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Even were the United States to clarify its objectives and put forward objectives that are achievable, the United States could fail to end the war’s endless character due to a lack of effective planning and capacity for war termination. This section will focus on three factors that have contributed to a low level of war termination plan development: the lack of an authorization structure that would draw a clear line between re-escalation and a new war, the lack of an effective partner capable of maintaining security without direct U.S. involvement, and the poor state of efforts aimed at resolving underlying societal crises.

A major problem with U.S. planning for war termination in Yemen is that the United States has waged its war under an authorization structure that does not establish a strong basis for differentiating a re-escalation of the existing war from a decision to wage a new one.

On September 14, 2001, Congress passed an Authorization for Use of Military Force, authorizing the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”¹ The AUMF provides for an open-ended war that is neither temporally nor geographically bound.² The continued reference to an ever-retreating mirage of al-Qaeda’s unlimited defeat serves to obscure this failure of war termination planning encapsulated in the AUMF and undermines planning for more achievable objectives.

A vision of sustainable counterterrorism that retains the AUMF is likewise a failure of war termination. While seemingly abandoning the binary between decisively defeating al-Qaeda and losing, it chooses to ignore the question of ends and war termination short of decisive victory rather than filling the doctrinal hole identified by Christopher Kolenda and discussed above.³

Even if a president announces that the United States has achieved its objectives in Yemen, and even if that is an accurate representation of the state of U.S. objectives at the time, in the absence of changes to the authorization structure, the larger war footing in Yemen will continue.⁴ As former Deputy National Security Adviser under Obama, Ben Rhodes, stated, “The reality is this is going to be a long process of essentially unwinding a series of wars and authorities, and I would argue excesses, that date all the way back to those early months after 9/11 that have shaped American foreign policy,” adding, “I don't even think a president alone could end the forever war. It would take Congress. It would take a shift in prioritization from the American public.”⁵

Because war termination via a peace treaty between the United States and AQAP is unlikely, war termination will almost certainly revolve around the United States’ own legal interpretation of its authority. The failure to repeal, reform, or even slightly update the 2001 AUMF is a failure of war termination planning, as it demonstrates the United States does not intend to fully hand over responsibility for security to another actor.

This problem with the authorization structure is compounded by constraints on the capabilities of the United States’ partners in Yemen to secure U.S. interests over the long term. Always a challenge, this has become a major barrier to ending the counterterrorism war as a result of Yemen’s fragmentation and civil war. As a result, even in the wake of seemingly accomplished objectives, U.S. partners may fail to manage crises, potentially generating pressure for a return to war.

Prior to the most recent bout of civil war and the effective collapse of the Yemeni government, the United States already faced challenges in relying upon the Yemeni government to provide security. The escalation of the direct U.S. counterterrorism war in Yemen originated in the perceived inability or unwillingness of the Yemeni government to sustainably guarantee U.S. interests in the absence of direct American action.⁶ State Department cables released by Wikileaks provide a warning sign, showing Yemen’s then-president President Ali Abdullah Saleh saying that his approval for U.S. strikes constituted a renunciation of the Yemeni government’s responsibility on the issue, placing success or failure in American hands.⁷ The U.S. war began under conditions that undermined the possibility of a future handoff of responsibility, and the United States struggled to improve the Saleh government’s capacity.⁸

The United States saw Saleh’s successor Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi (who took office in 2012) as a more promising partner, in particular because of his greater support for U.S. drone strikes.⁹ However, challenges continued under Hadi due to constraints imposed by public opposition to strikes and ongoing tensions within Yemen’s government.¹⁰ The 2013 State Department Country Reports on Terrorism called Hadi’s government a “strong counterterrorism partner,” but also wrote:

The Government of Yemen struggled to maintain momentum against a resilient al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in 2013, while facing multiple challenges from former regime elements, southern secessionists, Houthi rebels, and tribal adversaries. The military and security restructuring process, intended to unify the command structure of the armed forces, remained incomplete, with front-line units often poorly trained or poorly equipped to counter the threat posed by AQAP. The Yemeni military did not undertake major counterterrorism operations through most of 2013; instead, they primarily assumed a defensive posture, while relying on small-scale operations, including air strikes and raids, in response to AQAP attacks.¹¹

These challenges have grown since Houthi rebels advanced and the Yemeni government effectively collapsed. The U.S. State Department has repeatedly assessed that the Yemeni government lacks the ability to pursue counterterrorism efforts throughout the country.¹² In addition, representations of the conflict as dividing the country between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition misses the extent of fragmentation within the coalition.¹³ Beyond limits on military and policing activity, “Yemen does not have comprehensive CT legislation,” a problem exacerbated by political instability.¹⁴

The United States has, to some extent, replaced its Yemeni government partner by cooperating with the Saudis and the Emiratis in Yemen.¹⁵ The Gulf states, riven by infighting, leave a lot to be desired as a stabilizing force.¹⁶ Competition between U.S. partners could escalate existing conflicts or create new ones, hampering any U.S. effort to end its war. Moreover, the Emiratis in particular have a wider interpretation of who is a terrorist than the United States does, particularly when it comes to the Muslim Brotherhood, and as a result, relying upon the Emiratis has the potential to harm U.S. counterterrorism efforts, relations with others who don’t share the Emirati view, and human rights.¹⁷

