Imperial Grunts

^{CHAPTER ONE} CENTCOM ^{YEMEN, WINTER 2002 WITH NOTES ON COLOMBIA}

In November 1934, when the British traveler and Arabist Freya Stark journeyed to Yemen to explore the broad oasis of the Wadi Hadhramaut, the most helpful person she encountered was the French aesthete and business tycoon Antonin Besse, whose Aden-based trading empire stretched from Abyssinia to East Asia. Besse, dressed in a white dinner jacket with creased white shorts, served excellent wine at dinner, and was described as “a Merchant in the style of the Arabian Nights or the Renaissance.”¹ In December 2002, when I went to Yemen, the most helpful person I encountered was Bob Adolph, a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Special Forces, who was the United Nations security officer for Yemen.

Adolph, whose military career had taken him all over the world, had the chest of a bodybuilder and a bluff, bulldog face under wire-rim glasses and a creased ball cap. I spotted him on the other side of passport control, waiting in the dusky warehouse under fluorescent lights that functioned as the Sana’a airport.

Because of their own al-Qaeda problem, the Yemenis were suspicious of anyone with a Pakistani visa inside his passport. I was pulled over by a man smoking a cigarette and wearing a torn sweater and slippers. Adolph, seeing that I was making no progress, ambled over to him, speaking in bad but passable Arabic, gritting his teeth each time he made a point. Others were also haggling with customs and passport officers. It was a typical third world scene: confusion and a cacophony of negotiation in place of fixed standards.

After more of Adolph’s pleading, I got back my passport. We headed for the parking lot. It was 2 a.m. Two beggar boys grabbed my bags and put them in the Land Cruiser. Adolph slipped them half a dollar in riyals. I was relaxed. The Arab world, while afflicted by political violence, had little or no common crime. In this sense, Islam had risen to the challenge of urbanization and modern life, and was a full-fledged success.

“This is the most democratic state in Arabia. For that reason it’s the most dangerous and unstable,” Adolph said, explaining that when Western-style democracy replaced absolute dictatorship in places with high unemployment rates and weak, corrupt institutions, the result was often a security vacuum that groups like al-Qaeda could take advantage of. “I’ve drawn up multiple evacuation plans for the U.N. staff here, updating calling-tree lists,” he went on. “If the place goes down during the night, I can have all our people in Asmara the next day in time for brunch at the InterContinental there. The trick is to keep doing favors for people in the army, the police, and the tribes, and never call them in, until you need them to get your people out.”

He veered to avoid another head-on. “Notice the way people drive here, you’ve got ten-year-olds propped up on phone books driving Granddad around town. Forget about rules and licenses. Keep all of your cash in different pockets. Despite all of the guns, ready cash always gives you more power in Yemen than a gun. Everybody in this country is a businessman, and a good one.” His tone was commanding, didactic.

It was the last night of Ramadan. Though a few hours before dawn, the streets were noisy and crowded, and gaily strung with lights. Sana’a resembled a fairy-tale vision of Arabia, with basalt and mudbrick buildings festooned with colored glass fretwork and gypsum friezes. I recalled my first visit to Yemen in 1986.

Back then, the diplomats and other area specialists had assured me that with the discovery of oil in significant amounts, the Yemeni government would soon have the financial wherewithal to extend its power into the countryside, ending the feudal chaos. The opposite had occurred. To placate the sheikhs, the government bribed them with the newfound wealth, so oil revenues strengthened the medieval periphery rather than the modernizing capital. Kidnappings of foreign tourists erupted in the mid-1990s, as the sheikhs got greedy and sought to further blackmail the government. The government also had to compete with wealthy Wahabi extremists from Saudi Arabia and with al-Qaeda, who sometimes had more money with which to influence local Yemeni tribal leaders. With al-Qaeda targeting oil vessels off the Yemeni coast, maritime insurance rates had gone up, reducing sea traffic and consequently the amount of money from oil exports, so the regime had less money for bribes. The foreign community feared that a new wave of kidnappings might lie ahead.

For al-Qaeda, Yemen was a conveniently chaotic, culturally sympathetic country in the heart of Arabia, so much more desirable than far-afield, non-Arab Afghanistan. It might just be a matter of chipping away at the regime.

In downtown Sana’a, I noticed that people were not wearing the cheap Westernized polyesters that signify the breakdown of tribal identities under the pressure cooker of urbanization. They still wore white thobes with checkered keffiyahs or Kashmiri shawls, with the men sporting jambiyas (ornamental curved daggers) in the middle of their belts.

“It’s tribal everything,” another U.S. military source would explain to me. “The ministries are fiefdoms for the various tribes. It’s a world of stovepipe bureaucracies. All the information flows to the top and none of it is shared along the way, so that only [President Ali Abdullah] Saleh knows what is going on. As for the furious demands from the Americans to fight bin Laden, we Americans are just another crazy tribe that Saleh holds close to his chest, and balances against the others. Same with al-Qaeda. Saleh has to appease and do favors for everyone to stay in power.” Yeah, I thought, whichever dog is closest to biting him, he feeds.

Adolph told me that the Yemeni government controlled only about 50 percent of the country. A high-ranking Western diplomat in Yemen would hotly dispute that claim, telling me that Saleh controlled “all the main roads, oil fields, and pipelines,” which, I countered, was less than 50 percent of the country. “Well,” the diplomat huffed, “he controls what he needs to control.” If that was the case, I thought, then why was there such a problem with al-Qaeda in Yemen at the time of my visit? The difference between Adolph and this diplomat was not in their facts, or even in their perceptions, it would turn out. Rather, like the Marine lieutenant colonel I had met briefly at Camp Pendleton, Adolph didn’t know how to be subtle, or how to dissemble. He was brutally, refreshingly direct. Dealing with him saved time.

