Remember Yemen? For a few short weeks this winter, after the Yemen-trained Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried (and failed) to blow up a commercial airliner in Detroit, the troubled country found itself under a rare media spotlight. Journalists descended on the capital, Sanaa; pundits offered advice for fighting al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ending Yemen's two insurgencies. Congress called hearings. Yemen's foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, was a regular guest on international news networks.
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The country was the new Afghanistan, many said, the latest worrisome safe haven for al Qaeda and its affiliates. U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman declared it "tomorrow's war."
And now: nothing. Most of the reporters who landed in Yemen shortly after the failed bombing have left the country. If you search Google News for "Yemen," you'll get 24,100 results for January. For February? Just 593 -- many of them wire stories or items from the handful of blogs that regularly cover the country. The contrast is even starker on TV news, where the word "Yemen" was uttered exactly twice on U.S. evening newscasts in February, both times in the context of the bombing plot.
In Washington, too, the discussion has largely stopped: The congressional hearings and think-tank discussions have ended, and Yemen only merited mention at one State Department press briefing in February.
The Abdulmutallab plot convinced Americans that they should pay attention to Yemen -- but as quickly as it arrived in the public consciousness, it disappeared. The few weeks of media attention did little to dispel popular misconceptions of the country, so often portrayed as a drug-addled nation of radical terrorist sympathizers. Journalists who should probably know better often reinforced the myths: Thomas Friedman's two Yemen columns in February recounted a khat chew and fretted about Osama bin Laden greeting him at Sanaa's airport. The brief public debate also failed to answer a number of key policy questions or clarify the United States' often muddled Yemen policy.
The lack of attention now is unfortunate because -- despite the media's silence -- quite a bit has happened in Yemen over the last few weeks. The Zaidi Shiite rebels in northern Yemen -- the Houthis -- agreed to cease-fires with both the Yemeni and Saudi governments. The rebels have taken steps to implement both truces, releasing most of their Saudi prisoners of war and clearing roadblocks from northern Yemen.
But though the fighting has largely stopped, reconstruction has yet to begin. Northern Yemen's infrastructure is shattered after years of war: The fighting has demolished "7,180 houses, 1,412 farms, 267 mosques, 94 schools, eight medical centers, four police stations, three court buildings, three other government facilities and two religious centers," according to an estimate published in January in Small Wars Journal. A quarter-million people have been displaced in Yemen, and many have been displaced in villages in Saudi Arabia along the border.
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