Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?

[amborin]

Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?

Just before dawn on Dec. 24, an American cruise missile soared high over the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula, arced down toward the dark mountains above the Rafadh Valley in Yemen's Shabwa province and found its mark, crashing into a small stone house on a hillside where five young men were sleeping. Half a mile away, a 27-year-old Yemeni tribesman named Ali Muhammad Ahmed was awakened by the sound. Stumbling out of bed, he quickly dressed, slung his AK-47 over his shoulder and climbed down a footpath to the valley that shelters his village, two hours from the nearest paved road. He already sensed what had happened. A week earlier, an American airstrike killed dozens of people in a neighboring province as part of an expanded campaign against Al Qaeda militants. (Although the U.S. military has acknowledged playing a role in the airstrikes, it has never publicly confirmed that it fired the missiles.)

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Meanwhile, the United States grew increasingly concerned about Al Qaeda's growth in Yemen and about Saleh's tendency to see it as a family problem, solvable through dialogue. Veteran jihadists were said to be coming to Yemen from Afghanistan and Somalia. Last summer, Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the overall commander of American military forces in the Middle East, visited Sana, and the number of American military trainers working with Yemen's counterterrorism forces quietly grew. In the fall, a select group of American officials met with Saleh and showed him irrefutable evidence that Al Qaeda was aiming at him and his relatives, who dominate Yemen's military and intelligence services. That seems to have abruptly changed Saleh's attitude, American diplomats told me. The Yemenis began to mount more aggressive ground raids on Al Qaeda targets, in coordination with the airstrikes that began in December.

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Officially, American policy in Yemen is twofold: using airstrikes and raids to help the Yemeni military knock out Al Qaeda cells, while increasing development and humanitarian aid to address the root causes of radicalism. In late June, the White House announced it was more than tripling its humanitarian assistance, to $42.5 million. But the numbers are still small given Yemen's need. And diplomats concede that they have not figured out how to address the central issues of poor governance, corruption and the economy. "There is a huge amount of diplomacy that needs to be done and is not being done," Edmund J. Hull, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 2001 to 2004, said when I met him in Washington. "It makes me uneasy to hear that we're not getting out to those remote areas. One way or another, we have ceded the initiative to Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda is calling the shots."

AL QAEDA HAS a clear Yemen strategy. On Jan. 23, 2009, the group released a high-quality video clip on the Internet showing four men sitting on a floor, with a clean white curtain and a flag behind them. One of them was Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the group's leader, wearing a white turban, and one was Qassim al-Raymi, its military commander, clad in fatigues and a red-and-white kaffiyeh. Sitting alongside them were two new Qaeda commanders, both former detainees from the American prison camp at Guantánamo

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11Yemen-t.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

[Ozymanithrax]

1. No... n/t

[burnsei sensei]

2. There are some questions that are worth

asking, regardless of the answer.

[Robb]

3. Yemen has a fairly active government program to fight Al Qaeda.

Unlike Afghanistan, they are showing results. Time will tell, of course, but I wouldn't put money on "the next Afghanistan" just yet.