With the Arab Spring affecting up to twenty nations, depending on the source, it is hard to know which warrants the most interest or concern. Victoria Clark, author of Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, argues that the United States needs to make understanding Yemen a priority or risk the cultivation of more terrorists. The New York Times recently reported on recent violence in Aden (where the attack on the USS Cole took place) committed by Islamist militia fighters, some connected with al-Qaeda. This seems to confirm Clark’s emphasis that we must pay attention to the tumultuous nation. Fears of the creation of a Taliban state in Yemen—that it will be a second Afghanistan—have increased since President Saleh fled, leaving protesters demanding a presidential council and a military struggling to keep the peace, as the Washington Post  notes.

Clark, who was born in Yemen, predicted in her 2010 book that Yemen’s growing poverty was “fueling a popular dissatisfaction”—in fact foreseeing the fall of Saleh. That she was correct in her prediction makes the rest of her work all the more chilling and vital. Saleh’s regime collapsing means that the second part of her prediction, that the Yemeni government will fall to an eagerly waiting al-Qaeda, could prove to be just as correct.

After the 2000 attack on the USS Cole by jihadists, Saleh did not have the power or—more importantly—the will to fight them. When President Bill Clinton left office in the wake of the terrorist attack, Saleh had to convince President George W. Bush that he was going to begin a crackdown on the jihadists. Even though the Yemeni president never meant to execute such a plan, he played the politics in order to escape the chance of U.S. invasion and gain access to “a few million dollars’ worth of military equipment and surveillance technology.” Meanwhile, he encouraged tribalism instead of political unity. He also permitted the transition of Tariq al-Fadhli (popularly viewed as the leader of Yemen’s first generation of jihadists and whom Clark was able to interview) to “establishment sheik.” Clark blames Saleh’s leadership as contributing to the rise of various strains of jihadism, terrorism, and insurgency in Yemen. She traces the disturbing evolution of jihadism in Yemen in hopes that we will not let it come to its likely conclusion.

You can download a free chapter from Yemen, as well as chapters from other books on Middle East current affairs, from YUP’s Crisis in the Arab World Chapter Sampler.