Letter From Yemen: Failed State or Just Failing?

On the morning of September 17, 2008, a Hilux pickup truck and a Toyota Prado pulled up in front of the American embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, and exploded. Seventeen people were killed, including six embassy guards, but, as is the case with nearly every event of consequence in the Middle East, reports were conflicting. Some said there were six attackers, some said four. Some said the lone non-Yemeni victim was an Indian woman, others said it was a Yemeni American. In a macabre coincidence, the attack on the USS Cole in 2003, while it was docked in the port city of Aden, also killed seventeen.

AFEW weeks after the bombing I was sitting about a mile from the embassy in the lounge of the Movenpick Hotel, perched on a hilltop with a sweeping panorama of the city below. Few guests were on hand to take in the view. The bar was empty, and the staff at the reception desk fiddled with paperwork and tapped monotonously on computer keyboards, surrounded by the silent, cavernous entrance hall. Business was only slightly better at the less ostentatious Sheraton, a few hundred yards down the road.

The presence of either hotel showed appalling naiveté, or bravado, depending on one’s point of view: who would think of dropping an opulent hotel in the poorest, most conflict-ridden part of the Arab world? But somehow the board members of the international chains must have believed that the rebels who had been running wild for decades would be defeated and a victory in the “war on terror” would send the Al Qaeda operatives fleeing to Somalia or neighboring Saudi Arabia. Then the five-star rooms would fill with tourists and international businessmen chasing the investment that would flow in. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Many of the provinces are still ruled by tribal warlords; the country’s president of thirty-two years, Ali Abdullah Al-Saleh, has been driven from power; the Shiite Al-Houthi rebels have taken over the capital; and the primary question now is whether Yemen is a failed state or just a failing one.

Since there were few customers for the café waitress to look after she was killing time reading a Thomas Pynchon novel. She had the olive brown skin and delicate features of the Yemeni women I had seen in the markets covered in black abayas, their eyes peeking out from between the slits of their niqabs. But there the similarity stopped. Her skirt ended a few inches above the knee and her hair tumbled to her shoulders in swirling black curls. I didn’t know which was more surprising, the fact that she could pore over Thomas Pynchon in a country where most of the women couldn’t read in any language, or the name on her name tag—Mary.

By the standard of Yemen’s cultural norms Mary was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a freak. I asked her, with a touch of sarcasm, if business had been slow. She put down her book and rolled her eyes, and I soon learned why her life had followed a path so different from the women picking through vegetables in the market. Her father was a successful businessman who had lived abroad for most of her childhood, and so she had been educated at a boarding school run by Irish nuns. Since then Mary had become a living embodiment of a society that had splintered in many ways. There are so many fault lines in Yemeni society—tribal and political, but primarily tribal—that it could hardly be called a society at all. It was rather an agglomeration of overlapping alliances, and these were by nature tenuous, far more fragile than the rugged mountain ridges circling the city, and always leaning in the direction of the political winds.

I asked her how long business had slumped.

“Ever since … well … you know … ”

I knew what she meant in the broadest sense, but not exactly, because there had been a lot of “you knows” in Yemen recently. Yemen was a country plagued...