On A Dagger's Edge
Yemen has become America's surprise ally in fighting terrorism. But can the Muslim nation survive its own struggle with endemic poverty and extremism?
SANA, YEMEN--The roar from the shoulder-fired rocket echoes off the jagged peaks, followed by the steady crackling of automatic weapons. Systematically, the Yemeni snipers, prone against the dusty desert terrain, lay down cover fire for an assault on a cluster of tents believed to be a terrorist camp. Tufts of colored smoke mark the position of a ground assault team as the disciplined marksmen fire deeper into the camp.
This time, the assault is an exercise, but Yemen's elite Counterterrorism Unit has successfully carried out several high-risk operations against suspected terrorists and kidnappers. Portraits of six fallen soldiers, the unit's "martyrs," hang on the walls of their barracks. "They are without a doubt the bravest guys I have ever worked with," says Ed, a U.S. Army trainer on his second tour in Yemen. U.S. News was granted rare access to the CTU, a four-year-old quick-reaction unit in the Interior Ministry that has gained skills ranging from close-quarters combat and descending from helicopters on ropes to mountaineering. "With American training, they have gone from basic levels to become professionals," says Lt. Col. Abdul Rahman al-Mahweeti, the commander of the 140-man force.
This elite unit is at the vanguard of Yemen's efforts to take on terrorism. As the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, this desperately poor and deeply Islamic nation nestled at the tip of the Arabian peninsula has become one of America's most unexpected allies in counterterrorism. A land of gun-toting tribal factions, age-old smuggling routes, and desert villages perched in centuries-old defensive positions on high buttes, Yemen feels like a place frozen in time. The earthen houses in this ancient walled city date back to before the 11th century, and most Yemeni men still wear a jambiya, the traditional curved dagger, strapped to their waists.
Today, Yemen itself is on a dagger's edge, precariously balanced between forces of modernization and the pull of powerful traditionalists. In the West, Yemen may be best known for its recent history of tribal kidnappings of tourists, the 2000 al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole, and the ubiquitous chewing of khat, a mildly narcotic leaf. But the government has helped roll up several al Qaeda cells and, at least until a recent prison break, generally allayed western fears that terrorists would find sanctuary in the large tracts of lawless, tribal lands.
In deep denial. These days, though, Yemen is facing its own crisis, the result of deepening poverty and a government in denial about the depth of reforms needed to survive. In the past year, the United States and the World Bank have slashed their modest aid programs to Yemen, increasingly fed up with a bureaucracy that is one of the most corrupt in the world. "Yemen is teetering on the edge of failed statehood," warns one U.S. official. "It will either become a Somalia or get serious about transforming." For a nation awash in guns and crisscrossed by well-worn smuggling routes, the threat is grave.
So far, the worst has not materialized, perhaps because Yemen has been motivated by its own suffering. The country was probably al Qaeda's first victim, when militants bombed two hotels in Aden being used by U.S. soldiers on their way to Somalia in 1992. The bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors, sent Yemen's fragile economy even deeper into free fall. "The terrorists dealt blows to us before anyone else," says Rashid Muhammad al-Alami, the minister of interior. "When we fight terrorism, we fight it in pure self-defense." President Ali Abdullah Saleh echoed a similar sentiment in an interview (box, Page 42). "There is no backing away from the fight against terrorism," he said. "There is no halt."
Such commitment makes last month's brazen prison break particularly embarrassing. Twenty-three prisoners, including 13 convicted al Qaeda fighters, tunneled out of their cells; U.S. officials say they clearly had inside help. One of them--convicted Cole bomber Jamal Badawi--had escaped once before and was recaptured 11 months later. "The longer they remain at large, the more the threat level rises," says a senior U.S. official. The incident raised new doubts about Yemen's reliability. "At best," the official says, "it was a combination of negligence, stupidity, and greed."
