THE BASIC ABOUT THE REPUBLIC OF YEMEN

YEMEN has always been a wild and crazy place, I believe. My father went there

in the sixties to check it out for the New York Times, his employers at the time I remember he had a great and exciting time. As he was certainly a world traveler, it struck me that he was unusually intrigued by the place. He told me and my brother stories about how wild it was. He was blindfolded and taken at gun point to meet people in caves who gave him leaves of Quat, a plant that releases a strong stimulant (perhaps like cocaine?) that many Yemeni men chew all day long. He said he was rather scared the whole trip because very little was know about the unruly place then.

Today, in the New York Times, I was interested to read this by Glen Carey (Bloomberg News Dec. 29, 2009)

Yemen, home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations, is the poorest country in the Arab world as well as a haven for Islamic jihadists.

(...and)

Yemen gained new attention in 2009 from American military officials, who are concerned about Al Qaeda’s efforts to set up a regional base there.

With fears growing of a resurgent Islamist extremism in ... Somalia and East Africa (a short distance away from Yemen, on the African mainland), administration officials and American lawmakers said

Yemen could become Al Qaeda’s next operational and training hub, rivaling the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the organization’s top leaders operate.

The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels. The White House is seeking to nurture enduring ties with the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and prod him to combat the local Qaeda affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian

Peninsula, even as his impoverished country grapples with seemingly intractable internal turmoil.

General Information on Yemen:

Official Name: Republic of Yemen

Capital: Sanaa (Current local time)

Government Type: Republic

Chief of State: Ali Abdallah Saleh, president

Population: 22.23 million

Area: 328,065 square miles; slightly larger than twice the size of Wyoming

Languages: Arabic

GDP Per Capita: $1,000

Year of Independence: 1990

Web site: Yemen parliament.com (In Arabic)

Sound familiar? It should. That has been the American way of fighting terrorist

insurgencies for years now. It does not work. Americans should understand the there is

no AL Qaeda hub, no one place the organization operates from. All of these poor

countries have populations ripe for the picking of desperate young people. These “terrible people” who want to kill us are just poor young boys (and girls) who cannot see a future for themselves in their homeland.

Jihadist organizations prey on them. We should protect them. Al Quaeda is everywhere they are.

Instead of millions of dollars spent on the ground fighting people we cannot

see, those funds should be used to shore up stable governments (governments the people want, not governments we fabricate like in Afghanistan) so that infrastructures of financial, health and educational systems can be built and populations can hope for progress and eventual prosperity in the future.

We should educate ourselves, also, about every single country in the world.

Everyone is a player, large or small. If we want to fight terrorrism, troops on the ground is not the way.

I’m just sayin’.

Afghanistan War On Line

September 23, 2009

Dear President Obama,

Today the papers are reporting you want to take a new turn in the Afghan war.

That is great, but we should not send troops there at all. Trying to fight Al Quaeda is like fighting ants by stepping on one and thinking that you’ve won.

The pursuit, we all know, of Osama Bin Laden is futile. He may even be dead. We all realize that he is just one of many Al Quaeda leaders. For that to be our objective, I have to believe your administration is just using that to explain to the Americans who need a reason for the death of their sons and daughters. Either that or we need a war to sustain our flagging economy? Or, perhaps, you, Mr. President, feel you must continue the conflict to shore up the Democratic party. Are we fighting to keep the Republicans from beating you up some more?

Mr. President, I don’t mean to be rude. You are in a tough spot. You were handed this idiotic war and there is no easy way out. If changing the mission there from killing all insurgents to weeding out Al Quaeda so that perhaps we can have fewer troops deployed, I’m all for it. Keeping any troops there at all, however, is senseless.

The US needs to pull out of that area entirely. You and the other commanders in chief should develop a solid new plan to fight Al Qaeda (and even the Taliban) in cyber space. The latest capture of Mr. Zazi, in New York, is good. He seems to be talking quite a bit (can we believe this?) and providing the authorities with some useful information, hopefully. Our investigators are looking at plans he and others had on his computer. He used the internet to organize a group of terrorists, make a plan of attack and assemble the different materials to make bombs.

This method of combat is what I think the American armed forces should use more extensively. If we have to find people hiding in caves, use their Facebook or MySpace. I’m not trying to be flip. I am serious when I say our enemies use electronic devices and we should track them via that technology. Obviously, we will deploy troops at some point to go get whoever is found out. The number of American at risk would be so few and their objective would be so much clearer and much more direct. At least, they would know what and where the enemy was.

Such a surgical approach and use of many fewer troops would surely make more sense, save many lives and win the approval of the American people. The people of Afghanistan and many other countries would be happier with us too. What right have we to invade these countries, march through villages with sub-machine guns frightening people and putting their lives at risk? We are now trying to “make nice” with those localvillagers. Are we really helping them? The Taliban and other groups kill the elders for talking to American soldiers.

We should be a silent force in our battle with terrorists. Our missions should be clandestine and invisible to our enemies. Our intelligence agencies would do well to get better information to supply to the troops on the ground. It would be nice to be so good that we attack our enemies with surgical swat teams that accomplish their objectives

and then leave, without killing civilians.

We don’t have to risk American lives by making our soldiers befriend Afghani people over tea, ever on the lookout for someone who might kill them. That is ridiculous. Our soldiers with camo and guns should not be doing the job of the Secretary of State and foreign policy experts. Secretary Clinton should be over there winning over Afghani hearts and minds.

Al Quaeda is not an army that assembles at some headquarters in Pakistan or Iran or any other one place. They gather in “cells” all over the world. The recent arrest of Mr. Zazi proves that. Al Quaeda is everywhere. Al Quaeda is on the internet. Do our military really think they have home offices in the mountains of Afghanistan? Cubicles in the caves? Coffee machines and Sparklets water fountains in the rocks?

President Obama, if you really want to take the war in Afghanistan in a new

direction, look no further than your laptop. That is the way in. That is where our enemies lurk. Please get our people out of that desert and onto the world wide web. I makes sense to fight terrorism at its heart and its weakest point. Communication.