By Clarence Page

Having a Yemen visa stamped in my passport has brought wary questions from border officials over the past few years. Nowadays I'll be lucky if I don't get strip-searched. What a difference a botched terrorist attack makes.

Yemen has become a top priority for the Obama administration since Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas Day. Yemen is where he told authorities he received his training and the bomb that famously fizzled in his underwear.

Yemen has been popping up on our terrorism radar screen repeatedly since the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole killed 17 Americans in the port at Aden. Ten prisoners involved in that attack later escaped from a Yemen prison. Escapes like that seem to happen a lot in Yemen. That's one reason why Yemenis make up the largest bloc -- 88 out of 200 -- of the remaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

One of 23 suspected al-Qaida members who tunneled out of a high-security prison in Sana'a in early 2006 was Nasser al-Wuhayshi. He now leads al-Qaida's Yemen franchise, which claimed responsibility for the underwear bombing.

I happened to be visiting Sanaa, Yemen's 1,000-plus-year-old capital at the time with two colleagues from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member. The escapees might well have been digging beneath my feet, I calculate, while my colleagues and I happened to be meeting with government officials upstairs. There's little question that they received help from members of Yemen's security forces.

Yemen has all the makings of another Afghanistan except that Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland , is even more poor, corrupt, repressive, unstable and therefore hospitable to al-Qaida. Foreign Policy Magazine's latest "Failed States Index" agrees, noting that "refugees and extremists were perhaps Yemen's most noteworthy imports in 2008."

My most striking memories are of daggers and khat, each of which says a lot about what makes Yemen both fascinating and dangerous.

The jambiya is a curved dagger traditionally with a handle carved from rhino horn and worn in the belt of Yemeni men. It beats only the AK-47 and other automatic weapons as a popular male fashion accessory, especially in the rural areas. Once the jambiya is withdrawn from its sheath it must draw blood, according to tradition, even if the owner must cut his own hand to do it. The colorful weapon symbolizes an irrepressible warrior culture that currently fuels an ethnic rebellion in Yemen's north, a secessionist movement in its south and al-Qaida sympathies everywhere.

Khat is unofficially the country's national recreational drug and a major agricultural commodity. Little business gets done in Yemen after lunchtime unless it is done over khat (also often spelled "qat," among other ways), whose bitter green leaves are chewed like tobacco and parked in the cheeks. As Slate writer Elisabeth Eaves wrote in 2004, "After four weeks in Sana'a, I have met, through qat, government officials, ministers, politicians, business owners, journalists, poets, aid workers, a Hamas official, and an actress. Suffice it to say that without qat I would have neither friends nor sources."

Since past attempts to illegalize khat have resulted in at least one government overthrow, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh looks the other way while the drug sucks up human energy and the country's water supply.

The leafy evergreen plant is so lucrative and low-maintenance as a year-round cash crop that about 40 percent of the nation's dwindling water supply is devoted to its cultivation. That leaves the country importing food amid widespread malnutrition, unemployment and dwindling oil reserves.

Team Obama is looking at ways to deepen military and intelligence cooperation with Yemen's government, which like Kabul barely controls much of the country outside of its big cities. Saleh has stayed in power for 31 years, following a string of assassinated predecessors, by balancing the interests of tribal warlords and religious leaders against those of neighboring countries.

Since President Bush turned up the post-Sept. 11 heat, Saleh has tended to cooperate, as long as this country doesn't make its influence too obvious. Obama has stepped up covert operations against Al-Qaida in Yemen and plans to send $70 million over the next 18 months to equip, train and work with Yemeni security forces to strike al-Qaida bases.

But Yemen's desperate economic, political and social problems call for a broader strategy. We need to work with our allies and the World Bank to boost Yemen's economic development and push for a settlement of its internal disputes. One Afghanistan is enough.

 

© Clarence Page

 

Yemen's Problems Are Ours, Too | Clarence Page