Despite such lapses, cooperation on counterterrorism has largely improved. A major turning point came when Yemeni security forces turned up plotters who wanted to target Saleh's personal airplane. The pre-9/11 al Qaeda leadership in Yemen has been purged; in the most spectacular incident, the group's former leader in Yemen, Qaed al-Harethi, was killed deep in the desert by a missile fired from an unmanned U.S. Predator drone in 2002, apparently with Yemen's acquiescence.
Yemen has also created a Coast Guard that, with U.S. support, is beginning to patrol the nation's ports and its long, jagged coastline. "Now, as ships start to feel safer, they are starting to return," says Col. Lotf al-Baraty, the Coast Guard director in Aden. Still in its infancy, the Coast Guard will soon try to police some of the world's wildest smuggling waterways, across the Gulf of Aden from lawless Somalia. "As they stop more smugglers and illegal immigrants," says Cmdr. Scott Cull, the U.S. naval attach? in Yemen, "it makes it more difficult for the terrorists to get through."
All these efforts have paid off. U.S. News has learned that Yemen has helped foil three al Qaeda-related plots since late 2004, including one planning attacks in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Another cell of nearly a dozen included several fighters who had returned from Iraq, apparently under the direction of Abu Musab Zarqawi. Officials believe that Zarqawi was trying to build a long-term presence in Yemen but that his operatives became restless and began plotting more immediate attacks on targets including the Sheraton Hotel in Aden and the U.S. Embassy in Sana. The group was captured after U.S. intelligence passed a tip to Yemeni security forces. "This was a serious group," says a U.S. diplomat. "You just wonder how many others are out there."
For Yemen, the conflict in Iraq dredges up an alarming parallel. Yemenis vividly remember the aftermath of the long battle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and how the battle-hardened Yemeni volunteers who returned carried out some of al Qaeda's earlier attacks. Now, several hundred Yemenis are estimated to have traveled to Iraq to fight in the past three years. "We are waiting for when the war is finished in Iraq. We have to be ready," says Col. Yahya Saleh, the chief of staff for the Central Security Force (which includes the Counterterrorism Unit) and a nephew of the president. "If they come back, they will come back with more hate, and they will have been trained there, in explosives and other skills." The government has started to crack down, stopping young men at the airport on their way to countries like Syria.
"An ocean of failures." But this effort is hobbled by Yemen's history of cozy relationships with some of these militants and its paltry infrastructure. The government doesn't have a master database listing Yemeni citizens; even passport records are spotty. The government has pledged to curtail the thriving black market for small arms and explosives, but results have been limited. U.S. officials confronted President Saleh with evidence that guns sold to Yemen's Ministry of Defense ended up in the arms of terrorists who stormed the U.S. Consulate in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, in late 2004 and killed five people. "The worrisome thing is that there is a network, and Yemen could possibly be a one-stop shop because of the availability of weapons and people who could be recruited," says one U.S. diplomat.
Indeed, Yemen's alarming poverty--and the rising despair among its people--threaten to overshadow the tactical partnership. "By focusing on security, the United States is swimming in a sea of results while missing an ocean of failures," says Nabil Sabaie, a leading independent Yemeni journalist. Nearly half of Yemenis subsist on less than $2 a day, and unemployment continues to grow. Despite its oil resources, Yemen ranks 151 out of 177 nations on the United Nations human development index, which measures economic, educational, and health indicators. And with the population growing so fast that the size of this nation of 20 million will double in 17 years, Yemenis fear that any improvements are a long way off. "I'm afraid our people are not going to have the patience," says Mohammed Abdul Malek al-Mutawakil, a political science professor and opposition politician.
Take the example of Shakir Najji, 23, a senior in computer programming at the University of Sana. As one of the few Yemenis fluent in computers, he should be in high demand after graduation. Instead, he is convinced that he, like many of his friends, will not be able to find a job. "I want to leave the country," he says. "The situation is not good for settling down, working, and getting married."
U.S. officials admit that for several years following September 11, their diplomacy with Yemen focused almost exclusively on terrorism. Now, amid increasing alarm about the nation's future, U.S. diplomats are adjusting their efforts in Yemen to focus more on issues like democracy, freedom of speech, economic reform, and, especially, anticorruption. "This is a country that is really in the balance," says Thomas Krajeski, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen. "There is a risk here for failure, and there is a chance of success. It is our job to give them all the help we can, but they have to make some hard decisions now." Privately, U.S. diplomats are blunter: "We're not going to give them a pass anymore."
