Transcript
KENNETH POLLACK: Good morning. Welcome to the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. For those of you who may not know me, I am Ken Pollack and I am the Director of the Saban Center. I am delighted to see you all here in D.C. to talk about what has become a very important topic, one that we have been concerned about here for some time but which has burst onto the national stage in just the last few weeks. I'd also like to extend a very special welcome to our guests in Doha, Qatar. We are delighted to have our Brookings Doha Center doing a reciprocal meeting at the exact same time with members of the audience there who will be joining in at various points in time. We're thrilled to have you all with us. I hope it's a pleasant evening in Qatar.
As for Yemen and as for the topic of today, if you had the TV on at all on Christmas Day, whether it was watching basketball, watching football or just watching the Yule Log, you will know that of course we almost suffered a very nasty terror incident on Christmas Day, the infamous Undie Bomber. Of course, this led to a much greater uproar about the potential for terrorist attack by al-Qaeda operatives coming out of Yemen. What we wanted to do today was to dig a bit deeper into this story and to address the larger questions of Yemen, of the resurgence of al-Qaeda, of its presence in Yemen and of the wider war against al-Qaeda.
I am joined today by a terrific panel to discuss all of these different issues. Immediately to my right is Daniel Byman, who is a senior fellow here at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and is also the director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown. As many of you know, Dan is a frequent author, having written several books on terrorism and appears widely in the U.S. media on the topic. To Dan's right is Greg Johnsen, who joins us from Princeton University, where he is in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Greg is an expert on Yemen, having done a Fulbright scholarship there, and is a frequent author on Yemen, both on the relationship of al-Qaeda to Yemeni politics and on the wider issue engulfing Yemen today. Greg also has a new article coming out in Foreign Policy on the topic, and obviously for those of you who don't get satisfied by everything that you hear today, that may be a good place to go for some additional background material on the subject. Finally, to Greg's right is our Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel. Bruce of course joined the Saban Center for Middle East Policy after a very long and distinguished career in the U.S. government. He served at the Central Intelligence Agency, where Bruce's most important and most difficult responsibility was supervising myself and Dan Byman. After that, Bruce served at the Department of Defense, at the National Security Council, and since coming to us at Brookings has done extensive work on the subject of terrorism, on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and on almost everything else having to do with the Middle Eastern and South Asian political scene.
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