纽约时报杂志：热门变态传奇1.80私服也门可能成为下一个阿富汗

　　Within an hour, Ahmed said, the discussions expanded, and Ali al-Asowad, the aging sheik of the Abdullah tribe, was summoned from his house. The sun was rising over the arid brown hills around Rafadh and soon almost 100 people were sitting under the spreading boughs of an acacia tree for an emergency tribal meeting。

　　I met Ahmed several weeks later in Sana, the Yemeni capital, where he works part time as a bodyguard. By that time, Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch had claimed credit for a failed effort to detonate a bomb in a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas Day, igniting a global debate about whether Yemen was the next front in the war on terror. Yemen's once-obscure vital statistics were flashing across TV screens everywhere: it is the Arab world's poorest country, with a fast-growing and deeply conservative Muslim population of 23 million. It is running out of oil and may soon be the first country in the world to run out of water. The central government is weak and corrupt, hemmed in by rebellions and powerful tribes. Many fear that Al Qaeda is gaining a sanctuary in the remote provinces east of Sana, similar to the one it already has in Afghanistan and Pakistan。

　　Ahmed played a central role in the feud. In 2006, Ahmed's father and older brother were gunned down by men posing as customers at the father's market stall. Afterward, he told me, he drove the bullet-riddled bodies to the nearest police station to ask for justice. The police captain in charge waved him off dismissively, he said, telling him, "You tribes are always causing trouble - deal with it yourself."

　　Initially, Jifri said, the government refused to provide teachers, saying any town that was willing to accept help from Al Qaeda was beneath contempt. Finally, they relented。

　　But the tribesmen of Rafadh continued to shelter Quso and his men and not just because of their shared hatred of the government. Quso had offered to supply teachers for the village school. Local families knew he was with Al Qaeda but welcomed the news for a simple reason: there were no teachers in the school at all. "The people were saying, 'We would rather have our kids get an Al Qaeda education than be illiterate,' " Jifri told me. After hearing about Quso's offer, Jifri went to officials in Sana and delivered a blunt message: "Right now you have one Al Qaeda guy in Rafadh, tomorrow you will have 700."

　　官方而言，美国在也门的政策有两方面组成：发动空袭和突袭以帮助也门军队消灭基地组织团伙，另一方面加大发展和人道主义援助力度以解决极端化的根源问题。白宫六月底宣布将对也门的援助额提高三倍至4250万美元。考虑到也门的需要，这一数额仍太少。外交官承认，他们还没有想出如何解决也门政府执政能力低、腐败、经济等中心议题的方法。

　　Rafadh, several hundred miles southeast of the capital, is in some ways typical of the areas where Al Qaeda found refuge in Yemen. It is set among dry mountains populated by baboons, there are no paved roads and cars must travel laboriously along dirt tracks that wind among the hills. There is no public water supply or electricity and no functioning school. The valley was largely peaceful during the 1970s and '80s, when the socialist government that ruled South Yemen - a separate country until it united with the north in 1990 - tried to eradicate tribalism. But since then Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has encouraged tribal practices, and the feuds have returned. Rafadh itself has been devastated by a tribal conflict that has raged for years, killing at least a dozen people and wounding many more in an area with only a few hundred inhabitants。

　　Just before dawn on Dec. 24, an American cruise missile soared high over the southern coast of the Arabian peninsula, arced down toward the dark mountains above the Rafadh Valley in Yemen's Shabwa province and found its mark, crashing into a small stone house on a hillside where five young men were sleeping. Half a mile away, a 27-year-old Yemeni tribesman named Ali Muhammad Ahmed was awakened by the sound. Stumbling out of bed, he quickly dressed, slung his AK-47 over his shoulder and climbed down a footpath to the valley that shelters his village, two hours from the nearest paved road. He already sensed what had happened. A week earlier, an American airstrike killed dozens of people in a neighboring province as part of an expanded campaign against Al Qaeda militants. (Although the U.S. military has acknowledged playing a role in the airstrikes, it has never publicly confirmed that it fired the missiles。)

　　与此同时，美国越来越对基地组织在也门势力的壮大、萨利赫试图通过对话来解决问题的倾向感到担心。阿富汗和索马里的圣战分子据称正前往也门。美军驻中东地区司令彼得雷乌斯将军去年夏天访问了也门首都萨那，帮助也门反恐部队的美军教官数量也在悄悄地增加。一个美国代表团去年秋天会见了萨利赫，向他展示了基地组织企图对他和他的亲属下手的确凿证据。也门政府在这之后开始对基地组织目标采取更为积极的打击行动。美国对也门基地组织目标的空中无人机打击行动也于去年12月开始。