Inside the galloping Land Cruiser, Adolph knocked off the most recent security “incidents” in the country. His apartment building had been the scene of a gun battle between the son of a highly placed sheikh and government forces, with four people “KIA” (killed in action). Several more had been killed during a firefight between the al-Haima and Bani Mattar tribes outside Sana’a. Two bombs had exploded near the homes of government officials in the capital. In nearby Ma’rib there had been an attempt to assassinate the regional governor, Abdullah Ali al-Nassi, when tribesmen blocked the road and opened fire on his vehicle. The reasons for all this violence remained murky. As for al-Jawf and other areas on the Saudi frontier, there had been so many bombings and gun battles that Adolph hadn’t bothered to investigate or keep count. All this was a prelude to the assassination of a leading Yemeni politician and the murder of three American missionaries.

Adolph, trained as a hostage negotiator by Great Britain’s New Scotland Yard, told me what to do in case I was kidnapped: “Don’t protest. Be submissive. Show them pictures of your family to establish a relationship. After the first few hours, ask to see the sheikh. If they take you to meet him, it’s all right. It’s an authorized kidnapping, for the sake of convincing the authorities to give the tribe a new road or water well. They’ll tell you the negotiations should be completed in a few days; figure two months. Foreigners have been known to gain weight in the course of being held hostage in Yemen. Each family in the village will host you for a while, to divide the cost of your food. But if they don’t take you to see the sheikh the first day, start to worry. Then it may be an unauthorized kidnapping, and it’s okay to think of ways to escape.”

He slowed the vehicle as we got closer to his apartment in a wealthy area of Sana’a where many expatriates lived. High walls, armed guards, and concertina wire were everywhere: the paraphernalia of paranoia.

I was headed for Injun Country, Adolph told me. He meant the desert wastes of northern Yemen abutting the Saudi border, a border that the Yemeni government was attempting to demarcate, even as local tribesmen were blowing up the new border markers. The next day I had an appointment with a sheikh who could provide me with guards and a guide, a sheikh for whom Adolph had done favors.

Sheikh Abdulkarim bin ali Murshed, forty, looked older than he was: something not uncommon in a country where extreme poverty and a high birthrate literally sped up time. Well over half of the people in Yemen hadn’t been born when I had first visited sixteen years before. From his father, Sheikh Murshed had inherited control of one hundred thousand Khawlan tribesmen who lived east of Sana’a. They were part of the Bakil tribal confederation, the largest in Yemen. The Bakils were less powerful than President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s more cohesive Hashid confederation, which resided along the northern spine of the mountains of the High Yemen. President Saleh’s political rival, Abdullah al-Ahmer, leader of the Islamic Islah (Congregation for Reform) party, was a fellow Hashid, of the al-Ahmer branch. Consequently, the president needed allies from the Bakils to counter some of his own Hashid tribesmen, and Sheikh Murshed was both willing and ambitious for power.

With the blessing of both Saleh and some khawajahs (wealthy white foreigners), including the Americans, Sheikh Murshed had established a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Human Solidarity. He had business cards and a half-empty office where nothing seemed to be going on. Like the political party system in Yemen, the office was mainly a Westernized facade, behind which lay a vibrant traditional means of power: the tribe.

Adolph introduced me to Sheikh Murshed less than twenty-four hours after I had arrived in Yemen. This was at the start of the three-day Feast of Eid al-Fitr which concluded Ramadan, a time when such a meeting should have been impossible to arrange. But Adolph had a holiday gift for the sheikh: “an American jambiya,” as he put it with a wide, overbearing smile, as he towered over the sheikh. It was an authentic, foot-long Texas bowie knife in a handsome red case.

Adolph showed me a stack of such bowie knives inside red cases that he had bought for $80 apiece. “I should be able to deduct these on my taxes as a legitimate business expense,” he told me, “but of course I can’t. I’ve given one to the chief of police, and have another for the president’s half brother. In male-dominated tribal societies like Yemen, manliness goes a long way. It’s how you get people to do things for you.” Adolph’s apartment was filled with knives and swords—from West Africa, the Horn, and Yemen.

Sheikh Murshed told me that as a friend of Adolph’s, I would be his guest in the tribal areas. Thus it would cost me nothing for the vehicle, the bodyguards, and the guides I would be lent for my journey. If I wanted to show my appreciation, however, through a donation to his NGO, that was up to me. In other words, the negotiation had begun. The first group of guards with whom he put me in contact wanted $350 a day. I ended up paying $100 a day, plus a donation to the sheikh’s NGO.

Soon after our first meeting, the sheikh invited me to chew ghat at his medieval tower house, perched on a hilltop on the outskirts of Sana’a. The sheikh’s mafraj, upper-story room, was filled with about twenty tribesmen reclining on pillows on the floor. Late-afternoon sunlight fell through the stucco friezes and colored glass windows. The sheikh sat with his Makarov pistol, Kalashnikov assault rifle, and notebook, using a spittoon to rid his mouth of excess ghat leaves and mucus as he listened to supplications. The ghat was stuffed in plastic supermarket bags beside the pile of assault rifles on the machine-made carpets. An antique telephone sat on a chipped wooden stand. It never rang, but the sheikh talked incessantly on his new cell phone. Mounted on the wall beside faded family photographs was a television turned to Al-Jazeera, the all-news Arabic-language station out of Qatar that the Yemenis thought of as provocatively Westernized, even as Americans saw it as hostile to the West.

