“These drone strikes are stupid policy,” said a secular female activist from Taizz, a city that is considered Yemen’s intellectual capital. “Every time they kill Yemeni civilians they create more hatred of America.”

The youth activists sounded a lot like residents in a new Washington Post feature about how the dramatic increase in U.S. drone strikes in southern Yemen — at least 21 attacks since January — is breeding anger and sympathy for al-Qaida. The Post primarily quoted tribal leaders in areas under attack or residents whose loved ones were killed by drones. In contrast, the activists I met hailed from cities far from the militant safe-havens that drones are targeting. Most were political moderates eager for reforms — just the sort of potential leaders the U.S. should be cultivating as it seeks to steer Yemen toward a rights-respecting democracy after three decades under its autocratic former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

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For Fawza, thwarted marital bliss has become the symbol of his rotten existence since U.S. forces scooped him up in Pakistan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Fawza, who had gone to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against their domestic rivals long before 9/11 but never saw combat, was locked up by the Americans as part of "the worst of the worst," and then abruptly sent back to Yemen in 2006. Like most of the 14 Yemenis shipped home from Guantánamo so far, he's been stigmatized in his own country as a terrorist ever since, though he was never charged with a crime.

"Guantánamo has destroyed a big part of my life," he told me in a soft voice over cups of syrupy tea in an office in Yemen. (I have given Fawza a pseudonym and kept our exact meeting place secret to spare him additional grief.) "But I have done nothing wrong."

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