On the combined Al Qeada/Taliban front we find this:
Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act (
LINK in Title)
Is al-Qaeda network as strong as ever?
SAEED SHAH
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
September 10, 2008 at 10:33 PM EDT
ISLAMABAD — Seven years after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda has spread its violent tentacles across Pakistan, while its ally, the Taliban, have staged a bloody comeback in Afghanistan.
The radical Islamist group and its local partners have destabilized nuclear-armed Pakistan, and largely taken over its northwest fringe. Afghanistan has been sent into a tailspin of violence. While al-Qaeda was beaten back in Iraq after exacting a heavy toll on human life, its influence is now entrenched in Pakistan and Afghanistan, from where it is feared that terror strikes against the West are still being planned.
Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain at large, probably moving between Pakistan's tribal area and adjacent regions of Afghanistan, and they continue to use the news media to spread their message of hate.
U.S. President George W. Bush's announcement this week that thousands more troops would be deployed to Afghanistan was an acknowledgment that the mission there is in peril. The south and east of the country are firmly in the grip of an insurrection that took hold over the past three years, reversing the initial coalition victory in Afghanistan soon after 9/11.
“We've eliminated a lot of important players [in al-Qaeda] but all those players have been substituted,” said Christine Fair, an analyst at Rand Corp., a private U.S. research organization. “There's no question that Pakistan is far less secure than before the launch of the global war on terrorism. It is unquestionable that we are failing in Afghanistan. The Taliban are expanding with alarming success.”
After Pakistan joined Washington's anti-terror fight, it experienced for the first time attacks against its army, ISI intelligence agency and the Frontier Corps paramilitary force that patrols the tribal belt. Established Islamic extremist groups in Pakistan, which had previously been regionally focused and posed little danger to the country as a whole, have taken on al-Qaeda's ideology of global jihad, which means that they now also target their own country.
And new militant groups have developed in Pakistan, most notably Tehreek-i-Taliban, a movement with thousands of warriors that now controls much of the tribal belt that runs along the Afghan border. By the admission of Pakistan's Interior Ministry chief, Tehreek-i-Taliban has been taken over by al-Qaeda. During the past year, Pakistan has been rocked by dozens of suicide bombings, more and deadlier assaults than seen even in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda has also successfully colonized numerous other extremist groups in Pakistan, such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which have cells across the country that it can use to carry out attacks. Some of these groups had, or retain, murky relationships with Pakistan's intelligence agencies, which means that al-Qaeda benefits from an element of state patronage. But Pakistan's ability to manage these groups, once used to fight proxy wars in India and Afghanistan, has slipped from its grasp since its alliance with the United States drove the militants into al-Qaeda's embrace.
“They [militant groups] have got out of control,” said Muhammed Amir Rana, director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, an independent think tank in Islamabad. “A few of them are involved in sectarian activities, some of them are [fighting] in Kashmir, everything has been scattered. Officials are very disturbed, they have no strategy now for dealing with them.”
The closeness of a key Afghan Taliban commander to al-Qaeda was shown this week when a U.S. missile struck the home, in Pakistan's tribal territory, of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a veteran jihadist whose network has staged some of the most daring recent attacks on coalition forces. Among the dead were reportedly four al-Qaeda operatives, including two key lieutenants.
But while Pakistan has been thrown into chaos, and life in Afghanistan is much more insecure today than it was even under Taliban rule in the 1990s, there has been no attack on the U.S. mainland since 2001, a vindication for some, whatever the price in other countries.
“Al-Qaeda demonstrated the potential on 9/11 for being a strategic threat to the United States,” said Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis at Stratfor, a private U.S. intelligence firm. “Al-Qaeda is now down to a tactical-level threat. The fact that there hasn't been a follow-up attack in the United States speaks volumes of the success of the United States against this transnational, non-state actor.”
But rising anti-Americanism across much of the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrant communities in the West continues to inspire recruits to the radicals' cause. And while most remain outside of any sort of central control of al-Qaeda, local terror cells inspired by Mr. bin Laden have staged murderous attacks in London and Madrid, and numerous other plots have been caught before they could be executed.
“Al-Qaeda today is as dangerous a threat as ever. It has a secure safe haven in Pakistan, a revived ally in the Taliban and can operate on a global basis,” said former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, author of The Search for Al Qaeda. “I think it remains a strategic threat, and those who argue it is not are underestimating it.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
More at LINK, including Comments.
