter in Yemen there are a lot of similar stories not with the same amount of documentation but with sufficient documentation cleric who gives an anti al-qaeda speech and then a qap wants to meet with him and there's a drone strike that kills the a qap members as well as him a deputy governor and moderate who's killed children who are killed all of these things it's not a lack of documentation it's not a lack of of knowledge it can be hard to find some of the transparency but often there's some very talented journalists who are working on the ground who are bringing these things to our attention what what happens though is these stories come out and whether they come out from the UN document to the security council or they come out through New York Times reporter they come out through a local journalist what happens is that they're very infrequently and and to the best of my knowledge we don't see any officials held held to account we see what happened with the US drone strike in Afghanistan that this was a tragic result but the you know the proper the the proper steps were followed as the US military said and so there's just a complete lack of accountability and international humanitarian law and at least in this area the law might have caught up but the law lacks any teeth and so when that's the case then you have a real problem in which you can't have you don't have any real mechanism for bringing people to account when something like this happens we're seeing it in in Ukraine perhaps there's talk of universal jurisdiction we've seen that with some cases in Syria but it's very very small very few and very very limited compared to the knowledge and the documentation that we do have just to quickly add on that one of the things I flag into paper and think is important is that we're not only lacking transparency on civilian dots the various US military combatant commands particularly suncom covering Yemen and african for Somalia have not been telling us just how many people totaled they killed which I think is important both morally we should know how many people we kill in our wars and what the toll is and that has impacts on these societies whether or not they are militants and whether or not those militants actually threaten Americans or should be legitimate targets but secondly even if you're tracking civilians which at least the government is legally required to report in some form although their numbers I think often aren't great as we've seen we just aren't getting that info for combatants or people during teen term combatants and one of the issues is that to really figure out has the civilian been killed you want to know how many people total are killed and then where they civilians are not and only getting sort of trickles out of the government and what I think has become more difficult reporting recently or at least at the height in 2017 of casualties and US drone strikes in Yemen from the ground has made it very important the government actually tell us how many people it's killing and I think they have that data I mean that's what at our pressure AFRICOM gave us for this most recent strike in Somalia but held back into press release they clearly have it it should be public we have three three or four minutes left quick question for Alex relating to this so I mean can you tell us what the Biden administration has done in terms of reducing its support for the Saudi war in Yemen because obviously that's another way to kind of wind down our involvement and also your assessment if if the conduct of the war has had any impact on MBSs standing in Saudi negatively or for neutral or positive um yeah on the on the second question it's hard to know in authoritarian regimes without um you know good good quality polling what what people think I think MBS probably thinks that it has or at least sees finding a facing is a face saving way out of out of the conflict to be important so that kind of implies that that there is public concern um briefly on the sort of the Biden administration and the support for the Saudi leg coalition um so Biden announced when he soon after he came into office in in a big speech um that kind of centered Yemen amongst some other mother issues he said that the the US would end offensive support for the coalition um and so kind of drawing this weird interesting distinction between offensive and defensive weapons and operations which I think in practice it seemed like the administration was was still trying to figure out after that announcement was made because there were you know pauses on on some weapon sales some didn't go through others have seems like they they will go through um the US is still supports the coalition in the sense that um it provides maintenance and parts and other kinds of support for the aircraft involved in in the airstrikes so um I think that the support has been dialed down but hasn't been eliminated completely but um I know Greg also recently wrote a really interesting policy brief on the the Biden administration's approach so if there's time I love you yes yeah Greg go ahead yeah I mean the Biden administration put itself in an interesting position I mean when Biden was campaigning he called Saudi Arabia pariah he said that there's no redeeming social value for the Saudi royal family um he made it very clear as Alex came in that he was not going to be talking to Muhammad bin Salman his counterpart was King Salman and that's who he would talk to and so there was this period for the first year in 2021 where there was just significant US pressure on Saudi Arabia on Yemen I think what Alex said is exactly right there was this loophole that the administration tried to basically construct for itself that says we're not going to sell offensive weapons but we will sell defensive weapons and you know maybe this is a little bit of the Biden administration trying to have it both ways sustain the relationship with Saudi Arabia while while extricating itself from from this war in Yemen which really when you think about it I mean this is the US's original sin when it comes to the war in Yemen is that the Obama administration which of course President Biden was at the time the Vice President the Biden administration signed on to this war signed on to supporting this war and it was going to be a war that they had no control over how it was conducted and that's a real issue for the United States and so the Biden administration has really tried to push back against the Saudis push back against the Emiratis bring them to the table the problem that the Biden administration has has realized is that the Houthis have really no no motivation to sit down and give up at the bargaining table what it is that they believe they've won on the battlefield and so when the US can apply pressure to one side but not to the other side then you you're essentially strengthening the other side and you're not really ending the war at all and from a US perspective having a Houthi controlled state in in Yemen is not an ideal scenario either and so the US got in this war three administrations ago and now it's still trying to find its way out of and there's just no clear no clear exit strategy for the Biden administration in fact what the Biden administration has done we're now seeing some of those repercussions with Saudi Arabia and the UAE sort of refusing to help the US when it comes to pumping more oil or do some of the things that the US would like to see with regard to Russia and Ukraine I mean you have a situation where the UAE was sitting on the UN Security Council when they came time to vote on a resolution to condemn Russia and the UAE didn't side with the US the UAE abstained and essentially sided with Russia that's a shocking that's just a really shocking visual for a very strong US partner that has relied on the US security umbrella and what has that US investment in the UAE and Saudi Arabia really paid out in diplomatic terms for the US at least recently and the answer is frankly not much well we will wrap it up there thank you David for your excellent paper for the excellent presentation thank you Alex and Greg for commenting and thanks to the audience for those last questions and also for those who listened so we'll wrap it up right now