Either result, U.S. officials believe, could embolden Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has established a foothold in Yemen. A senior Administration official said that between a hundred and two hundred hard-core Al Qaeda fighters are in Yemen, and that hundreds of Yemenis provide them with support. Along with Pakistan’s tribal areas and Somalia, Yemen is now considered one of the most likely places from which Al Qaeda could mount an attack on America. Two recent failed plots appear to have originated with Al Qaeda members in Yemen: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to set off an in-flight bomb, on Christmas Day, 2009, and the loading of explosive printer cartridges onto America-bound cargo planes, in October, 2010. U.S. officials say that they have linked Abdulmutallab to Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric who is now the most prominent spokesperson for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Last spring, President Obama authorized the killing of Awlaki, who is believed to be hiding in Yemen.
America’s relationship with Saleh was once tense. In 2000, after Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in the port city of Aden, American officials complained that Saleh’s government had all but stymied their investigation, and that senior members of his government seemed to be aligned with the terrorist group. Saleh himself, however, is not considered to be an Islamist, or even particularly religious; like Saddam before him, he is most interested in maintaining power. Indeed, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Saleh, dependent on Saudi and Western aid, promised to coöperate with the war on terror.
Since then, he has allowed the U.S. to fire missiles at suspected militants, ordered his forces to detain terrorist suspects at the behest of the U.S., and facilitated intelligence-gathering operations, including surveillance by Predator drones. The U.S. jointly mans a military-command center in Yemen.
In recent years, the U.S. has dramatically increased its aid to Saleh’s regime. The focus has been on training and equipping Yemeni counterterrorism troops with modern weapons, night-vision cameras, and helicopters. This program, which was negligible as recently as 2008, had a budget last year of a hundred and fifty million dollars. The U.S. has also substantially increased its economic and development assistance to Yemen, most of it intended for areas populated by extremists.
As officials in both Washington and Sanaa repeatedly reminded me, Yemen is not Egypt: it has virtually no middle class, a weak civil society, a marginal intelligentsia, and no public institutions that operate independently of Saleh. The Yemeni opposition includes notable Islamists, among them Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, a cleric whom the U.S. has designated a terrorist.
A Western diplomat in Yemen said, “O.K., fine, Saleh goes. Then what do you do? There is no institutional capacity—in the bureaucracy, in the military, or in any other institutions in this society—to really step in and pick up the pieces and manage a transition.” A failed state in Yemen, coupled with an already anarchic situation in Somalia, could provide Islamist militants with hundreds of miles of unguarded coastline, disrupting the shipping lanes that run from the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean.
The senior Administration official put it bluntly: “Our goal is to help prevent a coup or a usurpation of power by Muslim Brotherhood types or by Al Qaeda.”
Even in a state of turmoil, Yemen is a place of austere beauty. In Sanaa, the grand Ottoman gate at the entrance to the old quarter leads to a maze of alleys and stone tower houses studded with akmar, or “moons”—crescent-shaped windows filled with multicolored glass. The alleys give Sanaa an almost medieval feel. Men walk the streets carrying jambiyas, curved two-sided daggers tucked into bright-colored sheaths and worn directly over the stomach. The women, in flowing black chadors, sometimes wear conical straw hats, giving them the profile of witches.
After a few hours of activity in the morning, the tempo in Sanaa ebbs, as Yemenis sit down with their daily bag of khat—a narcotic evergreen shrub whose softest leaves are stuffed into the cheeks. Until the early evening, many of the city’s residents enter a collective haze. Ali Saeed al-Mulaiki, a Yemeni journalist, joked to me that Saleh should be grateful for the phenomenon: “If the Yemeni people didn’t chew khat, they would think about their future and about their lives, and there would be a revolution.” Not only is khat sapping Yemen’s work ethic; it is sucking the country dry. Each daily bag requires about five hundred litres of water to produce, and some scientists predict that Sanaa will begin to run dry in the next decade, around the same time as its oil disappears.
Outside the cities, the landscape unfolds in wadis, ravines, and escarpments, from which treeless stone villages appear to rise without a break. In the rural areas, the government’s writ runs out, and tribal tradition takes over. Skirmishes erupt regularly among the tribes, with some tribal armies wielding machine guns and mortars. Indeed, Yemen has essentially been at war with itself since 1962, when a group of Army officers overthrew the monarchy that presided over what is now the northern part of the country. The southern realm, much of which was under British rule until 1967, became a satellite of the Soviet Union before merging with the north, in 1990.
Saleh has presided over the Yemeni states—first the north, then the unified nation—since 1978, when, as a young lieutenant colonel with virtually no formal education, he seized power after the assassination of President Ahmed al-Ghashmi, who was killed by an exploding briefcase. (The bomb was planted by an envoy from South Yemen.) At the time, Saleh was stationed in Yemen’s commercial capital, Taiz, where he commanded the local garrison. When he heard the news, he flew immediately to Sanaa. Within days, he had persuaded the Yemeni parliament and the Army to approve his ascension.
