A second spectacular Al Qaeda attack on Yemeni government security buildings in less than a month is a worrisome sign that the terrorist group may be trying to take advantage of a country splitting at the seams. U.S. officials are concerned that Yemen, like neighboring Somalia, may become a failed state due to a myriad of challenges, including a separatist movement in the south, tensions over government corruption charges, competition for dwindling natural resources, and one of the fastest growing populations in the world.

Wells Running Dry

Water shortages have become commonplace in Yemen. Last year, the Sunday Times reported that Yemen could become the first modern state to run out of water, “providing a taste of the conflict and mass movement of populations that may spread across the world if population growth outstrips natural resources.”

Earlier this year, government forces came to blows with locals over a disputed water well license in the south. Twenty homes were damaged and two people were killed during the resulting eight day stand-off, according to Reuters.

The heavily populated highlands, home to the capital city of Sanaa, face particularly staggering scarcity. Wells serving the two million people in the capital must now stretch 2,600 – 3,200 feet below the surface to reach an aquifer and many have simply dried up, according to reports.

Yemeni Water and Environment Minister Abdul-Rahman al-Iryani told a Reuters reporter that the country’s burgeoning water crisis is “almost inevitable because of the geography and climate of Yemen, coupled with uncontrolled population growth and very low capacity for managing resources.”

Nineteen of Yemen’s 21 aquifers are being drained faster than they can recover, due to diesel subsidies that encourage excessive pumping, loose government enforcement of existing drilling laws, and growing population demand. Qat farmers in particular represent an excessive portion of water consumption; growing the popular narcotic accounts for 37 percent of agricultural water consumption. Meanwhile, according to a study by the World Food Programme this year, 32.1 percent of the population is food insecure and the country has become reliant on imported wheat.

Yemen’s other wells – the oil variety – have long been the country’s sole source of significant income. According to ASPO, oil has historically represented 70-75 percent of the government’s revenue. But recent exploration efforts have failed to uncover significant additions to Yemen’s reserves, and as a result oil exports have declined 56 percent since 2001. The steep decline has pushed Yemeni authorities to look to other natural resources, such as rare minerals and natural gas, but the infrastructure to support such projects will take significant time and money to develop.

The Fastest Growing Population in the Middle East

Despite the country’s limited resources, Yemen’s population of 22.8 million people is growing faster than any other country in the Middle East. According to projections from the Population Reference Bureau, by 2050, Yemen’s burgeoning population is expected to rival that of Spain.

Fully 45 percent of the current population is under the age of 15 – a troubling ratio that is expected to grow in the near future. The charts from the U.S. Census Bureau embedded below illustrate the dramatic growth of the country’s youth bulge from 1995 through 2030.

A poor record on women’s rights and a highly rural, traditional society contribute to these rapid growth scenarios. According to Population Action International’s Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, only 41 percent of Yemeni women are literate and their total fertility rate is well over the global average. A recent survey from Social Watch ranking education, economic, and political empowerment rated Yemen last in the world in gender equity. Yemeni scholar Sultana Al-Jeham pointed out during her Wilson Center presentation, “Yemeni Women: Challenges and Little Hope,” that there is only one woman in a national parliament of 301 members and that ambitious political women routinely face systematic marginalization.

A contributing factor is that 70 percent of Yemen’s population live outside of cities – far more than any other country in the region – making access to education and healthcare difficult, especially in the large swaths of land not controlled by the government.

External migration from war-torn east Africa adds to Yemen’s demographic strains. According to IRIN, approximately 700,000 Somali refugees currently reside in country, and that number may grow as the situation in Somalia continues to escalate. Within Yemen’s own borders, another 320,000 internally displaced people have fled conflict-ridden areas, further disrupting the country’s internal dynamics.

Corruption and Rebellion

Competition over resources, perceived corruption, and Al Qaeda activity have put considerable pressure on the Saleh regime in Sanaa. The government faces serious dissidence in both the north and the south, and the Los Angeles Times reports that talk of rebellion is both widespread and loud:

Much of southern and eastern Yemen are almost entirely beyond the central government’s control. Many Yemeni soldiers say they won’t wear their uniforms outside the southern port city of Aden for fear of being killed. In recent months, officials have been attacked after trying to raise the Yemeni flag over government offices in the south.

USAID rates Yemen’s effective governance amongst the lowest in the world (below the 25th percentile), reflecting Sanaa’s poor control and high levels of corruption. Some reports claim that up to a third of Yemen’s 100,000-man army is made up of “ghost soldiers” who do not actually exist but whose commanders collect their salaries and equipment to sell on the open market.

The West and Al Qaeda

In testimony before Congress earlier this year, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman called on the Yemeni government to take a comprehensive approach to “address the security, political, and economic challenges that it faces,” including its natural resource and demographic challenges.