Arguments raged into the evening over the best way to improve security and living conditions in the troubled desert regions of al-Jawf and Ma’rib. The sheikh listened, not interrupting, but he always had the final word. He heard numerous supplications, including a request to help a man whose brother had been arrested for allegedly stealing funds from the central bank. The idea that a good lawyer and an independent judge would provide justice was not especially considered; only the sheikh, it seemed, could guarantee a fair resolution of the matter. “In Yemen, the kabili [tribal] system is stronger than the government, stronger than Islam even,” one of the supplicants told me. This was the essence of underdevelopment, a situation in which the government bureaucracy works on the basis of family ties and who-you-know, rather than on impersonal laws and principles.

The ghat spurred conversation. If it is chewed properly—the soft stems and leaves bunched into a rear corner of the mouth, resting on the lower teeth until a greenish mucus forms—the plant has an exquisitely subtle effect at once energizing and relaxing, like having five cups of espresso without feeling overwound. Ghat’s effect was creeping. It incited you sexually. It was common for men after the afternoon chew to take a siesta with their wives. A water-intensive crop, ghat was a principal reason for the desertification of the country. Groundwater supplies in Yemen were expected to last no more than a generation or two, while Yemen’s population growth rate of 2.8 percent was among the highest in the Middle East.[7] Ghat, which had no export potential, was increasingly being grown at the expense of cash crops like coffee, further exposing the local economy to catastrophe as underground oil reserves diminished.

The next person I saw as soon as I arrived in Yemen, again courtesy of Adolph, was Brig. Gen. Ali Muhsen Saleh al-Ahmer. Gen. Ali Muhsen, half brother to President Saleh (they shared the same mother), was said to be the second most powerful man in Yemen after Saleh himself. Ali Muhsen controlled an armored division that protected the capital. He had the reputation of being a buttoned-down, capable organizer, close to the fundamentalist Islah movement, as well as to gun-running sheikhs and perhaps to some in al-Qaeda, too. It was Ali Muhsen who helped Saleh get support from the radical “Afghan-Arabs” (Yemeni veterans of the Afghan war against the Soviets) when his regime was threatened by civil war in the mid-1990s. But American pressure following September 11, 2001, had been so severe that both Ali Muhsen and Saleh felt they had no choice but to accommodate President George W. Bush. The Americans made a deal with this former “bad guy”: giving Ali Muhsen’s regiment a chunk of the American military aid package was the only way that Washington could do business in Yemen.

Ali Muhsen reminded me of a tribal leader that a young Winston Churchill describes in his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: “He was a great man, which on the frontier means that he was a great murderer…. A strong man who has felt the grip” of an imperial power “is the best tool to work with.”² It was Ali Muhsen’s ties to the radicals that gave his half brother, the president, the political protection he needed to move closer to the Americans—temporarily, that is. And also to distance himself from the Americans swiftly and credibly if that, too, became necessary.

Late at night during Eid al-Fitr Ali Muhsen received Adolph and me in his heavily fortified compound in Sana’a. The flamboyant jambiya that Ali Muhsen wore over his tribal dress testified to the value of its lineage; it had likely been passed down for generations. Syrupy tea, nuts, and raisins were served. Adolph presented Ali Muhsen with a bowie knife, “a gift from one soldier to another.” Ali Muhsen smiled as he put his hand gratefully on Adolph’s. For Adolph in this situation, being a former U.S. Army officer was more important than being a U.N. security officer. But the two functions were really inseparable. For sensitive security details like Yemen, where expatriates were truly at risk, it was not unusual for the U.N. to have Americans, or at least other Anglos, in positions of authority. While the United States and the United Nations often seemed at odds on the world stage, on the ground in Yemen the distance between them seemed less consequential.

“I’m ready to roast your communications minister alive,” Adolph complained. “I need to set up a radio call network for my staff in case of emergency and he won’t see me.” Ali Muhsen suggested he would settle Adolph’s problem. Adolph didn’t believe him, and went on complaining for a while. Ali Muhsen appeared to respect him for that.

Adolph introduced me in flattering terms and I made small talk with the general. To ask a direct question—or to consider this an interview—would have been an abuse of hospitality. In a place like Yemen the truth emerges by accident, when talking of other matters. The fact that the general had received me would serve as the best form of protection were I unlucky enough to be kidnapped. The excess of nervous-looking armed guards in the sitting room and nearby courtyard testified both to Ali Muhsen’s real authority and to the anarchy swirling around it.

Less than seventy-two hours after I had arrived in Yemen, during the most important holiday of the Muslim year, when government offices were closed, Adolph, with his passable Arabic, had arranged a trip for me through an area where westerners had been denied the right to travel, and had gotten me a brief audience with the country’s most shadowy figure. Adolph impressed me as neat, orderly, a bit anal-retentive even, as well as unpretentious.

