Drone Warfare in Yemen: Fostering Emirates Through Counterterrorism?

Over much of the past year in the restive country of Yemen, the Abyan and Shabwa provincial regions were declared Islamic emirates, harboring fighters of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and testing the crude governing powers of emergent groups like Ansar al-Sharia, before being retaken in the summer of 2012 by the Yemeni military. In light of the application of the Obama administration's counterterrorism (CT) and military strategy in Yemen, the question arises whether the use of drones may not have contributed to instability, rather than serving as a simple 'solution' to the rise of extremist Islamism. We will argue that, in addition to the five distinct forms of blowback we identified in the use of drones in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Yemen allows us to inquire into longer-term blowback. Adapted from the source document.