Picture dated March 1, 2006 shows a Yemeni soldier standing guard in old Sanaa.PATRICK BAZ
Yemen is suddenly atop the Obama administration's anti-terrorist agenda, but unless this President's attention span is markedly different from his predecessors, the poorest Arab state's slide into chaos risks being ignored soon again.
All but forgotten in the long and bloody history of al-Qaeda attacks were the bombings of two hotels in Aden in late December, 1992. A tourist and a hotel worker were killed, but Washington got the message and stopped using the Yemeni port city as a rest-and-relaxation retreat for its troops waging a near-war in Somalia.
The Aden bombings were al-Qaeda's first "victory" - driving the "Crusader" soldiers from an Islamic state on the Arabian Peninsula. Nearly two decades later, both Yemen and Somalia are racked by violence and poverty, both are failed or failing states and both are increasingly regarded as havens for Islamic extremists and incubators for terrorists.
It was in Yemen that a Nigerian jihadist is thought to have been trained and supplied with the sophisticated high explosive and the chemical detonator that could have destroyed a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas Day.
"Obviously, we see global implications from the war in Yemen and the ongoing efforts by al-Qaeda in Yemen to use it as a base for terrorist attacks far beyond the region," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.
In 1993, Ms. Clinton's husband, then a newly elected president, could have drawn the same ominous conclusions. Instead, Washington mostly ignored the extremist threats growing in the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden. Eight years later, in the final months of the Bill Clinton presidency, an al-Qaeda suicide squad launched an audacious attack on a U.S. warship in Aden harbour, nearly sinking the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole.
That attack went without retaliation from both the outgoing president and his successor, George W. Bush. Now the finger of suspicion points again to al-Qaeda in Yemen, not just for the latest failed effort to blow up an aircraft, but also for the links between a Yemeni-based radical cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, and the U.S. army psychiatrist who went on a murderous rampage at Fort Hood in Texas two months ago.
"Al-Qaeda has always found weak and failing states like Yemen to be its best staging bases and sanctuaries," says Bruce Riedel, senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
"Along with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia, Yemen offers an ideal location to operate with little outside interference," Mr. Riedel, who led the group reassessing President Barack Obama's policy options in Afghanistan, wrote for the Brookings Institution website earlier this week.
Yemen is plagued by instability and corruption, which makes the Obama administration's decision to back President Ali Abdullah Saleh's government with money and training a high-stakes effort.
The Obama administration is betting that with sufficient support, Yemen can avoid the downward spiral that is consuming Somalia.
"Yemen is not like Somalia, there's a government that we can still deal with," said Andy Johnson, director of the national security program at Third Way, which considers itself the leading moderate think tank of the progressive movement.
Mr. Johnson, however, acknowledges that dealing with a corrupt and embattled government in a country where anti-American sentiment runs rampant remains a "high-risk" effort. The Saleh government has demonstrated it can be "a reliable, but far from perfect, partner," he added.
It's not just the re-emergence of al-Qaeda in Yemen - now merged with the Saudi branch and billing itself as al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula - that threatens the Saleh government.
The brutal crushing of a sporadic Shia rebellion in the north - which the Yemeni government says is backed by Iran - has forced hundreds of thousands to flee. Smouldering southern bitterness over the union of the previously separate states of North Yemen and South Yemen has rekindled secessionist sentiments. Dwindling oil reserves and gross inequality of wealth means that more than half of Yemen's population of 23 million is malnourished, according to the World Food Program.
Yet the United States and other Western countries need to maintain a low profile. As in Pakistan, the government both needs U.S. support - especially in terms of intelligence-sharing - yet is undermined if it is seen to be taking direction from Washington, Mr. Johnson said.
Clandestine, or at least deniable, operations by missile-firing, pilotless aircraft operated by U.S. military or CIA personnel sometimes thousands of kilometres away are the most controversial military interventions. As far back as 2002, a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone flying over Yemen killed a senior al-Qaeda leader. Last month, another Predator apparently fired missiles that killed more than a dozen militants but missed Imam al-Awlaki, reportedly the intended target.