Word: yemen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...more about Yemen...