Robert B. Adolph Jr. was born in 1952 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, one of nine children in a poor Catholic family. He started working when he was eleven. He was thrown out of high school five times, finishing 313 in a class of 330. He joined the U.S. Army after high school and was sent to Germany, becoming a staff sergeant, and later a member of Army Special Forces. “In the military, for the first time in my life, people told me that I wasn’t stupid.” Encouraged, Adolph, by way of a mail-order correspondence course, got a college degree, something he was still intensely proud of. Later, he would earn a master’s degree in international relations from American University in Washington, D.C. His military education in the course of becoming a Special Forces officer included Belgian commando school, Russian language school, a combat swimmer’s course offered by the Danish army, and Ranger and parachute jump master schools. In Germany he commanded two military intelligence companies. Serving in Egypt he learned to be wary of most scholarly books about the Arab world. “The books I read never mentioned that to improve a society you have to give the money to women, never to men. In the City of the Dead in Cairo,” he went on, “I adopted a poor family: Dad wanted a TV set, Mom wanted a sewing machine to start a little business.”

In 1992 he was sent to Cambodia as an American military observer to the U.N. peacekeeping mission. “It was the first time that I was in a place with no government. The Khmer Rouge were doing a bargain-basement business with the Thai army in gems and logging. I learned that if someone puts an AK-47 in your face, you move back slowly, bend at the waist in a supplicating manner, with your palms together as though you are about to pray. They usually put their guns down when you do that. Being in Cambodia for six months was like being raped. Nothing I had been given to read in the course of my education prepared me for what I encountered.

“It didn’t make me cynical. It just helped me get things done on the ground.” He set up an anti-malarial program in northern Cambodia, getting a French crew to bring in mosquito nets on C-130s (Adolph’s French, I learned, was like his Arabic) and a Canadian trucking company to distribute them. “The hardest thing, though, was to convince rural Cambodians that malaria was from mosquitoes, not from bad spirits.”

Upon retirement from the U.S. Army in 1997, Adolph became an advisor under contract with the State Department to the Bosnian Ministry of Defense. The next year he became the chief security officer for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone, where he had to evacuate several hundred civilian staff under threat from the sadists of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). “Whether it’s the RUF, al-Qaeda, or Serbian Chetniks, one unifying factor is that none of these people know how to have a normal relationship with a woman, and that lies at the root of their cruelty,” he told me, sucking on beer suds one night in his apartment. “RUF commanders would force boy soldiers to rape old women in their own village at gunpoint, so that the boys could never go home again. It is the kind of discipline unsocialized teenagers understand.”

Sierra Leone had been a frustrating assignment for Adolph. In Special Forces he had learned that “the mission was everything”; in the U.N. he had to work in an environment where, as I knew from my own reporting, the mission was secondary to diplomatic necessity.

For example, Nigerian peacekeepers were not in Sierra Leone to keep the peace, but in some cases to steal alluvial diamonds. The RUF controlled the diamond fields. The Nigerians made deals with the RUF. They used their own peacekeepers as mules to get the diamonds back to Lagos. The Nigerian government was getting money from the international community for each peacekeeper it dispatched to Sierra Leone, but the Nigerian soldiers themselves were not always paid by their own government. Guinean and Zambian peacekeepers were also not paid, though their governments were getting money from the U.N. for every soldier dispatched to Sierra Leone. The result was that they surrendered without a fight to hunter-warrior guilds dressed in wigs and shower caps.³[8] If the U.S. was going to subcontract out its imperial burden to the U.N., the U.N. would have to be able to fight on the ground as well as it talked before the television cameras.

Two weeks after he left Sierra Leone, the U.N. sent Adolph to Yemen. Here the mission was everything, to judge by the blunt way he had spoken to Gen. Ali Muhsen about the communications minister.

“Family, Village, Tribe, Guns—Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. That’s Yemen,” began the U.S. Army colonel dispatched to Sana’a from CENTCOM in Tampa, Florida. Terrorism is an entrepreneurial activity dominated by enterprising self-starters. And as the colonel explained to me as we lined up for food in Adolph’s apartment, “In Yemen you’ve got nearly twenty million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all extremely hard-working compared to the Saudis next door. It’s the future. And it terrifies the hell out of the government in Riyadh.”

The buffet dinner included a dozen men. Aside from me, a U.N. official, the French defense attaché, and two diplomats from the American Embassy, the rest were American military officers running one program or another in Yemen: Yemeni commando training, de-mining, and so on. They were a bunch of working-class guys. There was much talk about “how dumb” they all were, especially from the U.S. defense attaché, Army Col. Gralyn Harris, a former wrestler at the University of Connecticut who happened to speak fluent Arabic. I had also gone there, I told him. I said that he was the first fellow graduate I had met in more than two decades as a foreign correspondent. “What shit is that?” he laughed.

The conversation drifted to jobs after retirement from the service that paid as much as $70,000 per year. There was a lot of clear, ungrammatical, mincing-no-words comparisons of one country and culture with another, observations that were relevant even as they might be difficult to print. This was a world where people were judged less by their ideas than by the practical implementation of them; here virtue was in the results. If there was such a thing as an American Empire, it was here at this party.

Bob Innes, tall, red-haired, and extremely personable, was a fireman’s kid, born in 1950, who had grown up in an Irish-Italian neighborhood on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue, near Ebbets Field. “I never got over the Dodgers deserting Brooklyn for Los Angeles,” he told me. “The three greatest villains of the twentieth century were Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley,” the Dodgers’ owner. Innes was now building from scratch a Yemeni coast guard.

“I was the product of a mixed marriage,” he began in homey deadpan. “My mother was from Brooklyn, my father from the Bronx. In the late 1950s my father retired to fireman’s heaven, Arizona: the real mythic west of the Apaches, that’s before it became suburban and upscale,” he sneered. On the streets of Phoenix, Innes learned Spanish from his Mexican friends. With good grades he got accepted to Stanford, which his parents couldn’t afford. With no scholarship from Stanford, he went to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.

