Perched on the southern tip of Arabia, Yemen has four sides. On the north lies a family petro-business known as Saudi Arabia. To the east is once mysterious, still monarchic Oman. Its other two sides are coastlines: on the south the Arabian Sea (and onwards into the Indian Ocean), to the west the Red Sea (and across that thin reach to the Horn of Africa).

Yemen also has four faces, all of them on display in Sana’a where this writer was based for the past two weeks. There is romantic, touristic Yemen with its ancient history, spectacular architecture, and picturesque peoples. Full of smiles until Sept. 11, this face now confronts the specter of cancelled airline service (Lufthansa and Egypt Air) and what looks like single-digit hotel occupancy. Second there is geopolitically strategic Yemen: athwart the Bab Al-Mandab maritime chokepoint, and sharing a peninsula which produces much of the oil to which our world economy, like a globalized jet-set junkie, is so addicted. Canadians are drilling for more of this drug in the wastelands of eastern Yemen, thus far with modest success, but Yemen’s mere proximity to luckier countries makes it important to ours. Regional stability in South Arabia is crucial to North America.

The other two faces of Yemen – one immediate and much publicized, the other quiet and long-term – deserve fuller treatment. What happens on these two fronts will make or break Yemen … and have an effect, however distant, on the United States. Their names: counter-terrorism and development.

The counter-terrorism awareness clock has ticked for a decade or so at the U.S. embassy in Sana’a. Its loudest alarm sounded 11 months earlier than Sept. 11 with the zodiac speedboat suicide bombing of USS Cole in Aden harbor. Seventeen American sailors died in that attack; at least two more would have but for the instantaneous assistance of French military emergency personnel based in Djibouti. (Why was there so little mention of this help at the time – let alone the national expression of thanks it so deserved? We and the French often jar each other’s sensibilities, but they were there in a heartbeat in October 2000.)

John Walker Lindh, the young American seeker-turned-soldier whom our government will try for conspiracy to kill American soldiers, studied here in Yemen before moving onward to the less purely academic domains of Islamist Pakistani madrassahs and Taliban Afghan frontlines. In Sana’a he lasted one week at an established, respected Arabic language school run in the Old City by an equally well-regarded former Peace Corps employee. Then Walker left, reportedly in an ideological huff over music and proximity to women for the more behaviorally rigorous Al-Iman (“The Faith”) University in the suburbs. Suffice it to say that Faith U. is now under close scrutiny.

Under even keener surveillance are the 50-odd Yemeni nationals currently “detained” at Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay. Information gleaned from them and from sources still in Afghanistan has helped pinpoint guilt for the Cole attack. Such new material also prompted the FBI Valentine’s Day terrorism alert on possible attacks in the United States and/or on U.S. interests in Yemen. Investigation is complicated by name confusion. The chief suspect-in-advance, a 24 year-old Yemeni, appears to have alternate versions of what we’d call his surname.

This vagueness in Muslim monikers isn’t limited to terrorists, and its remedy – nation-wide name changes – points to how far the Yemen government is going in its part of the War on Terror. Traditionally, Muslims had no surnames because, in local, small-scale, day-to-day life, none were necessary. More broadly known individuals, a small minority overall, were identified by patronymics, not unlike our own system. “Osama bin Laden” means Osama the son of a patrilineal line traceable back to an eponymous Laden. Trouble is, most Muslims are named from a small stock of Qoranic options – which means duplication. The variations on those options, even before transliteration into English, are numerous – which leads to alteration. Example: Muhammed, the most popular of all Muslim names, frequently appears in our Latin alphabet with o in place of u. Its meaning, “he who is praised or glorified,” remains clear, but computer listings get muddled. The Prophet’s name, furthermore, can morph into Mahmud or Ahmad. Then there are nicknames and, here as elsewhere, aliases.

Now Yemen has decided on a standardized four-name format, beginning with passports and then national ID cards. Your name will be your own, then your father’s, then his father’s, then his father’s. Maine male readers may try this process on their own identities. My apologies to female readers for not knowing what Yemen would have in store for you. (Perhaps Yemen itself does not yet know. Most women in Afghanistan live their entire lives in the bosom of one or two families … and thus need/want only one name.) This new policy is part of counter-terrorism, and so far all the identifiable Yemeni terrorists have been male.

Yemen, in the words of one who knows, has had “a significant al-Qaida node.” That word “node” gets it perfectly in this amorphous, transient, but utterly dedicated phenomenon of militant Islamism. Individuals come and go, but key link points endure, at least for a while. Yemen, with its vast areas governed not by tribes rather than central government, suits this connective purpose for al-Qaida and probably other groups. Thus it’s no wonder, in response, that so many top U.S. civilian and military officials have “noded” here in the past month: FBI Director, CENTCOM Commander in Chief, CENTCOM Commander of Special Operations, and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. The Yemen Times reports (complete with handsome, full color portrait) a Feb. 16 visit by our CIA director. No comment.

Some of the enemy node doubtless still exists. The United States is supplying equipment and training to help Yemen’s now committed leadership in unraveling this unwelcome knot. Cornered on Feb. 13, one al-Qaida operative unraveled himself, fatally, with a hand grenade. Two more suspects, both with long histories of to-ing and fro-ing between Yemen and Afghanistan, have surfaced here in recent weeks. According to the Yemen Observer, “an increasing number of tribes are joining the security forces in the manhunt.” Pictures have been circulated together with stern warnings of severe punishment for harboring suspects.

Counter-terrorism is our No. 1 short-to-medium term priority in Yemen. Until resolved, it must rank first also for the Yemeni government. Otherwise – given all those lonely, distant, currently un-policeable valleys – Yemen could go the way of terrorist breeding ground Afghanistan. But true security, for both Yemen and the US, will require attention not only to symptoms of terrorism but also to causes – or, if “causes” seems simplistic and exculpatory, at least to contributing factors.

These factors are largely rooted in frustration. What frustrations make terrorism attractive? How can those frustrations be constructively and imaginatively addressed? Here “development” becomes a top priority. The next column – Part II – describes what the United States is doing, in cooperation with Yemen, to lift the face of one country’s social, economic, and political development.

Meanwhile Mohammed Hamid Mohammed Al-Ahdal (alias Abu Asim) and Kaid Salim Talib Sufyan (alias Abu Ali) are still out there on the loose, presumably somewhere in the hinterlands of Yemen. Come to think of it, also still missing is Osama bin Laden, whose father emigrated from one of those Yemeni valleys – known in Arabic as wadis – in 1934. It’s called Wadi Da’wan, located way out east toward Oman. I was there late last month. Stay tuned for “Osama Country” in the Bangor Daily News.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.