WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration confronts the latest terrorism threat in Yemen, its diplomatic and development efforts are being constrained by a shortage of resources, a lack of in-house expertise and a fraught history with a Yemeni leader deeply ambivalent about American help.
Administration officials said they focused on Yemen as a hothouse for Islamic terrorism from the day President Obama took office. The United States has tripled its foreign assistance to the country from 2008 levels and plans to spend up to $63 million on Yemen this year.
But by all accounts, that is a modest amount for a country that is suddenly a central threat on the foreign policy landscape; it is roughly the same amount the United States sends to Serbia. It illustrates how much the United States is stretched on the foreign policy front, and how hard it is to extend its resources beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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.
Washington’s limited insight into Yemen was on display Thursday, when the White House’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, expressed surprise that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was sophisticated enough to carry out a plot against an American jetliner. In fact, Mr. Brennan, a onetime C.I.A. station chief in neighboring Saudi Arabia, is widely regarded as one of the administration’s most knowledgeable officials about the country.
“It’s not that Yemen is the most mysterious and unknowable country in the world,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “One needs to ask why more wasn’t done sooner.”
The State Department said it had decided to step up its engagement with Yemen even before the botched Dec. 25 attack on the jetliner. In September, the United States signed an agreement with the Yemeni government for a three-year $120 million “stabilization program,” devised to create jobs and improve health and other public services on an accelerated timetable.
“We wanted to put together a package of quick-impact projects that would give people a sense that their lives are improving,” said Janet A. Sanderson, a deputy assistant secretary of state who oversees Yemen.
After the Navy destroyer Cole was bombed in Yemen in 2000, the United States embarked on a similar effort. In addition to focusing on counterterrorism operations, the State Department helped finance projects like a health clinic on the rugged highway between the capital, Sana, and Marib, a town in a remote region where Qaeda forces are known to cluster.
Improving health care is one way to make Yemenis less receptive to Al Qaeda and other extremists, Mr. Hull said. The United States had previously tended to focus its economic aid on politically influential places like Sana and Aden, the port city where the Cole was attacked. From 2002 to 2004, officials said, Qaeda elements in Yemen were on the defensive.
But Washington’s relations with Yemen soured after several Qaeda suspects escaped from a prison in Sana in 2006. After the release of a high-profile Qaeda operative in 2007, the United States suspended aid that Yemen was supposed to get through the Millennium Challenge program.
“You had this reversal and downward trend in relations,” Mr. Hull said. “Both we and they took our eyes off the ball.”
By 2008, nonmilitary aid to Yemen had dwindled to less than $20 million. Afghanistan is expected to receive $2.7 billion a year in nonmilitary aid, Pakistan $1.5 billion and Iraq $500 million.
The administration doubled Yemen’s economic aid last year, but as Barbara K. Bodine, another former ambassador, pointed out, the amount “works out to $1.60 per Yemeni.”
“That won’t even buy you a cup of coffee in Yemen,” she added, “and they invented coffee.”
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, respectively.
State Department officials acknowledge that the United States has limited resources for Yemen, though given the intense scrutiny focused on the country, those numbers could rise. But they question whether more aid money would be used effectively, given the pervasive corruption there. As it is, the United States steers most of its dollars through outside organizations like CARE.
Officials also say the United States has to be realistic about what can be done in Yemen, given a long list of problems, including a water shortage, dwindling oil reserves and secessionist movements in the south, a major insurgency in the north and a growing young population with no jobs.
In a speech this week on development strategy, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came close to labeling Yemen a lost cause. “In countries that are incubators of extremism, like Yemen,” she said, “the odds are long. But the cost of doing nothing is potentially far greater.”
The biggest hurdle to aid may be Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. While American officials said he appeared determined to root out Qaeda elements, his resolve has wavered over time, depending on his calculation of whether radical Islamists are a threat or benefit to him. Mr. Saleh is also worried about being too closely identified with the United States.
Saudi Arabia already pours an estimated $1 billion a year into Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates, Britain and Germany have longstanding ties.
“He hasn’t always been eager for American support,” a senior administration official said of Mr. Saleh. “That’s all the more reason to wrap this in broader international support. That makes it easier politically for him.”
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