Britain has announced new joint plans with the US and Yemen and a UN proposal, all of which would go toward managing threats originating in Yemen, Somalia, and the Indian Ocean:
The British government said Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.S. President Barack Obama had agreed to fund a counterterrorism police unit in Yemen to tackle the rising terrorist threat from the country.
Brown’s Downing Street Office said the United Kingdom and the United States had also agreed to increase support for Yemen’s coast guard operation. Pirates operating in the waters between Somalia and Yemen have seized four ships in the last week.
Downing Street said Brown and Obama will push the U.N. Security Council to create a larger peacekeeping force for Somalia.
The British government unveiled its plans in the wake of the thwarted Christmas Day bombing of a passenger plane bound for Detroit.
While Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is facing a tough election in May, has been pushing heavily in the past week for more international efforts to combat these threats, a US official made it sound like the administration might have been taken by surprise to some degree by the announcement late tonight (morning there). The US has agreed to a British-led conference on addressing radicalism in Yemen.
This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.
