SANAA: The United States used the full might of its armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to rout its enemies. But when it came to Yemen, Washington chose diplomacy over conflict.
The country known to the Romans as Arabia Felix — Happy Arabia — is today an impoverished hotbed of Muslim militancy and lawlessness. It is also the ancestral home of Saudi-born Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who many Yemenis admire.
The United States, burdened with costly conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, is trying to win over the support of Yemenis with tactics less bloody and cheaper than war.
It is equipping and training Yemeni security forces in anti-terror tactics and giving the coastguard patrol boats, while building roads and clinics and fighting illiteracy.
This has cost Washington up to some $100 million a year in military and other financial aid to Yemen, in stark contrast to the $87 billion earmarked for Iraq and Afghanistan.
“You can’t have stability without development and you can’t have development without stability,” said the US ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Hull.
Analysts say Washington’s approach to the situation is wise, given the difficulties Yemen’s government is facing because of its cooperation with the United States.
They say authorities in Yemen, where nearly half the 20 million population live on $2 a day, are torn between US aid and the rising anti-American sentiment among tribal and religious chiefs and ordinary Yemenis over perceived pro-Israeli US bias.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, analysts say, the United States kicked in the back door, but in Yemen it went for a diplomatic solution.
“Busting in the door in Yemen would be like knocking down a wasp hive,” said Evan Kohlman, senior terrorism analyst at the Investigative Project, a Washington think tank which runs one of the biggest databases on Muslim militancy.
“It would certainly shake the trees but we might be a bit surprised at what we shook out. It could be very bloody.”
SECURITY A HOT ISSUE: Shortly after the US war in Afghanistan to hunt down Al Qaeda, media speculation was rife that Yemen, Somalia and Sudan would be next in a second phase of the ‘war on terror’.
But trying to improve its reputation as a haven for Muslim militants, Yemen began a massive security crackdown in the first military operation against Al Qaeda outside Afghanistan.
Yemen was the scene of the 2000 bombing of the US warship Cole and of a French supertanker last year.
In the 1980s, thousands of Yemenis went to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, returning to fight again in Yemen’s 1994 civil war. Many of those hardened militants became followers, or at least sympathizers, of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.
A transit route for the incense trade 3,000 years ago, Yemen is now a favourite spot for drugs and arms smugglers due to its strategic position on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, its porous 1,800-km border with Saudi Arabia and its long, poorly controlled coastline.
The United States views this part of the region as one of the most combustible in the world and patrols its seas from a military base in Djibouti on the Red Sea coast opposite Yemen.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations plans to set up an office in Sanaa this year. —Reuters
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