The government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been president of a united Yemen since the early 1990s and of the North Yemen Arab Republic for more than a decade before that, has been cooperating with the United States against Al Qaeda in a sort of desultory, off again, on again way since 2001. Mirroring the support that the tribes lend Al Qaeda, his cooperation derives less from any commonality of interests than it does from the wads of American assistance it guarantees. Yemen subsists, as expert Andrew Terrill describes it, on a system of subsidies and bribes. The economy has no pulse. Its tribes don’t get along. It has no meaningful infrastructure. It exists in a state of perpetual war. It offers the perfect safehouse for Al Qaeda.
Despite or maybe because of this grim prognosis, the United States, concerned by Al Qaeda’s expanding presence, has increased its security and development assistance to Yemen. But this is like giving vitamins to a terminal cancer patient. Saleh faces the classic dilemma of leaders in the Islamic world who the United States cultivate as erstwhile partners in the struggle against Al Qaeda. He walks a fine and constantly shifting line, blunting American pressure when terrorists pop up in Yemen and staving off dissent at home when the United States looses fusillades in the Yemeni desert. In the meantime, Saleh can only pray that none of his subjects launches a catastrophic strike against the United States, prompting a direct and furious American intervention.
The dilemma, needless to say, hardly comes as news to Washington policymakers, or at least one can hope. We have, after all, been here before. Sudan, Somalia, Anbar, Afghanistan, Northwest Pakistan—Al Qaeda loves a vacuum. Yemen is simply the latest. But America doesn’t have the capacity to fill vacuums in every far-flung precinct. It can barely accomplish this end in Afghanistan, much less six Afghanistans. And, still, the engine behind America's strategy is precisely the assumption that, because Al Qaeda relies on ungoverned spaces to prepare for attacks, the United States must eradicate such spaces, preferably by assisting local governments, as in Yemen and Pakistan, but also via direct military action, as in Afghanistan.