Obama: No plan to deploy to Yemen

President Obama says he has no intention of sending American troops to Yemen or Somalia.

Obama told People magazine in an interview to be published Friday that he still believes the center of Al Qaeda activity is along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“I never rule out any possibility in a world that is this complex,” Obama said. However, he said, “in countries like Yemen, in countries like Somalia, I think working with international partners is most effective at this point.”

“I have no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground in these regions,” Obama said.

His comments on Yemen were echoed Sunday by two of his top generals.

“As far as any kind of boots on the ground there with respect to the United States, that’s not a possibility. We are not into those kinds of discussions,” Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on CNN.

In a separate interview on the same network, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Yemen’s foreign minister had made it “quite clear that Yemen does not want to have American ground troops there. And that’s a . . . good response for us to hear, certainly.”

“We would always want a host nation to deal with a problem itself,” he said. “We want to help. We’re providing assistance.”

Terrorism concerns are rising in Yemen, which sits at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula, and in Somalia, located along key global shipping routes to Mideast oil fields. U.S. officials say they believe the suspect in the Detroit airliner attack received Al Qaeda training in Yemen.