Yemen also sees it as a "race against time," says Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi. Oil production, which accounts for more than two thirds of the government's revenues, is dropping precipitously. High oil prices have offset the financial impact of declining production so far, but World Bank experts predict that in about a decade, oil revenues will be negligible. Precious water resources are being similarly depleted. At the same time, the reform effort has stalled. "Democracy, elections, human rights, corruption--this all leads back to the security interests," says one U.S. diplomat. "Without those, you cannot have stability in the country, and youths will continue to be siphoned off into extremism, and, in the worst case, a collapse of government would affect our national security."
The anger on the streets is palpable. In Yemen's cities, small villages, and farming communities, the talk is all about inflation. When Yemen tried to lower gas subsidies last year (in response to World Bank demands), violent riots broke out around the country; several dozen people were killed.
On street corners in Sana, unemployed laborers--some even with university degrees--gather every morning desperately looking for a job. They are lucky if they can find work one day a week. Hamood, a 50-year-old construction worker, has to support his wife and 10 children on an average of $10 a week. "Every year," he says, "it becomes worse." Hamood cannot afford school fees, so his wife and kids all work as sharecroppers in his home village. "Without fixing these things, we cannot guarantee that we will survive in the future," says Mohamed al-Tayeb, a member of the Shura Council, Yemen's equivalent of a senate.
"Divide and conquer." Increasingly, however, Yemenis fear that the strongman who has ruled for 28 years will be unable or unwilling to make the tough reforms needed. "The Americans are happy because they found someone who will fight terrorism," says Mutawakil. "But my fear is that we're establishing the foundation for terrorism in the country, just as they did in Iraq." He is particularly concerned about what he calls Saleh's "divide and conquer" style. Faced with trying to control Yemen's powerful and unruly tribes, Saleh has worked to maintain a delicate balance between competing forces, rewarding friends and pitting rivals against one another.
Saleh's defenders bristle at this analysis. For one thing, they point out that most of Yemen was virtually cut off from the world for centuries, ruled by hermetic religious regimes. "It was really medieval," says Abdulkarim al-Arhabi, the minister of planning, "and not much different from the days of the prophet perhaps." Indeed, up until the 1962 revolution, the gates of Sana's medieval old city were locked at 6 p.m. every night, barring any entry or exit until the next morning. Yemen has been relatively stable for only a decade. After many years as a Cold War battleground, it was unified in 1990 but then suffered through a civil war in 1994.
Yemen has always been one of the most traditional Islamic countries, in part because of its isolation. But in recent years, more radical forms of Islam have begun to seep in. One factor was the return of the hardened mujahideen from Afghanistan, some of them with ties to al Qaeda. Another was the arrival of a veritable army of Yemeni laborers expelled from Saudi Arabia in the wake of the Gulf War (after Yemen backed Saddam Hussein). Many of these returning expatriates brought the Saudis' ultraconservative brand of Islam back with them.
It is also hard to control an unruly country with complicated tribal relationships and an estimated 60 million guns in private hands (or three for every man, woman, and child). That doesn't even include the weapons trade, which U.S. officials believe includes planeloads and shiploads of weapons moving through the nation. (It is difficult to overstate the gun culture in Yemen. Take Nasser, a taxi driver in Sana, who proudly lists the weapons he keeps in his house: AK-47s, pistols, grenades, even tear gas--to control his wife and kids if they protest, he jokes. He recalls the time that he loaned an empty family house to a friend of his. When the owner, his uncle, returned, he asked, "Did you take the land mine out of the living room?")
Shoo-in. Amid all this, Yemen has somehow managed to remain one of the most democratic nations in the (admittedly autocratic) Middle East--and one of the very few with a relatively free press. The government tolerates a raft of opposition parties and independent newspapers. Yemenis, for the most part, feel free to criticize the government, and even Saleh, in public. A presidential election is scheduled for September, and while Saleh is assumed to be a shoo-in, he will face several other candidates.