Though we live in the jet age, 70 percent of all intercontinental cargo travels by sea, making the seas more strategic than ever. Most countries that claim to have navies really have coast guards. Though the U.S. Coast Guard consists of only thirty-eight thousand seamen and five thousand civilians, it is the largest coast guard in the world, as well as the world’s seventh largest navy. At first Innes served off the coasts of Greenland, Canada, Wake Island, and South Vietnam. “I saw the last U.S. aircraft leave Tan Son Nhut, where it was decided which dependents got on and which didn’t.

“What did I learn from the experience in Vietnam?” he asked himself out loud, letting the silence formulate his next statement. “I learned that honor and integrity are personal qualities, not institutional ones, not ones we should expect the state to always have. If you don’t like the policy, tough. Bad things happen in this world. You do the best you can in your job, and let the crybabies write the books.”

In the 1980s, Innes administered Coast Guard training programs in West Africa and every place in Latin America except for Bolivia and Paraguay, which don’t have seacoasts. His Spanish had become fluent. He was reading Cervantes in the early-seventeenth-century original text. He arrived in Monrovia, Liberia, in April 1980 just as Master Sgt. Samuel K. Doe staged a coup against President William Tolbert, and body parts were being paraded in the streets. “West Africa was Haiti on a pan-continental scale. The problems in South America weren’t even close. The high culture that in South America is a thing of beauty no longer exists in West Africa. But then there was Colombia….”

Innes was in Colombia from 1987 to 1990 as the U.S. Coast Guard, police, and naval attaché. He also worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “Yemen can be hell in a handbasket, but it’s paradise compared to the Colombia of that era.”

Manuel Noriega held the reins of power in Panama, providing a haven for insurgents and narco-traffickers along the Panamanian-Colombian border. The Iran-Contra scandal raged still, which hindered Washington from providing the Colombian military the support it needed to battle the guerrillas and drug lords. The period also saw a closing act of the deadly drama between cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar and the Colombian government.

Innes told me of an incident in the Amazon region of southeastern Colombia in the late 1980s. In one village, he and the Colombian troops accompanying him found all of the adults crying because their children had been kidnapped. Unlike previous kidnappings, no one had demanded a ransom. He and a force of local soldiers took a boat upriver. In a clearing they discovered a dozen bodies of children with various body organs removed in a not so delicate fashion. The local police chief and others believed the carnage was committed by smugglers and dealers in the lucrative underground trade in body organs for transplant. A wealthy and unknowing foreigner from another continent—Innes never found out who—had a child who desperately needed a liver transplant. Such a foreigner would be willing to pay anything to find a liver that matched for his child, and he wouldn’t necessarily ask about how it was done.

“In Colombia,” Innes continued, “there was no distinction between military conquest, enslaving Indians, kidnapping, narco-trafficking, or a black market for body organs, so long as it turned a profit. Drugs are the lure that promises to break the cycle of poverty. By local standards the cartels were not inhuman. For many, drugs represented a means of escaping abject poverty.”

Narco-trafficking was, among other things, an economic weapon of the rising middle and upper-middle classes against the government, the traditional families, and the oligarchs who controlled the coca, the sweet coal, and the emeralds—the real wealth of the country.

“Violent, untimely death,” he went on, “was normal for young men in many parts of Colombia. It’s an intimate fact of their lives, it’s what most of them expected. Because they know they are going to die young and in pain, they want to do right by their families, breaking the cycle of poverty. Narco-traffickers knew this. In Colombia, minors would never be tried and sentenced as an adult regardless of the crime, so criminal organizations sent children to commit horrible acts on their behalf. The narco-traffickers kept their promises to these kids, financially rewarding their families if they were killed or caught. There is a big show of moving the kids’ parents into new little homes, and of sending the siblings off to private schools. That is more than the state could ever do for them. In Colombia, every pubescent teenager could be your assassin. In Yemen, crime operates within limits. Islamic law provides a vigorous moral compass.”

I should go to Colombia, I thought.

Innes retired from the Coast Guard in the late 1990s and was recalled to active duty after September 11, 2001.

“I was mowing my lawn in Louisiana when the twin towers were hit. Now I’ve got forty guys under me, only forty, but they’re a beginning. These guys,” he told me, getting intense, “were kicked out of the other Yemeni armed services, because they were smart, they spoke English, they asked too many questions and so nobody here trusted them. They were demoralized. ’No,’ I tell them. ‘Don’t you all understand! Before [Robert] Clive consolidated India for the British in the eighteenth century, Yemen, right through the Middle Ages, was the haunt of those like Sindbad the Sailor. Aden was among the largest ports in the world for a thousand years. The coast here constitutes an incredible strategic geography. When you look at the expanding desert, the maritime environment is the only non-bleak future this country has.’

“After the [French tanker] Limburg was hit by al-Qaeda,” Innes went on, “insurance premiums for ships entering Yemeni waters went up 254 percent for a while. Yemen needs a twenty-first-century coast guard, like Jordan and the UAE [United Arab Emirates]. And these people are willing to learn; they’re not like others in the region who just want to hire mercenaries.”

