An image taken with a mobile phone shows black smoke billowing after suspected Al-Qaeda militants sabotaged an oil pipeline in the town of Al-Shubaykah 12 kilometres east of the provincial capital, Ataq, in the southern Yemen province of Shabwa on November 02, 2010, a security official said, days after US-bound parcel bombs were traced to Yemen.AFP/Getty Images/AFP / Getty Images
The government of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has gone on the offensive against Al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula - dispatching security forces to root out the Saudi bomb maker behind a year-long wave of bombing attempts, and pressing charges against a U.S.-born imam who is on the CIA's wanted-dead-or-alive list.
But, no sooner had the announcement been made about deploying troops to the troublesome central and southern Yemeni provinces of Maarib and Shabwa, when word came that a group, believed to have been part of the AQAP network, bombed a major oil pipeline in Shabwa, just 12 kilometres outside the provincial capital. The twin blasts sent flames and black smoke into the sky and dealt yet another blow to the country's teetering economy.
The unusual step of charging and trying in absentia the American-Yemeni citizen Anwar al-Awlaki caught most observers by surprise and is seen more as a sop to U.S. critics than a serious counterterrorism measure.
The bearded, bespectacled Mr. al-Awlaki, 39, was born in New Mexico and moved to Yemen several years ago. He is alleged to have encouraged a U.S. Army psychiatrist to kill 13 people in a shooting rampage last year at Fort Hood, Tex., and to have inspired several other people to take up militancy, including Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to blow up an airliner over Detroit last Christmas.
But until now, Mr. al-Awlaki was not regarded as a major figure in AQAP.
His prosecution is "obviously something the Yemeni government is doing because it realizes that he has become a pet project of the Pentagon, someone they are obsessed with," said Gregory Johnsen, a respected Yemen scholar at Princeton University. The government "is hoping that steps like this can pre-empt possible U.S. actions in Yemen," Mr. Johnsen wrote Tuesday on his blog.
But Mr. al-Awlaki is a red herring, he said.
"The more Western media and the Obama administration focus on al-Awlaki, the more AQAP pushes him to the front, essentially taking advantage of all the free advertising."
The real threat, Mr. Johnsen said, is from Ibrahim Asiri, the Saudi man apparently behind Friday's airborne package bombs, and who last year dispatched his brother to carry out a suicide bombing of the Prince who heads Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism efforts. His brother died; the Prince did not.
The latest steps taken by Yemen are unlikely to be effective, said Mr. Johnsen, who added that he is "incredibly worried about the increasing militarization of U.S. policy toward Yemen" a development that will only make the situation worse.
He noted that ominous warnings have begun to appear in some recent AQAP announcements threatening retaliation for a December attack by the United States on a village in south Yemen, in which a large number of women and children were mistakenly killed.
U.S. forces maintain a fleet of aerial unmanned drones that patrol Yemeni skies on an almost daily basis. Many U.S. officials and politicians now argue that a greater U.S. role must be played.
"The U.S. can get to where it wants to get in Yemen," Mr. Johnsen said Tuesday, "but it can't get there in the speed that modern politics demands. Instead it will need to take a patient approach that utilizes more than just military options."
"There needs to be a parallel economic track," said Jalal Yacoub, Yemen's deputy finance minister who worries about the effects of things such as Tuesday's pipeline bombing. Oil and, increasingly, natural gas, are the country's only hope to stave off economic failure, and that is the key to ending the terrorism, Mr. Yacoub believes.
"Efforts at security must be accompanied by economic steps to support development," he said. "It will take forever to eliminate extremism by security measures alone."
It's too bad Washington didn't realize this years ago, Mr. Johnsen said.
"One of the most depressing things is that if the U.S. had actually taken a proper approach to Yemen in the days after Sept. 11, it wouldn't be in the situation it is in today," he argued.
"Unfortunately, the U.S. forgot about Yemen and now it is reaping the consequences of years of neglect and inattention."