Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?

That accommodation has begun to fray as al-Qaeda has stepped up its targeting of foreign interests in Yemen, most notably through a foiled attempt to storm the U.S. embassy in September 2008. Early this year, the head of al-Qaeda in Yemen, Naser al-Wahishi, announced the merger between his organization and al-Qaeda's Saudi branch to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a move that caused the U.S. director of national intelligence to note that Yemen was "re-emerging as a jihadist battleground and potential regional base of operations for al-Qaeda." With a base in Yemen, al-Qaeda could launch attacks on the Red Sea gateway to the Suez Canal, as well as stage operations against Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

The U.S. is worried that Yemen isn't taking the threat seriously enough. In July, General David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, visited the country to encourage President Ali Abdullah Saleh to be more aggressive. "The view from Sana'a doesn't match the view from Washington," says Gregory Johnsen, a U.S. expert on Yemen. "The Yemeni government is much more concerned with fighting the Houthis in Saada and with the secessionists in the south. Al-Qaeda ranks a distant third. The government doesn't see it as a Yemeni problem. [It sees it as] a foreign problem." (See pictures of President Obama in Saudi Arabia.)

It doesn't help that several high-level al-Qaeda operatives — including al-Wahishi — have mysteriously escaped from Yemeni prisons in the past, or that former inmates of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo have resurfaced as active operatives in Yemen. But Johnsen thinks the U.S. is too focused on a military solution. "Obviously you have to eliminate key fighters, but the U.S. has done that before," he says. "Unless you address the underlying issues — especially poverty — you'll just be fighting a different incarnation of al-Qaeda every few years."

Fighting poverty in Yemen is no easy task. Education levels are abysmal, and the country is awash in guns. It also struggles with a severe water shortage, in large part because of the national addiction to khat, a shrub whose young leaves contain a compound with effects similar to those of amphetamines. The top estimate is that no less than 90% of men in Yemen and 25% of women chew the leaves, storing a wad in one cheek as it slowly breaks down and enters the bloodstream. Astonishingly, most of the country's arable land is devoted to the plant, which accounts for approximately a third of the country's water usage. And Yemen has very little water to begin with; almost all of it comes from underground aquifers filled thousands of years ago and replenished only very slowly. Experts predict that Sana'a, a city of almost 2 million, could run dry in as few as 10 years. The social upheaval from such an environmental catastrophe and the refugees it could produce might create an even more perfect breeding ground for al-Qaeda. "I tell [the U.N. refugee agency] that they should start buying tents" for drought-displaced families, says Michael Klingler, a hydrologist and the local director of GTZ, the German aid agency.

Neither the Yemeni government nor the U.S. has any plan to help the country go cold turkey off khat. And the public is inclined to complacency about the failings of the government. "You sit up discussing all your problems and think you've solved everything, but in fact you haven't done anything in the past four hours because you've just been chewing khat, and all your problems actually got worse," says Adel al-Shojaa, a professor of political science at Sana'a University and the head of an organization opposed to the use of the narcotic. "All the decisions you've made are bad because you made them while on khat." Unfortunately, there's one group that could solve Yemen's khat problem. The angry puritans of al-Qaeda don't touch the stuff.

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