Few resources available to U.S. to deal with Yemen

Beyond providing military and intelligence help — showcased in recent airstrikes on training sites for Al Qaeda — the administration has yet to develop a coherent plan for dealing with Yemen’s pervasive poverty and corruption, according to former diplomats and outside experts. Those ills, they say, are at the root of Yemen’s lure for terrorists.

“I don’t think we have a strategy for Yemen; I think we have some responses,” said Edmund J. Hull, the American ambassador there from 2001 to 2004. “It’s difficult to do because the problems in Yemen are so huge that you almost get stopped before you start.”

In an overburdened State Department, there are only a handful of Yemen experts, compared with 30 people from nine government agencies who are assigned just to the administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke…

Ms. Bodine, who was posted to Yemen at the time of the Cole bombing, said that even with the increased commitment, American aid was still overly skewed toward military support, much of it covert. Over time, she said, that could undermine Yemen’s struggling democracy.

“If they see David Petraeus more than Kathleen Sebelius, then we have a problem,” Ms. Bodine said, referring to the military commander and the secretary of health and human services.