Sinking into the Sand: How Yemen is slowly Collapsing

The latest spate of terrorism within Yemen has led many to question the stability of the poorest of the Middle Eastern States.

On the morning of Wednesday the 6th of October two related attacks hit the capital of Yemen, one on a British embassy motorcade and another on a gas company that employed Westerners. The terrorism is not unheard of in Yemen, it was blamed for housing the terrorists that attempted to blow up a plane flying over Detroit on Christmas Day and in April a suicide bomber attacked the car of the British Ambassador. But this most recent outbreak of terrorism is seen as being indicative of further problems within the state.

US experts at the State Department recently compared Yemen's future to that of the failed state of Somalia; a civil war that has been ongoing for 6 years, the hub of al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsular, oil revenue that is steadily decreasing and an incompetent central government lend to a bleak outlook for the desert state.

Yemen's government relies on oil exports for nearly all of it's revenue but at the current rate of extraction and assuming no further oil wells are found it seems likely that Yemen's supplies will run out by 2017. This means that unless Yemen's government performs a remarkable turnaround and reforms its public expenses, unlikely in a country where 40% of the population live on less than $2 a day, it will go bankrupt and become a failed state. That is if it survives the current insurgencies on multiple fronts for that long.

The Obama administration has been keen to bring the world's attention to the plight of Yemen with a senior advisor pointing out "One failed state on the Gulf of Aden is bad enough". If Yemen does fail it seems that al-Qaeda would be able to use it as a base to distable other countries in the region, notably Saudi Arabia, people would take note but by then it would be too late.