Reuters BY prodding Yemen's army to take on militants, the United States may entrench a split within its ranks and risks undermining the shaky political accord devised to stave off a descent into all-out civil war. Four months after Washington and its Gulf Arab allies pressured President Ali Abdullah Saleh into ceding power, Yemen's military command remains divided between his friends and foes. The former include a son and nephew who lead units that have received US aid to fight a Yemen-based wing of Al-Qaeda. The US focus on those militants may brake a drive to restructure the military as part of a transition that sidelines Saleh and, its sponsors hope, will keep Yemen from sliding into chaos that empowers Al-Qaeda, some analysts and diplomats say. Reforming the military appears at most a longer-term priority for a US administration whose top negotiator with Yemen is its counter-terrorism chief. “The deal created expectations of restructuring as a first step, a condition, for an overall political solution,” said a Sana'a diplomat of the pact Saleh signed in November, intended to prevent renewed fighting between rival military units and tribal militias that followed a mass anti-Saleh uprising last year. “But there is resistance to changing things quickly or in a single step. They (the Americans) understand this as a process which eventually reaches restructuring, so that their ‘war-on-terrorism' objectives are not compromised.” Those objectives center on Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a force that includes members of cells who fled Saudi Arabia's 2003-2006 campaign against its own militants. AQAP is seen as a potential menace to neighbouring countries and to sea lanes off Yemen used to supply large amounts of crude to Western markets. For the United States, a united Yemeni military, free of the divisive political in-fighting seen during the struggle to oust Saleh, is regarded as crucial to the campaign against Al-Qaeda. But while the transition plan's over-arching goal is a cohesive military under professional command answering to legitimate political leaders, its terms are crucially silent on the immediate fate of individuals, notably Saleh's relatives. Saleh had granted the United States freedom to carry out attacks on suspected Al-Qaeda targets in Yemen, including a 2009 missile strike in 2009 that killed dozens of civilians. As Saleh's crackdown on protests intensified last year, his longtime ally General Ali Mohsen mutinied, taking with him the First Armored Division, and militants took the first of a series of towns in south Yemen. The ease of their advance led Saleh's foes to accuse him of secretly colluding with them, the better to convince Washington of a looming Al-Qaeda threat which only he could help counter. As the United States is painfully aware, such murky dealings are not new in Yemen's complex politics nor unique to Saleh. US counter-terrorism chief John Brennan has vowed US materiel will not be used for “internal political purposes” in a land where the ex-president seems keen to retain influence. __
