Yemen

A leading expert, Gregory Johnsen, is interviewed by Glenn Greenwald. Worth a listen (or read the transcript).

To highlight a few points, al Qaeda in Yemen was decimated by November 2003. It since has resurrected since February 2006, and has been gaining strength since. Johnsen says it will be difficult to dislodge and it does pose a threat to the United States. Glenn Greenwald asks questions to test his belief that if the US just leaves them alone, they won't harm the US; and Johnsen disabuses him of that.

Johnsen says that there are structural problems in Yemen - declining oil reserves, high birth rate, declining water supply, and so on - that make Yemeni youth susceptible to radicalization. Johnsen thinks that al Qaeda will keep being able to resurrect itself there unless the US undertakes a {huge} development effort to address some of these structural problems.

The one point on which Johnsen validates Greenwald is that the current military strikes against al Qaeda are counterproductive. However, while Greenwald thinks (or used to think) they are unconditionally counterproductive, Johnsen thinks that with the proper preparatory work, they are required. (The population must be first alienated from al Qaeda before any strikes are made.)

There is a further irony in this. Ondelette is the pen-name of a commenter on Greenwald's blog, who is a humanitarian - who believes that the US has an obligation to help develop Afghanistan. In contrast, most of the other commenters are either libertarians or isolationist-leftists. They think the US should simply leave Afghanistan, not worry about development, and likewise elsewhere in the world. In their simplistic worldview, absence either makes the heart grow fonder or makes for forgetfulness. If the US had no presence in Afghanistan, they believe, then no terrorist plots targeting the US will be hatched there. They, including Glenn Greenwald, have made life unpleasant for Ondelette, and essentially driven him off the board. Now the expert on Yemen that Greenwald has interviewed has essentially validated Ondelette - Yemen needs long term US military AND development involvement, and without that, there is a growing threat to the US.

Depending on your point of view, Greenwald's questions can be considered to be penetrating, or a desperate try to preserve his world-view. The real test of the man is whether he can change his mind. We shall see. Here are excerpts of some of his questions:

* How would you characterize what is being called al-Qaeda in Yemen in that spectrum, and how significant of a threat it is really to the United States, not within Yemen, but outside of Yemen and in the homeland?

* You say attacks throughout the region - is there evidence of any substantial plots against the United States itself that have originated with al-Qaeda in Yemen?

* I guess my question really was: is there any evidence of any credible or significant plots originating from al-Qaeda in Yemen that have been directed against the United States. Not rhetoric, not "death to America", but actual plots.....Right. I don't mean if we have a presence in Yemen or in Saudi Arabia, I mean against the United States itself.