While Washington obsessed Monday over President Barack Obama's plans in Afghanistan, as well as over a new burst of violence next door in Pakistan, some unsettling news arrived to remind everyone that the extremist threat isn't limited to those troubled countries.
Reports from Yemen said government forces had killed 59 Shiite rebels in the country's north. The death toll is a sign of the intensity of the government's current fight against a Shiite revolt that has forced tens of thousands of Yemenis out of their homes.
Combine that revolt in the north with separatist unrest in the south and a growing al Qaeda movement, all in the Arab world's poorest country bordering Saudi Arabia, and you have a recipe for the kind of incubator for trouble that Afghanistan became before the 9/11 attacks. Lest we forget, barely a year has passed since al Qaeda forces struck the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa.
Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, left, in Minneapolis on Oct. 4.
Meanwhile, a second nation, this one in Africa, is moving much further down the track toward failed-state status and becoming a haven for Islamic extremists. It's Somalia, where Islamist militias are not only battling a virtually powerless central government, but over the weekend threatened to advance across the border to hit targets in Kenya as well.
Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed visited the U.S. in recent days and warned that "a foreign idea" is taking hold in his country; he didn't mention foreign terrorists, but that's what he meant. The State Department's most recent terrorism report says that al Qaeda "elements" are benefiting "from safe haven in the regions of southern Somalia."
Taken together, the reports from Yemen and Somalia present a vivid reminder that al Qaeda became a direct threat during the 1990s precisely because it was able to fill the power vacuum that Afghanistan had become. That could happen again in Afghanistan or Pakistan, of course—but not only there.
Happily, the other threats aren't going wholly unnoticed. In Somalia, U.S. military commandos just last month launched a daring helicopter assault in which they took out the most-wanted al Qaeda operative in that land, a man named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, along with his bodyguards. Mr. Nabhan, long on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's most-wanted list, was suspected of building the truck bomb that killed 15 people in a Kenya hotel in 2002, and of choreographing a failed missile launch at an Israeli airliner.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama a few weeks ago sent a letter of support to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, U.S. officials said. According to Yemen's state news agency, the letter pledged help in "the fight against terrorism" and said the U.S. will "stand beside Yemen, its unity, security and stability."
Those are signs that the national-security apparatus isn't asleep at the switch as these problems grow. The question is whether the broader U.S. political system is too overloaded with the Afghanistan debate to act against dangers elsewhere. Fighting extremism, after all, is like squeezing a balloon; when flattened in one place, it tends to bulge somewhere else.
That's particularly important to keep in mind because, despite the turmoil in Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. analysts think the fight against al Qaeda in those countries has diminished the terror group's ability to operate. The most recent State Department report on terrorism says that, over the past year or so, al Qaeda and "associated networks continued to lose ground, both structurally and in the court of world public opinion."
Yet like-minded Islamic extremists in places such as Yemen and Somalia can pick up the cause, with or without guidance from al Qaeda's home office.
The danger is most acute in Somalia, where lawlessness is rampant. The central government controls little outside the capital of Mogadishu, and not all of that city, international reports indicate. Meanwhile, the Islamist movement al Shabaab is led by men affiliated with al Qaeda, some of whom fought with it in Afghanistan, the State Department reports. The only good news in Somalia is that the Islamists have spent some of their time and energy in recent weeks fighting among themselves.
In the long run, Yemen may be the more worrisome spot. It is, after all, the ancestral homeland of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and it has a close relationship with oil-rich Saudi Arabia, whose monarchy is a perpetual bin Laden target. Al Qaeda-affiliated groups already have claimed responsibility for a list of small-scale attacks in Yemen over the past two years; Yemenis' broader role is underscored by the fact that 92 of the 221 remaining terror detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison are Yemenis.
The good news is that Mr. Saleh retains a good measure of control and wants help dealing with the threat, meaning it may be easier to help. Juan Zarate, a terrorism adviser to George W. Bush, says the best bet in Somalia may be a policy aimed at simply containing extremists there. But in Yemen, he says, hopes are brighter because of "a government that has some resources and some willingness to work with us," as well as neighbors who are at least as concerned as is the U.S.
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