Still, it's not clear how much the government is capable of changing. The democratic reforms all stop short of threatening Saleh's rule; in the last election, he won 96 percent of the vote. The state maintains its monopoly on radio and television stations--perhaps the most influential media in this predominantly illiterate society. The government has also been backsliding on press freedom in recent months, as more journalists are being harassed and several newspapers have been shuttered in recent weeks.
Yemen is not getting all that much help through foreign aid these days, either. Donors are growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress and the overriding problem of corruption, leading to large cuts in aid this past year. "We are giving them just enough to maintain the status quo," says one U.S. official. "They need aid that's transformational--billions of dollars that they're not going to get. We won't increase it because the leadership is just not there."
Robin Madrid has run the Yemen program for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes democratization, for five years and used to be an optimist about the prospects for reform. But she is finally fed up with the "gridlock" on election reform, "skyrocketing" corruption, and increasing harassment of journalists. The final straw came when her staff recorded "appalling cheating" by government officials during a by-election for a parliament seat. "This past year, the scales dropped from our eyes," she says. "We're tired of promises. We're tired of good intentions. It comes to a point when it's not enough to say that you held the country together as it fell down the tubes."
Accountability. In the past two months, however, Madrid says she has noticed a subtle shift in the government's attitude, perhaps in response to some of the aid cuts. Several reform measures have suddenly moved forward, including a bill to strip the president of his role as head of the judiciary and one that would create an anticorruption agency. "In the past, we have been lenient when it comes to accountability," says Qirbi, the foreign minister. "Now we are making the people who are responsible accountable for any poor performance. We have overcome a major obstacle, which is admitting that there are deficits."
Still, even the best of intentions tend to get sabotaged by the endemic corruption. One glaring example is the education sector, which has been a particularly weak spot for Yemen, where about half of adults are thought to be illiterate. "We have maybe the worst educational quality in the world," says Arhabi, the minister of planning. "I have myself seen students in sixth grade, who if you ask them to pronounce the alphabet, they aren't able to finish it. Forget about reading and writing."
Over the past few years, Yemen has embarked on an ambitious effort to reform the nation's outdated public-school curriculum. The aim was to move away from the old system of rote memorization to a more interactive and participative system. And while the curriculum itself gets high marks from many experts, the reform has been handicapped. "The curriculum provides more questions than answers, so you have to go to the library, the Internet, or the teachers," says Arhabi. "But there usually is no library, no Internet, and the teachers don't know the answers."
And then there is the corruption. Rana Ghanem, who trains science teachers for the Education Ministry, describes how corruption is rooted in the system at all levels. After the ministry revamped the science curriculum, she traveled to various school districts to present a two-week training course. But she says that every time she arrived for a new session, none of the teachers had been notified, and she would lose the first day. Then, only a quarter of the 20 or so teachers expected would show up for training. The reason was simple, she says: The districts were allotted a transportation allowance for each teacher who was trained. If only a few turned up, the director could keep the balance. "If you are a person who tries to be straight and do the job the way it is supposed to be done, you will be fought," she says. Indeed, people scoffed when she tried to give the unused transportation allowance back to the ministry, pointing out that someone at the ministry would take it for private use instead. Abdusalam al-Joufi, the minister of education, largely dismisses her concerns, noting that teachers are not well paid: "I can understand why [corruption] happens. I am sure it is limited."
Even worse, some corruption is officially sanctioned. As many as 60,000 people are receiving at least two government salaries, often doled out officially to buy their loyalty. "Many of the double dippers are tribal sheiks or military people," says Yahya al-Mutawakel, the vice minister of planning. "So the government thinks the best way to change this is voluntarily, not compulsorily." Officials have asked these "double dippers" to choose one salary. But few people expect this to have much effect. "If you find corruption everywhere," Mutawakel says, "you're not sure where to start."
