When a 23-year-old Nigerian attempted to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight and an al-Qaida group in Yemen claimed responsibility for the thwarted attack, it could not come as a surprise to anybody familiar with the conditions in this wild and wide open Arab country.
A decade ago on a study tour of Yemen with a small group of American academics, I saw first hand not only Yemen’s severe economic limitations but also the difficulties in governing this ancient society. In discussions with political leaders, I gained the impression that they take their elections and their fundamentally democratic constitution serious. Yet, controlling 23,580,000 Yemenis, half of them functionally illiterate, with inadequate police and military forces remains all the more formidable, as long as the country has one of the world’s fastest growing populations and an estimated 40 percent of the workforce unemployed.
Steep mountains, large deserts, and generally inadequate roads make it exceedingly difficult for the authorities to exert uncontested control over outlying regions, particularly over the northern tribes and political and religious dissidents. A government official told me that at that time Yemen's eight million males owned an estimated 60 million guns. There obviously was no gun control.
For years, kidnapping visiting Westerners (Americans, Britons, and Germans in particular) has been a preferred method for tribes in the hinterland to pressure the central government into meeting their demands. Several kidnap victims have been killed in shootouts between military units and kidnappers. One kidnapping victim was Jürgen Chrobog, formerly Germany’s ambassador to the U.S. and a man who himself had conducted negotiations with kidnappers.
Already at the Sana'a airport we learned that its metal detectors did not work and noticed that two friendly men, with submachine guns hidden under their coats, had been assigned to join us in our van for our protection. Soon after our arrival, President Ali Abdullah Saleh invited us to his palace for a talk. He tried to explain why he and most of his people are so split-minded about the prevailing U.S. policies toward Arabs. Why, he asked, did our government fail so persistently to use its economic strength and political clout to end the brutal Israeli occupation over the Palestinian Arabs? Why were we so eager to be friends with the oil-rich but undemocratic rulers of Saudi Arabia? And why do we try so hard to dominate the Muslim world against its often expressed demand to be free from Western colonial domination?
Partly because the limited control the central government has over its territory (roughly as large as Utah), terrorists succeeded in their suicidal bomb attack on the American destroyer Cole nine years ago. Yemen has roughly 1,000 miles of virtually unprotected coastline, while its equally long land borders with Saudi Arabia and Oman across desert territory are just as easily penetrable by well-equipped infiltrators. No wonder that, over the past decade, associates and friends of al Qaeda have gradually gained footholds in Yemen.
Most recently, on December 17, U.S. missiles attacked an al Qaeda camp north of the capital Sana'a. Another bombing farther south near a Bedouin village allegedly killed 60 partisans of al-Qaeda. Women, children, and other bystanders, however, also perished. On Christmas Eve, U.S. air strikes hit a town where an internet jihadist and a participant in the attack on the USS Cole were suspected to hide out. None of the wanted, however, but more uninvolved people died. Furious villagers protested that the Yemeni government did nothing to prevent the foreign strikes--and what the Americans call “collateral damage.”
In southern Yemen, thousands have been staging peaceful protests in sympathy with the Palestinian Intefada. In attempts to meet increasing U.S. demands for anti-terrorist measures, the central government has repeatedly bombed suspected terrorists, partly with Saudi support.
In Yemen, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, bombing anti-western jihadists and their sympathizers all too often leads to inciting more young Muslims to sacrifice themselves as suicide bombers against the perceived enemies of Islam. Would they perhaps stop attacking Westerners if they stopped invading their turf?