Innes had $8 million of the $22 million in military aid that the U.S. had awarded Yemen after President Saleh and his half brother signed on to the War on Terrorism. Innes’s ambition for the Yemeni coast guard was infectious. He told me how in “five to seven years,” his 40 guys would increase to 2,500. They would patrol the coast from Saudi Arabia to Oman, from the Red Sea through the Bab el Mandeb Strait to the Gulf of Aden. “Their mere existence will drive down maritime insurance rates. I have forty-four-foot motor lifeboats for them, a real heroic, forgiving boat. The French boats from Djibouti are crap.”

Two weeks later I happened to be in Aden, visiting the Prince of Wales Pier, a somber, gray, churchlike edifice that the British had built in 1919, at the start of their last phase of High Empire. Here, in the heart of “Steamer Point,” from where British rule over Aden and its hinterlands had emanated, was an off-limits construction site, the spot that Bob Innes had chosen for the headquarters of his new Yemeni coast guard.

The month before I had come to Yemen, on November 3, 2002, a missile fired from an unmanned CIA Predator aircraft had incinerated a vehicle in which a suspected al-Qaeda leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, was traveling along with five others in the Ma’rib region east of Sana’a. Since then, foreigners—Americans especially—had been denied permission by their embassies to enter the area, for their own safety. My plan was to pass through the northern, al-Qaeda–strewn badlands of al-Jawf and Ma’rib en route to the Wadi Hadhramaut, four hundred miles to the east, and then head south to the Arabian Sea where al-Qaeda was also active. I wanted a visual sense of the socioeconomic stew in which al-Qaeda flourished.

Leaving Sana’a, I and Abdullah, the driver whom Sheikh Murshed had found for me, entered a horrid maze of sandstone and black lava escarpments, buttes, and mesas that formed steep, wind-chiseled canyons. The canyons quickly emptied into an ashen wasteland speckled with ruins identified with the biblical kingdom of Sheba. An hour after leaving Sana’a, we pulled over by a roadside market to buy ghat for the afternoon chew.

Immediately I was amid filthy cinder-block storefronts, crowded like an inner city with young men in dirty white thobes, old keffiyahs and blazers, and armed with jambiyas, bandoleers, and Kalashnikov assault rifles. It was like a John Wayne western, except that the men were wearing skirts. A young boy pulled out his jambiya and pointed it at my face, laughing manically as he did so. Blunt and difficult to remove from their sheaths, jambiyas are rather impractical as a ready weapon, and more often than not represent the stabilizing influence of tribal custom: the Yemeni social glue that kept down the rate of random crime. The AK-47s were another matter. “Once you have a gun, why bother to learn to read and write,” the Yemeni soldier whom Abdullah had picked up interjected, after I had asked a particularly hostile knot of young men if they attended school. They didn’t.

Estimates for the number of firearms in Yemen went as high as eighty million, four for every Yemeni. The U.S. intelligence community speculated at the time that Yemenis had more assault rifles and grenades per capita than any other nation in the world. The small arms threatened to raise Yemen’s age-old tradition of quaint tribal wars to a debilitating level of anarchy.

Between Sana’a and Ma’rib, a distance of 125 miles, I counted eleven military checkpoints signaled by oil drums filled with sand and cement. The government presence in this desert was greater than ever before, and that was no small achievement. The soldiers at these checkpoints were neither drunk nor vicious like the kind I had experienced in Sierra Leone, or like the lizard-eyed mafiosi I had seen in former Soviet Georgia. Yemen was not a failed state. It was just a somewhat weak one, like so many others around the world. That’s what made the canvas which continued to unroll before my eyes so daunting.

The Global War on Terrorism—or GWOT, as the U.S. military called it—represented merely the current phase of American imperialism. But terrorism was both a cause and a symptom of the political weakness of states like Yemen. So, in a sense, the U.S. was fighting the unwieldy process of modernization itself.

The military checkpoints were freelance enterprises, where underpaid soldiers charged a few thousand riyals ($20) to jump in the car with a foreigner and protect him until the next checkpoint or two. Officially, the main road between Sana’a and Ma’rib was in government hands. But between one checkpoint and the next—indeed, two hundred yards away from any of the checkpoints—anything could happen. Mudbrick battlements visible from the road hid the encampments of rebellious tribal sheikhs, some with their own artillery pieces. The crowded markets selling guns and ghat multiplied as we skirted the region of al-Jawf (“The Depression”), an especially lawless region plagued by a continuum of mysterious bombings and tribal firefights.

We pulled into a roadside café—a few broken tables and chairs set on a corroded wooden pallet. Two Toyota pickup trucks stormed in, filled with rowdy young men in their early teens, most with bad teeth, pockmarked complexions, and broken fingernails. Every one of them had an AK-47, often with the safety latch off. Older men, also armed, were the drivers. The lone soldier accompanying us sat morosely sipping his tea, as though trying to hide. The fact that Yemen had among the lowest per capita income and highest population growth rate in the world was for me no longer a statistical abstraction.⁴

The sheikhs who controlled these young men were often wealthy: from highway robbery, the sale of guns and other cross-border contraband, and bribes offered by both the Yemeni government and Saudi Wahabis. With the money the sheikhs bought sheep and camels, and more guns and ammunition; they didn’t build schools and women’s health clinics. It was a conscious choice, not a matter of poverty. I thought of warriors straight out of the Iliad, armed with cell phones and other information-age paraphernalia.

To counter this trend, the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a was overseeing a foreign aid program in the Ma’rib region that included the building of schools and a hospital. But the general instability this close to the capital, plus the heightened tension following the CIA’s Predator attack, made it a difficult choice whether or not to expose civilian aid workers to kidnapping and worse. (To wit, the U.S. Embassy was a sealed-off fortress, with multiple gates, two-way mirrors, and iron teeth coming out of the ground to block vehicles. Most of the diplomatic staff were males without dependents.)

