Osama bin Laden is dead and Americans are rightfully taking a victory lap.But the greatest threat to the nation's safety and security over the past fiveyears has not been from bin Laden's al-Qaeda, dug into Afghanistan andPakistan. It's been from a Yemen-based offshoot called al-Qaeda in theArabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Remember Afghanistan on September 10, 2001? Today's Yemen is worse.AQAP is holed up in the roughest part of a failing state with a collapsingcentral government, a non-existent economy and an anti-Americanpopulation, a huge number of whom are wasted every day on qat, a narcoticleaf that is the crop of choice in the country. Clean water is running out,the birthrate is among the highest in the world and more than half thepopulation is illiterate. It's enough to make Afghanistan look inviting.
AQAP came out of the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Its leaders, mostlySaudis and Yemenis, went to Saudi Arabia, but were driven out whenRiyadh finally got serious about fighting its own chickens-home-to-roostterrorism. Since then, the group has launched several deadly attacks.
In 2008, AQAP militants attacked the US Embassy in Sana'a, killing 11people. In 2009, a senior AQAP operative offered to surrender to Saudiauthorities, requesting a meeting with Saudi counterterrorism czar PrinceMuhammad bin Nayif Al Saud. Muhammad agreed to the meeting andflew the terrorist to Saudi Arabia on his private jet, only to have theman detonate homemade plastic explosives hidden in his underwear.Muhammad was seriously injured. A year later, Nigerian student OmarFarouk Abdulmutallab sewed a similar bomb into his underwear and triedto blow up a Northwest Airlines flight as it arrived in Detroit on ChristmasDay. Late last year, AQAP tried to send bombs concealed in emptied tonercartridges to addresses in the U.S. via UPS and Federal Express, successfullygetting them into aircraft cargo holds.
To make matters worse, as many as 36 American ex-convicts who convertedto Islam in U.S. prisons went to Yemen in 2009, ostensibly to study Arabic.The FBI, however, believes that they went to undergo training in AQAP camps in eastern Yemen. Scary? You bet. And there's no way to stopthem. They have valid U.S. passports, they've done their time and it's up toU.S. law enforcement agencies to prove that they were in Yemen for terroristtraining.
A year ago, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a report warningof terrorism in Yemen, an emerging failed state in every way. But in 2010there wasn't a danger of the country's entire political system falling apart.Today that's the reality. Yemen's President Ali Abdallah Saleh leadslittle more than the city of Sana'a. Most of the outlying areas are eitherengaged in rebellions, are ungoverned or are under AQAP's control. AndSaleh spends most of his time shooting his own people who are engaged inpeaceful demonstrations.
Couple that with Yemen's economic, demographic and societal realitiesand you have a disaster in the making. Yemen's oil -- the source of over 75percent of its income -- will run out by 2017, and the country has no apparentway to transition to a post-oil economy. Water shortages are alreadyacute throughout the country, and Sana'a may be the first capital city in theworld to run out of water. The mix of a high birthrate, little education, andextreme unemployment is toxic.
Many counterterrorism experts believe that Yemen is beyond the point ofno return. Drone attacks aren't going to destroy AQAP. A strong centralgovernment, democracy and economic opportunity might. But if thecountry continues to circle the drain, robust intelligence collection andboots on the ground may be required to crack AQAP. It's a task in whichthe whole world has a stake -- after all, bin Laden's al-Qaeda had Europe,Asia and Africa in its crosshairs for a decade, not just America. And if theUnited States does go it alone, it could find itself mired in another hostileenvironment for a generation.