The Yemeni government is poised to receive $150 million in bilateral military assistance from the United States. But some experts are critical of that approach: Dr. Mustafa Alani of the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center told UN Dispatch that, “you are not going to solve the terrorist problem in Yemen by killing terrorists,” calling instead for investing in economic development.

USAID has budgeted $67 million for development assistance, economic support, and training programs in Yemen for FY 2010 and has requested $106 million for FY 2011 (although about a third is designated for foreign military financing).

While Yemen’s Al Qaeda presence continues to captivate Western governments, it is the country’s other problems – resource scarcity, corruption, and demographic issues – that make it vulnerable to begin with and arguably represent the greater threat to its long-term stability. The United States and other developed countries should address these cascading problems in constructive ways, before the country devolves into a more dangerous state like Somalia or Afghanistan. In keeping with the tenets of the Obama administration’s National Security Strategy, an exercise in American soft power in Yemen might pay great dividends in hard power gains.

Sources: Association for the Study of Peak Oil – USA, Central Intelligence Agency, Congressional Research Service, Guardian, IRIN, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Population Action International, Population Reference Bureau, ReliefWeb, Reuters, Social Watch, Sunday Times, U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of State, UN Dispatch, USA Today, USAID, World Food Programme.

Photo Credit: “Yemen pol 2002” via Wikimedia Commons courtesy of the U.S. Federal Government and “Yemen youth bulge animation” arranged by Schuyler Null using images courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Data Base.

In Islamabad yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged longstanding Pakistani concerns that the U.S.’s ongoing mission in the country is solely military in nature. However, Clinton asserted at the opening of the second U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue that the “future demands a comprehensive human security, a security based on the day-to-day essentials like jobs, schools, clinics, food, water, fuel, equal access to justice, [and] strong, accountable public institutions.” To that end, she announced a $500 million assistance package earmarked largely for new agricultural and hydroelectric infrastructure development, as well as the construction of new hospitals and other health infrastructure.

Watch below or on MHz Worldview

According to last week’s guest on Dialogue, restoring environmental order and eradicating global poverty have become the two defining challenges of our era. The environmental horror unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico illustrates just how difficult it is to balance economic progress and protection of the planet. It provides an alarming example of how the search for resources and profit can lead to the plunder of nature. Host John Milewski speaks with Oxford University economist Paul Collier on his latest book, The Plundered Planet: Why We Must and How We Can Manage Nature for Global Prosperity. Scheduled for broadcast starting June 30th, 2010 on MHz Worldview channel.

Around the world, countries from Afghanistan to Papua New Guinea to the United States are taking part in their decadal census, leading the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) to select the theme “Everyone Counts” for World Population Day 2010, which was celebrated on July 11.

Everyone has the right to be counted, because “censuses and population data play a critical role in development and humanitarian response and recovery,” said UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid in her World Population Day message. Obaid added that “with quality data we can better track and make greater progress to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and promote and protect the dignity and human rights of all people,” especially among vulnerable populations like women, girls, the poor, and the marginalized.

USAID similarly supports quality data collection, which it says plays a critical role in advancing voluntary family planning in the developing world. For the last 25 years, USAID has funded the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program, which collaborates with national health ministries to collect data on family planning, child and maternal health, disease prevalence, and other health indicators.

This invaluable data is made freely available for public use, which can foster new research in the field and stimulate innovative approaches to addressing public health issues. Praising the DHS program, Gapminder Foundation Director Hans Rosling told a Wilson Center audience last year that “statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them.”

Accurate census counts are also important elements of “good governance, transparency and accountability,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon in his World Population Day message. “Population data helps leaders and policy-makers to make informed decisions about policies and programmes to reduce poverty and hunger, and advance education, health and gender equality,” he said.

But no one is suggesting that coming up with reliable population data is an easy task. As Sean Peoples and Elizabeth Leahy point out in the May/June 2009 issue of World Watch magazine, issuing population projections can be a risky business:

In the 2008 Revision of World Population Prospects, the UN Population Division projects that our planet will grow to 9.15 billion people by 2050. Yet this medium-variant projection is just one of several possible scenarios released in this latest round of number crunching. The low- and high-variant projections—7.96 billion and 10.5 billion, respectively—could instead become reality, given uncertainties in the developing world due to factors such as inconsistent data collection, weak health system infrastructure, and low government capacity.

The goal, then, is to make sure everyone counts.

The Indian government’s battle with Maoist and tribal rebels – which affects 22 of India’s 35 states and territories, according to Foreign Policy and in 2009 killed more people than any year since 1971 – has been largely ignored in the West. That should change, as South Asia’s “other” insurgency, fomenting in the world’s largest democracy and a key U.S. partner, offers valuable lessons about the role of resource management and stable development in preventing conflict.

