Yemen: Who Knew?

Military.Com ^ | 2/22/2010 | Peter Brookes

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

In the days after the foiled Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound airliner, some were quick to call for a new front in the war on terror, this time in Yemen, where the Nigerian-born "Undie-Bomber" was in contact with al-Qaida.

While the emphasis on Yemen from a counterterrorism perspective has waxed and waned over the years, it has long been on our terror radar, going back to at least the late 1990s.

It is unfortunate that we have had to become intimately reacquainted with Yemen, a little-known but strategically located country with an ancient history, including being the home of the mythical Queen of Sheba, in such a near-tragic manner.

Yemen came into our counterterrorism consciousness most starkly with the al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden in October 2000, when a small boat laden with explosives struck the American destroyer, killing 17 sailors. But Yemen's contact with al-Qaida precedes this, stretching back at least to 1998, when the terror group attacked U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, reportedly passing through Yemen and using Yemeni documentation for travel. Al-Qaida attacked a French tanker off Yemen in 2002 as well.

[TigersEye]

It’s small. Carpet bomb it.

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

I agree.

[TigersEye]

I don’t suppose we’ll hear any criticism of Yemen’s government system from 0bummer or The Hildebeast. ? They save that for properly functioning republics.

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

No.

[world weary]

Its actually a little larger than California, not small.

[robomatik]

"Its actually a little larger than California, not small."

if true, so is japan. tell that to hiroshima and nagasaki!

[world weary]

so the release of nuclear weapons has been authorized? ;)

Sorry, navy guy here, had to make the Crimson Tide joke.

[TigersEye]

How big is that compared to Afghanistan or Iraq? How much of it do you think is inhabited?

[world weary]

Just from comparing their Wikipedia entries, Yemen is actually larger than Iraq by about 100,000 km^2, and Afghanistan is even larger by about the same amount. Granted that large swaths of Yemen are uninhabited (espically in the north where Yemen borders on Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter) but that is precisely where the terrorists are hiding.

I'm not saying that bombing doesn't have its place, but it is of limited use in killing terrorists in remote locations, espically since if you have no after action BDA going on by infantry to count bodies and weapons, you really have no way to confirm that you're hitting what you want to hit. If you don't do BDA after the action, you're just wasting resources .

[TigersEye]

I recently read that they are mostly in the mountains on the west coast.