Many of the United States’ potential partners over the course of its war in Yemen, including the Yemeni government and later the Saudis, also have elite-level ties to jihadism within their societies, and struggle with their own issues with persistent jihadist organizing.¹⁸ Both the Saudis and the Emiratis have been accused of funneling support to militias tied to al-Qaeda.¹⁹

This is not to suggest that Saudi Arabia and the UAE do not view AQAP as a threat and haven’t waged a significant campaign to disrupt the group with real successes.²⁰ However, their ability to achieve transformational objectives, and especially unlimited objectives, is constrained. The challenge is further exacerbated by the growing evidence that the Houthis, a group the United States has almost no leverage over, are capable of militarily overcoming the United States’ chosen partners.²¹

War termination planning is also challenged by the difficulty of resolving the wide range of underlying crises that contribute to AQAP’s resilience and increase the risk of sudden shifts in the character of the threat.

The United States might have been able to improve the capacity of its partners in Yemen, particularly before the government’s collapse. However, arguments that such efforts alone could have provided an exit from endlessness are challenged by the failure to manage systemic political crises. According to Luke Hartig, former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, the “Yemeni security sector needed a decade-plus uninterrupted commitment. For political and security reasons, the United States was never able to provide that.”²² Despite some efforts, the United States and its partners failed to provide the Yemeni government the broader aid it needed while also failing to manage tensions and fragmentation within Yemeni politics. At the end of the day, these failures overcame the limited advances in building capacity.²³

Yemenis are now in the midst of one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes. In addition, the broader internationalized militarization of the Middle East, its reflection in Yemen, and the actions of Yemenis themselves, have created a situation that holds great potential for sudden shifts in power and threat.

A vision of war termination in which the United States simply washes its hands of responsibility while presuming that a fragmented and chaotic Yemen will never pose a major threat again is untenable. First, even if such a stance were sustainable, it would be immoral given the humanitarian crisis and America’s contributions to it. The United States cannot credibly claim to hold no responsibility for conditions, even in the absence of U.S. strikes, having actively structured U.S.-Yemeni relations for two decades around the counterterrorism issue and having strongly supported the Saudi-led coalition.

Second, it is a policy primed for failure. The ongoing civil war will limit the ability of the United States to count on the kinds of less-militarized cooperation that undergird many of the defensive measures that make the homeland so secure. Moreover, a policy in which the United States simply washes its hands of Yemen while choosing to view continuing instability and humanitarian crisis as acceptable conditions would risk providing confirming evidence for al-Qaeda’s arguments that the United States seeks to keep Yemen weak and disempowered from afar.²⁴

Currently, the threat to the U.S. homeland from AQAP has declined. However, AQAP’s proven capability to attack the U.S. homeland in the 2009-2012 period warns against assuming that such a condition will be permanent, particularly if broader tensions and grievances are not addressed. Today’s decision-makers, however restraint-oriented, cannot credibly guarantee that the United States would not return to military action were conditions to worsen. Therefore, it is essential that an end to military action be combined with other forms of engagement that create conditions for non-militarized responses in the case of a future crisis and address the underlying conditions that make such crises possible.²⁵

The need for continued U.S. engagement in Yemen, however, does not provide a defense of the endless counterterrorism war. Framing transformation as a counterterrorism objective requiring war is at odds with the kind of transformation needed. The war on terror does not address the core humanitarian and socio-economic issues facing most Yemenis.²⁶ By filtering the need for transformation through the lens of the war on terror, American policymakers risk missing the broader security threats to Yemenis from the civil war and the growing fragmentation and militarization of Yemeni politics, especially when war rationales increasingly rely on preventive war logic.²⁷ As International Crisis Group Yemen Analyst Peter Salisbury writes, “These developments raise the question of whether continued focus on the hollowed-out AQAP brand and a largely defunct transnational threat is a distraction from a real problem being stored up for Yemen’s future: the tens of thousands of religiously motivated fighters on both sides of the civil war.”²⁸

While historically, the securitization that comes with a war framing in Yemen has sometimes coexisted with funding aimed at resolving systemic issues, it has also meant that assistance can be unpredictable and tied to the ups and downs of the immediate security threat rather than societal improvement.²⁹ In addition, an overarching war framing can lead the United States to over identify with its partners, limiting its ability to press for changes that systemic transformation might require.³⁰

Efforts to end the United States’ counterterrorism war in Yemen should be realistic about what potential partners are capable of offering and the need for continued diplomatic efforts to manage partners and prevent infighting and governance failures from giving al-Qaeda new openings for growth and disruption. Simply abandoning Yemen to its current woes is unlikely to sustainably end the endless war, but framing systemic change as justification for governance-based counterinsurgency in a war with no end in sight is likely to exacerbate rather than resolve the underlying systemic crises that make sustainably ending the war so difficult.