Foiled airline bombing puts focus on Yemen

By MARK BOWDEN

One of the consequences of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to kill himself and everyone else aboard Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day has been to alert Americans to the growing fight against al-Qaida in the obscure nation of Yemen.

A proud franchise of the terror organization there — al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP in military speak) — claimed credit for the botched Christmas attack, which it said was carried out in retaliation for recent American-assisted air strikes against its alleged training camps and safe houses. The American military has been interested in Yemen ever since 2000, when the USS Cole was attacked in the Yemeni port of Aden.

That interest has become something more like active engagement in recent years. Our government doesn’t confirm the activities of its clandestine units, but it is likely that American special operators have been conducting missions against terrorist cells in Yemen at least since 2008.

This is not necessarily cause for alarm. While some decry the expansion of America’s war effort to a new front, the war against Islamist extremism has never been limited to one country or even one region. It is a war most effectively fought with legitimate local forces in the places where terror cells take root, which is why groups like al-Qaida tend to seek out territory that is obscure and poorly governed.

Few countries fit the bill so well as Yemen. Like many of the nations where al-Qaida and its ideological cousins have migrated, it has never attracted much attention. For one thing, it has less oil than any of its Middle Eastern neighbors, and what little it has is very nearly depleted. The poorest of the Arab nations, it is a place where nearly half the population (46.6 percent) lives on less than $2 a day, according to the United Nations. It occupies the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula, and is slightly larger than the state of California.

Tribal culture

Yemen is a bastion of tribal culture. I wrote about it 30 years ago as one of the main reasons for the poaching of the threatened black rhino in central Africa, because Yemeni tribesmen paid premium prices for ornate dagger handles fashioned from rhino horns. The country’s poverty, traditional nature, relative emptiness, and lack of strong governance make it classically fertile jihadist soil.

While recent reports may suggest that Yemen is a new front in the ongoing war, the country began attracting renewed attention from the U.S. military in 2007, when intelligence-gathering in Iraq uncovered vibrant links between al-Qaida jihadists there and emerging cells in the arid Arab nation. According to a senior officer at U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus highlighted the growing AQAP threat at a meeting of counterterrorism officials in Qatar in the summer of 2008, while he was still commander of forces in Iraq (although he had already been confirmed as CENTCOM commander).

If recent U.S. military activity in Yemen is any indication, Petraeus’ preoccupation with the country has grown. Obama ordered cruise missile strikes on terrorist targets there on Dec. 16, and American-assisted Yemeni air strikes on Christmas Eve might have killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric who reportedly inspired both Abdulmutallab and the shooting spree at Fort Hood in November (relatives of the cleric say he is still alive and well). Petraeus visited Yemen in late 2008, and again with President Ali Abdullah Saleh last summer, when, for the first time, the Yemeni leader not only accepted but “requested American assistance against al-Qaida.

Saleh has problems galore, so it is little wonder that he’s decided to ask for help. His government, one of the only republics in the Arab world, has come under increasing stress from a combination of social, economic, natural, and political factors, all of them intertwined. He faces declining oil production, a growing youth population, and increasing water shortages. The influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia, whose northern coastline is directly opposite Yemen across the Gulf of Aden, has imported that country’s addiction to khat and a substantial arms trade and smuggling network.

While elected, Saleh’s leadership long predates Yemen’s embrace of democracy, and that embrace is diffident at best. Saleh’s regime is notoriously corrupt and has a grudging hold on power that is decidedly undemocratic. He is fighting a civil war against the Houthis, a radical Shia sect, in the north, and a secessionist movement in the south. Al-Qaida has begun targeting members of Saleh’s inner circle for suicide attacks. The president managed in the spring to postpone elections for two years, which gives him a little breathing room — ordinarily he relies on tribal backing, which makes it harder for him to cooperate with Western nations.

Opportunity for U.S.

As bad as things seem for Saleh, his predicament has afforded the United States an opportunity. Just as the full cooperation of the Filipino government has helped rout the Islamist extremist organization Abu Sayyaf in its southernmost islands with minimal but effective American involvement, the full cooperation of the Yemeni government spells trouble for al-Qaida there.

It enables Yemen authorities to do what they do best, which is to infiltrate and identify the violent radicals in their midst. And it enables the U.S. military to do what it does best, which is to provide surveillance, weaponry, and tactical guidance. With any luck it will, as in the Philippines, be less about the United States going to war in another country than about Yemen dealing with the threat al-Qaida poses to its own government.

In Yemen, as in the Philippines, their fight is also our own.

X Mark Bowden, a former staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote “Black Hawk Down” and, most recently, “The Best Game Ever” about the 1958 game between the Colts and the Giants. He wrote this for The Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.