Given these facts, it was left to the military assistance team from CENTCOM to provide the liberal humanist alternative. The money for military assistance that wasn’t going to Bob Innes’s coast guard, or to bribe Ali Muhsen into supporting his half brother’s new alliance with the Americans, was being spent on the training of Yemeni elite units. Nobody expected President Saleh to take control of these desert tracks east and north of the capital. However, the U.S. did hope that better-trained Yemeni commandos would eventually be able to project power at will, facilitating the introduction of civilian aid workers.

It was a Hobbesian state of affairs. Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, was by seventeenth-century standards a modernizer, because he believed that the breakdown of the medieval order, through the establishment of a central governing authority, was necessary for liberal progress. In Yemen the soldier took precedence over the aid worker because it was only the soldier who could provide the elemental security, without which there could be no central authority in the first place.

Leaving al-Jawf for Ma’rib, we now had two armed guards riding with us, along with an escort of soldiers in a separate truck that we had picked up at the latest roadblock.

Ma’rib, described by the Elder Pliny in his Natural History as a town six miles in circumference, had been the capital of biblical Sheba. It was now a gridwork of dusty streets littered with wrapping paper and discarded bottles. The ratty storefronts rested on high cinderblocks, smelling of oil and petrol combined with choking gray dust. Except for a flock of women clad from head to toe in black, the whole place had the atmosphere of a male dormitory. Given the recent Predator attack, I was told to tell people that “I was Australian.”

Who here was al-Qaeda? I asked myself, licking my fingers after devouring a greasy chicken in a sidewalk restaurant filled with armed youngsters. Perhaps nobody. It didn’t matter. The point was that these foul, densely populated encampments in Yemen’s northern desert, adjoining the most unstable parts of Saudi Arabia, constituted a fertile petri dish within which radical groups such as al-Qaeda and its offspring could breed. Here was the demographic and cultural battlefield that the U.S. security establishment would have to penetrate. Similar battlefields lay all over the world.

The fact that Ma’rib was an oasis became noticeable only when I looked down on it from afar: from a sun-baked archaeological mound coated in moondust holding the crumbled debris of antiquity, with nineteenth-century mudbrick towers tilting crazily in each direction. The tourist stand had long collapsed. A few soldiers followed on foot close behind me. From the top of the mound I saw a thin band of drab vegetation.

For a thousand years, from the eighth century B.C., the great dam of Ma’rib, whose massive, honeycombed walls were still visible, joined with an elaborate system of terrace irrigation to make much of this desert truly green. Biblical Sheba (the Sabaean kingdom) had been part of an antique cluster of civilization every bit as fabulous as the Nile Valley in Egypt and the environs of Carthage in Tunisia. The pharaonic Egyptians called this corner of Arabia the Land of Punt; to the Hebrews it was Ophir. As I shall explain, Yemen’s internal disarray was a natural by-product of this history, which in turn was a result of geography.

Yemen, or Yaman, is a word of ancient connotation. In Arabic it literally means “right hand,” the part of Arabia south of the Gulf of Aqaba that, from the standpoint of Greco-Egyptian geographers like Ptolemy, lay to the “right” of Alexandria. Yemen, with a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s land area, yet with a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s, has since the classical age been the demographic core of the Arabian Peninsula. Here in the peninsula’s southwest corner sweeping basalt plateaus rear up into volcanic plugs and sandcastle formations, framing a network of oases that since antiquity has sustained large urban populations.

Separated from one another by mountain fastnesses, and rich from the production of funerary spices on the cliff sides, from 800 B.C. to A.D. 500 half a dozen tribal kingdoms in this part of Arabia (Sabaean, Hadhramauti, Himyarite) fought internecine wars, even as their merchants cultivated contacts with Africa and southern Asia. From India came diamonds and sapphires, lapis lazuli, and pepper; from Africa, ivory and ostrich feathers. Sabaean merchants and their rivals exported frankincense and myrrh at a time when such spices sweetened every funeral altar in the known world. Yemeni kingdoms grew rich on their individual strips of the great incense highway. Freya Stark writes that “they became imperial and aristocratic, builders of tall cities; they colonized Somaliland and Ethiopia.”⁵ Yet, because each was checked by the other, in spite of their imperial demeanor, none of them developed into an empire that was able to rule the whole of present-day Yemen.

These ancient kingdoms were followed by an equally bewildering assemblage of medieval Arab dynasties—Ziyadids, Zaydis, Rasulids, and so forth—both Shiite and Sunni, as each valley and oasis remained a sovereignty unto itself. Indeed, the Rasulid period from 1229 to 1454 stands out as the only example of effective government over most of Yemen through modern times.⁶

The Ottoman Turks officially conquered Yemen in 1517. But their four-hundred-year hold over the interior was nothing but a series of bloody failures, with the Shiite Zaydis withdrawing into their mountain hideouts of northern Yemen following each victory. To the south, the British officers who manned the Aden Protectorate were kept busy maintaining short-lived truces among the Qu’aiti, Kathiri, and other tribes in the Hadhramaut and adjoining wadis. The historian Jan Morris mentions that “the last true expression of High Empire” for the British was the system of tenuous treaties among the Hadhramauti chieftains negotiated by Harold Ingrams of the Colonial Office and his adventurous wife, Doreen, which came to be known as the Sulh Ingrams (Ingram’s Peace).⁷

But internecine violence never truly ceased. A civil war from 1962 to 1968 in northern Yemen, between the forces of a conservative imam and revolutionary officers supported by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt—a war which gradually disintegrated into the usual tribal feuding—claimed two hundred thousand lives before a military-run republic emerged. Meanwhile, in southern Yemen, Britain’s Aden Protectorate gave way to a Marxist state, where, in 1986, Moscow’s attempt to change the leadership of the Yemeni Communist party led to a month-long intertribal war in which ten thousand people were killed. As in Afghanistan, the Soviets found that Yemeni governments were easy to change but that once installed they were undermined by clan divides.

