Meet "Uncle Ali": the Yemen version of Musharraf!

The president of Yemen is Ali Abdullah Saleh .... but is more well known as Uncle Ali:

Yemenis call him "Uncle Ali," and he is the only president in Yemen’s chaotic modern history whom they’ve had time to get to know on a first-name basis. Ibrahim al-Hamdi, who led a military coup that toppled the civilian government of the northern Yemen Arab Republic and became president in 1974, was assassinated three years later. His successor, Ahmad al-Ghashmi, lasted barely eight months before he was blown up by an exploding briefcase. Saleh, a former army tank driver with a primary school education who grew up in the dusty tribal village of Bayt al-Ahmar, was elected by a committee to the presidency of the republic later that same year. He stayed in office until 1990, when the north and the formerly Soviet-allied South Yemen rejoined, and has held on to power as president of reunited Yemen ever since.

 What kind of a ruler is he?  He is the Yemeni Pervez Musharraf:

The best reason Saleh has not to push hard against al Qaeda may be a paradoxical one: if he were to eliminate America’s enemies in Yemen, he wouldn’t be able to fight them anymore. If the group remains a threat, Saleh’s cash-strapped government receives huge sums of money and pledges of political support from the international community, so why would Saleh slaughter his cash cow? "So long as there is al Qaeda, no one will let him fail. It’s simple," said Naif al-Gunas, the speaker of the opposition coalition, the Joint Meetings Party. A war against a dissolute enemy like al Qaeda also allows Saleh to use counterterrorism funds and military resources to battle his internal enemies—the Shiite rebel group in the north, and the separatists in the south—simply by accusing them both of being allied with al Qaeda, which he has done repeatedly. (The alliances are mostly unproven, but, as one parliament member put it, "Shared enemies make unlikely bedfellows.")

At the end of the day, Saleh’s ability to sell his own temporary allegiance to the highest bidder is his main political asset, and for the time being the U.S. seems to have secured the dubious prize. While the concern, following the attempted Christmas bombing, was that Yemen would be the next Afghanistan, and Saleh the next Hamid Karzai, in truth the Yemeni president resembles no one so much as former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Like Saleh, Musharraf took vast amounts of American military aid intended for the fight against terrorism and spent it on his own military priorities, including an arms buildup against India and a secret nuclear weapons program. Like Saleh, he balanced occasional crackdowns on al Qaeda with a broader live-and-let-live gentleman’s agreement, allowing the organization to thrive and metastasize in the tribal areas. And like Saleh, he was seen by Washington as the best available partner we had, regardless of his flaws—which, perhaps, he was, at least for awhile. In Yemen, as in Pakistan, the only thing more daunting than the odds of the alliance producing anything of value is the lack of other options.

And we know how well the pro-Musharraf angle worked for the US and Pakistan, don't we?