The three speakers brought their different perspectives together to generate a complex picture of what they described as a country with serious economic and population problems that has also been forced to resist the pressure to act as a highly sought-after base for al-Qaida in recent years.
Bodine began the talk by placing the discussion of Yemen in the context of the current wave of revolutions in the Middle East.
“Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens, and then sometimes weeks pass and decades happen and that seems to be what we are going through in the Middle East right now,” Bodine said. “While [authoritarian regimes] rule, their collapse seems to be inconceivable, and after they fall, their demise seems to be inevitable.”
The former ambassador also reflected on the sudden, unanticipated nature of recent uprisings and noted that no one, not even the protesters themselves, could have predicted the success of the revolutions.
“If anyone had asked either the most pessimistic or the most optimistic observers of the region on Jan. 1 that, if by March 1, Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak of Egypt, two of the most repressive leaders in the region, would be gone and Gaddafi would be under siege, I don’t think anyone would have taken your bet,” she said.
The countries’ younger populations and their increased access to Western media were significant factors in these movements, Bodine said.
“The wave has some significant common threads and some significant national distinctions,” she explained. “Upwards of 50 percent of the populations in these regions are under 25, in some cases under 20, and in Yemen 50 percent of the population is under the age of 15.”
“They have little connection to the world of their parents,” Bodine continued. “They have been raised on satellite TV. It has created a transnational consciousness that doesn’t replace their own nationalism or their own identity but does provide a sense of shared experience, shared frustrations and shared aspirations.”
Turning her focus specifically to Yemen, Bodine discussed several troubling symptoms that she noticed during her visit to the country last January — problems that, she suggested, could make Yemen next in the recent string of revolutions.
“There was a very distinct sense of an impending crisis, much like that smell of rain that you have before a thunderstorm even appears on the horizon,” Bodine said. “Virtually everyone I spoke with mentioned the grinding problem of unemployment ... With very few resources, little revenue in the government to support education [and] inadequate infrastructure, there really is no ready-made solution to this problem. We can’t create five million jobs here, [and] to expect the [Yemeni] government to create them in a short period of time is unrealistic.”
Ryan spoke next, discussing how Yemen has long been targeted by al-Qaida as a possible headquarters, because the unstable environment in the country could help the terrorist organization thrive. He noted, however, that the Yemeni government and tribal groups have consistently resisted such attempts.
Al-Qaida only has a good chance of establishing a strong hold in Yemen, Ryan said, if the United States deploys troops there as it did in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“If we refuse to play their game, they don’t win,” Ryan explained.
In fact, he noted, there has been a recent decline in al-Qaida’s recruitment success and influence in the country.
Ryan recommended that the United States adopt an approach toward the region that centers less on security and al-Qaida.
“What we need to do is not to talk about al-Qaida, but have traditional values, to stand for something,” he explained. “Threats to Yemen would remain without al-Qaida.”
Elaborating on al-Qaida’s interest in establishing a base in Yemen, Shapiro cited the terrorist organization’s past experiences in Somalia in the 1990s. Shapiro said that al-Qaida functions poorly in completely ungoverned spaces and instead prefers operating within established countries.
“They want to find governments that tolerate their presence,” he explained.
Shapiro also noted that, out of the 257 reported terrorist attacks in Yemen since 2001, only 43 have involved al-Qaida and fewer than 300 people have died as a result of all of the attacks. He compared this figure to that of Pakistan, where 7,848 people have died from terrorist attacks in the same time period.
“This level of violence is consistent with long-term stability,” Shapiro explained.
All the speakers noted that, while the political and economic state of Yemen is unstable, the prospects of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups establishing themselves in the country are far less likely than the media portrays them to be.
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