North and South Yemen officially united in 1990, as the South Yemeni state collapsed in the course of the worldwide dissolution of the Soviet empire. But unlike in Eastern Europe, the experiment with democracy failed here. Indeed, it led to another civil war in 1994, this time along north-south lines, in which the north emerged victorious; seven thousand people died in the fighting.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, a former army lieutenant colonel, took power in North Yemen in 1978. Though he couldn’t control all of this Afghanistan-like country, he was still doing better than the Turks or the British before him.

The anachronistic trinity of family, village, and tribe that has divided Yemen since antiquity had one positive element, though: it prevented the kind of stultifying, overly centralized tyranny existent in places like Iraq and Syria. And with no danger of Saleh becoming such a tyrant, the CENTCOM concept of training Yemeni elite units to project power in the cindery badlands held out the only hope of liberalization, through the extension of central authority. But to succeed, the three-thousand-year legacy of separate Yemeni kingdoms would have to be overcome.

We continued east, passing through the edge of the Empty Quarter, the utter desert that, while associated with Saudi Arabia, crept over into Yemen. It was late when we entered the Wadi Hadhramaut and stopped for salta, a spicy stew filled with beans and lentils. Reclining on a rush mat in the gaslit darkness, I noticed that the bread I had been served was similar to Indian nan, and that the men had darker, more oriental features than in Sana’a and Ma’rib. Instead of thobes they were wearing plaid loincloths, like men I had seen in India, Burma, and Indonesia. It was testimony to the copious family and trading links with South and Southeast Asia that Hadhramauti merchants had maintained for centuries; the Nizam of Hyderabad, in south-central India, recruited his bodyguards exclusively from Hadhramauti tribesmen.⁸

Despite a history of insular tribal feuds, this hundred-mile-long oasis, inhabited since 1000 B.C., was part of a rich cosmopolitan world obscure to the West. The rise of radical Islam in Indonesia in our own time has its roots in Islamic learning centers established in the early eighteenth century by Hadhramauti traders, whose twenty-first-century business networks derive from those begun by the Sabaean and Himyaritic spice merchants of antiquity.⁹ Such networks offered convenient pathways for a group like al-Qaeda to conduct its financial operations, particularly as Osama bin Laden’s family came from the nearby Wadi Do’an. Caravan trails, revived by bin Laden’s organization, provided the Hadhramaut with direct links to Mecca and other places in Saudi Arabia.

I awoke the next morning to a racket of birds amid pink oleanders, highlighting fields of alfalfa and date palms at the bottom of soaring, crumbly canyons. In towns dubbed “mini-Manhattans,” because of the six- and seven-story mudbrick buildings stacked one against the other, hordes of young boys filled the narrow alleys. The jewelry stores had been boarded up and replaced by hardware and motorbike shops after the collapse of the nascent tourist boomlet of the early 1990s. This was when kidnappings increased and the Hadhramaut became known as an al-Qaeda hideout. In the shell of a dilapidated hotel, once owned by a Hadhramauti trading family from Singapore, I had a Pepsi with a devout young man who told me that “people here have different opinions about Osama than you do in America, so I think it is better that we do not discuss it.”

From the Wadi Hadhramaut it took five hours to reach Mukalla on the Arabian Sea, where the French oil tanker Limburg had been bombed by al-Qaeda in 2002. Mukalla teemed with Somali refugees, Ethiopian street urchins, and Islamicized Yemenis recently returned from Saudi Arabia. The Wahabi attempt to radicalize Yemenis was having more success in the formerly Marxist south, where fundamentalism was the natural reaction to communism and its assault on religion.

At sunset I took a walk on Mukalla’s beachfront. Red volcanic rocks pressed against steamy seawater with scabby white buildings in the background. The beachfront was divided into two parts: one for men and teenage boys; another for women and their young children. The women were veiled and most of the men had beards. Garbage was everywhere. Yet it was a peaceful communal space, with throngs of the proletarian faithful enjoying the first evening breezes. Mukalla offered the urban fundamentalist counterpart to the wild tribalism of the northern desert and the exotic cultural stew of the Wadi Hadhramaut. To judge by the recent firefights, Mukalla’s al-Qaeda cells had eluded capture by Yemeni commandos. Here was yet another battlefield that awaited successful penetration by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Yemen was vast. And it was only one small country. I looked at the teeming working-class crowd all around me, so pure and devout, each young woman with several children. To judge by the threadbare Western polyesters of the men, the folkways of the tribe were slipping away faster in Mukalla than in Sana’a, making religion here less traditional and inevitably more austere and political.

How was America to cope with this crowd and so many more like it, from Morocco to Indonesia? “Rome is no longer confined to Rome: henceforth she must identify herself with half the globe, or must perish,” writes the French novelist and historian Marguerite Yourcenar, assuming the voice of the Emperor Hadrian.¹⁰

How to manage such an imperium? It was time to find out.