Pakistan is at a major demographic crossroads. With a youth-heavy population of some 180 million and an annual population growth rate around 2 percent, the country’s population is projected to swell to roughly 335 million by mid-century. Such explosive growth raises major questions about Pakistan’s future, from looming food and water scarcity, to yawning inequalities in the nation’s educational and economic systems. Some warn that these problems threaten to drive a new generation of disaffected Pakistani youth toward political and religious radicalization.

Recently, I asked a number of leading Pakistani demographers visiting the Wilson Center how their country could best achieve more sustainable population growth rates and effectively harness the economic potential of Pakistani youth.

Educate Girls

Zeba Sathar, Pakistan country director for the Population Council in Islamabad, told me empowering girls through education represents one of the most important means of reducing the total fertility rate, which currently stands at four. “When children are educated—particularly when girls are educated—they take care of their fertility and their family size themselves,” Sathar said.

Yet securing educational opportunity for Pakistani girls has often been an uphill battle, largely due to entrenched social norms. Yasmeen Sabeeh Qazi, Karachi-based senior country adviser for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Population Program in Pakistan, pointed out that a traditional preference for male children in Pakistani society has meant girls do not often receive the same level of family resources as males. This phenomenon has historically fed gender inequality, she said.

“Since boys are preferred, girls are not given the same kind of attention and nutrition, especially in the poorer and less-educated families,” Qazi told me. “But as the education level goes up, you see that this divide starts narrowing.” For Qazi, one of the keys to heightening educational access for girls is to increase both the quantity and quality of schools in rural districts, where two-thirds of Pakistanis live.

Decentralize Family Planning Services

Others I spoke with emphasized improving access to reproductive health and family planning services in rural and urban areas. The federal government’s relatively recent move to delegate operational authority for family planning services to the provincial or district level has encouraged many, such as Dr. Tufail Muhammad with the Pakistan Pediatric Association’s Child Rights & Abuse Committee in Peshawar.

Muhammad said the ongoing decentralization—which he described as “a major paradigm shift”—is meant to increase ownership of population planning policies at the local level, and therefore lead to more effective implementation because “the responsibility will be directly with the provincial government.” Once capacity is established at the local level to design and implement those policies, Muhammad added, “supervisors, administrators, and policymakers will be very close to [family planning] services.”

Manage the “Youth Bulge”

Yet despite the fact that both the public and private sectors are taking steps to address Pakistan’s growth issues, the population crunch will intensify before it potentially eases. Even assuming that greater educational opportunity for girls and increased local control over family planning services help drop Pakistan’s total fertility rate, the sheer size of the current youth bulge—two-thirds of the country’s population is under age 30—means population issues will inform every aspect of Pakistani society for decades to come.

In discussing the current state of Pakistan’s education system, some speakers also asserted that the influence of madrassas, or religious schools, over the student-aged population has often been overstated. Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan’s former finance member and recent senior scholar at the Wilson Center, said during the panel discussion that inaccurate enrollment estimates created “the impression that the system is now dominated” by those institutions. He noted that more recent figures place madrassa enrollment at just five percent of the total student population.

With a majority of Pakistani students enrolled in regular public schools, he insisted that “public policy in Pakistan has to focus on public education” in order to prevent those students from slipping through the cracks. The problem, he added, was that “the education that they are receiving is pretty bad. It really does not prepare them to be active participants in the workforce and contribute to the economic development of the country.”

Still, most of the experts sounded optimistic about Pakistan’s potential to mitigate some of the adverse effects associated with the near-doubling of the country’s population during the next 40 years. By starting to more openly address an issue that the government and the powerful Pakistani media have long preferred to ignore, they seemed to agree the country is taking a big step in dealing head-on with its looming demographic challenges.

“I don’t look at the Pakistani population as a burden, but rather as an asset,” remarked Burki. “But it has to be managed.”

Photo Credit: “School Girls Talk in Islamabad,” courtesy of flickr user Documentally.

In the wake of The New York Times article detailing a potential mineral bonanza in Afghanistan, Senators Ben Cardin and Dick Lugar earlier this week published an op-ed in support of a bill that would create “an international standard for transparency in law” by requiring oil, gas, and mining industries to report amounts paid for drilling/mining rights in their SEC filings. A similar program, albeit a voluntary one, already exists – the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The senators, however, raised questions about the ability of EITI to ensure transparency and accountability of payments for future mining rights to Afghanistan’s government. Joining EITI was a “good first step,” they say, “but too many countries and companies remain outside this system.”

The European Union’s biofuel goal for 2020 “is a good example of setting a target…without really thinking through [the] secondary, third, or fourth order consequences,” said Alexander Carius, co-founder and managing director of Adelphi Research and Adelphi Consult. While the 2007-2008 global food crisis demonstrated that the growth of crops for fuels has “tremendous effects” in the developing world, analysis of these threats are underdeveloped and are not incorporated into climate change policies, he said. [Video Below]