The investigations of U.S. Army major Nidal Malik Hasan’s November 5 murder of 13 soldiers at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, and of the December 25 failed attempt by a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to detonate a bomb inside a 300-passenger plane en route to Detroit, have revealed links between these terrorists and a spawning Al Qaeda network in Yemen.
Major Hasan reportedly exchanged e-mails and sought spiritual guidance from a radical U.S.-born Islamic cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki, who grew up in Yemen. Mr. Abdulmutallab, for his part, said he received training and explosive devices from the Al Qaeda operatives during his four-month stay in Yemen last year.
Yemen’s involvement in these terrorist acts has also shed light on its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom Washington urged to launch a vast antiterrorist operation, now underway in the volatile Arab nation.
Mr. Saleh is a seasoned war horse. He served as North Yemen’s president for 12 years, before 
merging the north and south in 1990, following decades of colonial and ideological division. He has been president of this Sunni-dominated nation ever since, although the real extent of his authority is questionable.
The government repeatedly clashed with separatists in the south through the 1990s, and the insurrection flared again in 2008. Moreover, violence has escalated in the country’s northwest, along the border with Saudi Arabia, and repeated attempts to quash these Shiite insurgents (led by Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi) have been largely unsuccessful. In the northwest, Al-Houthi insurgents crossed into Saudi Arabia last month, murdering two Saudi patrol guards and triggering a joint Saudi-Yemeni airstrike against guerrillas. Today, the government’s control is effectively limited to the areas surrounding the capital, Sana’a.
Although newspapers and 24-hour news channels seem keen to highlight Yemen as the new front in the “war on terror,” the nation actually surfaced as a breeding ground for international terrorists in the early 1990s, when impoverished refugees escaping violence in neighboring Somalia were recruited by Al Qaeda in Yemen. In October 2000, Al Qaeda terrorists blasted a hole in the American Navy destroyer USS Cole harbored in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 U.S. sailors. And, in September 2008, Al Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, killing ten non-American citizens.
For the most part, the Bush administration’s engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq prevented it from allocating resources to confront the burgeoning terrorist network in Yemen. One critical mark of escalation in the Bush administration’s counterterrorism tactics was a CIA-sponsored drone strike in Yemen at the end of 2002 that killed six Al Qaeda operatives, including Qaed Sinan Harithi, the suspected organizer of the USS Cole incident. Today, the reoccurrence of domestic terrorism puts pressure on Obama to eradicate the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula before it gathers strength and threatens the stability of that nation.
Indeed, the “systemic problems” that President Obama referenced in his speech about intelligence failures leading up to Mr. Abdulmutallab’s attempted bombing could just as well describe the state of affairs within Yemen. The country is plagued by numerous socioeconomic and political ills, including an excessive reliance on rapidly dwindling oil resources, severe water shortage, pervasive corruption, inter-regional tensions, and illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, and population growth rates that are among the highest in the Middle East. While protracted sectarian and territorial disputes have made the task of state-building increasingly difficult for Mr. Saleh, most of the problems the country faces today are the product of his own heavy-handed and short-sighted policies.
Mr. Saleh has neglected to address southern Yemenis’ concerns about lagging economic development and political marginalization. These grievances stoked secessionist sentiments in the south, which Mr. Saleh opted to address by crushing the uprisings and expelling political opponents from the country, rather than taking steps to improve the southerners’ livelihoods and implement fairer federal civil service recruitment policies. Al Qaeda has taken advantage of southern discontent with Mr. Saleh’s policies to plant networks in this area that cannot be easily penetrated by government security forces.
After 9/11, Mr. Saleh joined Washington’s fight against global jihad but failed miserably in ridding Yemen of jihadists due to a weak army, poor law enforcement, and little, if any, control over remote areas populated by belligerent tribes.
But the Obama administration has pledged—in addition to arming and training Yemeni soldiers to fight Al Qaeda—to increase development assistance to Mr. Saleh’s government in hopes of providing a holistic solution to the problems that render the nation susceptible to radical Islamism. Additionally, U.S. economic aid also has the corollary benefit of making Washington’s military involvement within Yemen’s borders more palatable to ordinary citizens, who tend to sympathize with Al Qaeda’s anti-American rhetoric.
The aid package, it is said, will be directed toward implementing a 20-month, 10-step reform plan, devised by Jalal Yaqoub, Yemen’s deputy finance minister. Mr. Yaqoub believes that his proposal will help boost Yemen’s economy and blunt the separatist movement by creating new jobs in Aden, South Yemen’s former capital and a major trading hub. He also hopes to improve Mr. Saleh’s domestic image through a merit-based recruitment of 100 new officials for key posts in the government.
President Obama has praised the proposed reforms. No doubt, they are Yemen’s bravest attempt to date at self-modernization. However, local analysts are skeptical about Mr. Saleh’s ability to uproot Al Qaeda from its strongholds around Aden and facilitate local economic growth in less than two years. Although, it is unlikely that Mr. Yaqoub’s ambitious goals will be accomplished within two years, Mr. Saleh, who turns 68 this year and has been grooming his son to succeed him, is motivated to leave a more stable Yemen as his legacy.
In the end, both Mr. Saleh and President Obama should understand that the success of the U.S.-supported military campaign against Al Qaeda will be checkered at best, unless efforts are also made to improve the security situation in the adjacent East African nations, whose porous borders and chaotic regimes offer easy escape routes and safe havens for terrorists. With Washington’s attention and resources now strongly committed, Mr. Saleh may still be able to better the present and future for his 20 million citizens.
Marianna Gurtovnik’s interests lie in foreign policy and international security. She has written on these topics for World Politics Review, Asia Chronicle, Transitions Online, and New Eurasia, among others. Marianna has also written research studies on the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. government’s response to the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and the Suez Canal Crisis (1956) for the congressionally-funded Project on National Security Reform.
A version of this article was published simultaneously at our partner site, The Mantle.
For further information on Yemen please see “The Big Question” that answers how big is the threat of Yemen’s southern secessionist movement.