There have been a few unambiguous bright spots in the reform effort. Perhaps the brightest is the Social Fund for Development, an independent government agency that helps build schools, clinics, roads, and water wells funded mostly by foreign nations. With only 150 full-time employees, the fund managed some 1,000 projects last year with an $80 million budget. The fund--and Arhabi, its director--win nearly universal praise from foreign donors for their integrity and exhaustive accounting system. The secret: highly paid employees and the ability to fire staff at will.
This kind of progress, however, is limited. The deprivation remains particularly acute in the tribal regions of Yemen. Alawa-al Basha is a tribal sheik near the fiercely independent city of Marib, near the bulk of Yemen's oil reserves. His home village of 2,500 people is lucky to have a functioning school. But there is no road, and even though the government built a health clinic last year, it is not functioning, or even furnished. "The problem is not in the construction but in the operation," says Basha. The nearest open clinic is a few miles away, but it is staffed by only one nurse and stocks limited medicine. To reach a full health center, villagers must cross through the villages of several tribes, a dangerous proposition given the violent history of vendetta killings between rival clans. Basha recalls one recent dispute that began when one tribesman was killed. In the resulting battles between two tribes, some 36 people were killed or injured in just one hour. "How can you talk about development in this atmosphere?" he asks. "It is a reflection of the complete absence of authority and law."
Underlying any discussion of reform, however, is one uncomfortable factor--nobody can picture Yemen without Saleh in charge. Even his most implacable critics fret that there is no viable alternative today. Sumayya Ali Bajji is a U.S.-educated former journalist who has returned from years of living abroad to run against Saleh in the upcoming September election. As the nation's first female candidate, she has little chance of winning, but she is already speaking loudly about what she says is the eroding position of women in Yemen. "Today, my daughter in Yemen cannot do what I did as a child--ride a bicycle, swim, ride a horse," she says. Still, when asked what her biggest fear is, she does not hesitate: "Should Saleh die in office, God forbid, what would happen? Because there is no infrastructure of government."
"Fanaticism." At the same time, there is a fear that U.S. leverage in Yemen might be diminishing. High oil prices have lessened the influence of foreign aid money on the government's decision making. "Where are the incentives for the president and the government to modernize and push for more democracy?" asks Tayeb, who is critical of the recent cuts in aid. There has also been some domestic backlash to the government's cooperation with Washington on counterterrorism, given the anger over Yemeni detainees in Guantanamo Bay and U.S. policy in Iraq and Israel. "It all creates public opinion that is not in favor of, or is even hostile to, any cooperation between the American and Yemeni governments," says Alami, the interior minister.
The security situation has also made it more difficult for U.S. diplomats to reach out to Yemenis. Face-to-face meetings are difficult, with U.S. officials ensconced inside their fortresslike embassy compound. "They don't trust us when we say we're here to help them," says one U.S diplomat. "There are liberal, modern, western-oriented people, and they still don't trust us."
All of this is part of a deeper battle. "The real conflict in the country is not between the government and the opposition but is between traditional powers still locked in the 19th century and the forces of modernization that try to grope their way into the modern age," says Mohammed al-Sabri, a leading figure in the opposition. "The traditional forces are besieged, but when your room for maneuver has shrunk, you become very tense and aggressive." He points to a simmering rebellion, fueled by radical Islamists, in the northern town of Sadah, where hundreds of soldiers and rebels were killed last year. "I expect more dangerous risks in Yemen--extremism and fanaticism," he says. "But it's not related to religion. It comes out of the failure to satisfy life's needs."
Sabri places his hopes in reform. And Yemen's government is starting to talk a good game. "The state and the government are moving ahead with reforms--political reforms, judicial reforms, economic reforms, anticorruption reforms, counterterrorism," says President Saleh. "The country is moving toward modernization." For many, the upcoming local and presidential elections will be a test. And the stakes are high. "What we are afraid of is that the Yemeni people will lose hope in elections as a means of change," Sabri says, "because this is what the traditional forces want."
For photographs and more: www.usnews.com/yemen
This story appears in the March 13, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.