Tag Archive for ‘Osama bin Laden’ at Asian Window

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Tag Archive for 'Osama bin Laden'

Rings of terror: A guide to Al Qaeda’s leadership

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on February 17, 2010

in Af-Pak and Terrorism

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Lydia Khalil in Foreign Policy:

1. Al Qaeda’s original leadership. The first group is made up of al Qaeda’s original leadership — and it is shriveling up like the roster of the local VFW. This crew still has a few big names: still-at-large figures like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Yahya al-Libi. But the original core of al Qaeda is shrinking fast. No one knows the exact composition of this highest-level group, nor its exact whereabouts. But the best intelligence suggests the members live somewhere in the vicinity of Pakistan.

2. Al Qaeda’s regional subsidiaries. Next, there are members of al Qaeda’s regional subsidiaries, local terrorist or insurgent groups that have declared allegiance to the group. This includes outfits such as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ansar al-Sunnah in Iraq, al-Shabab in Somalia, and segments of the Taliban. These organizations do not take operational direction from al Qaeda’s core, but accept broad strategic guidance. They are often critical to al Qaeda’s efforts to expand its jihad throughout the globe. Al Qaeda, in turn, exploits these proxy groups, often mired in regional conflicts, to co-opt nationalist struggles into its broader narrative. Often, the senior leaders of these regional insurgent-cum-terrorist groups are in contact with original senior al Qaeda leadership. More:

My Life with the Taliban

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on January 25, 2010

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Abdul Salam Zaeef was a founder of the Taliban and his memoir, My Life with the Taliban, offers a fascinating if dispiriting insight into the movement. From The Telegraph:

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a founder of the Taliban in 1994 and a minister during its short-lived regime, has much to say about the wars in Afghanistan and the roles he has played in them. As a teenage refugee from the Soviet invasion, he joined the mujahideen, and a few years later was fighting alongside Mullah Omar when the future Taliban leader lost an eye.

He has written a fascinating account of his own remarkable life which gives real insight into why the Taliban was formed, what motivates it, and what it is now trying to achieve. It is what he has to say about hopes of ending the current war, however, that will be of most interest to the spooks and diplomats in Kabul, Washington and London; they will have been hoping that Mullah Zaeef would point the way towards a negotiated end to the fighting. But he does not, and what he has to say suggests that ending the bloodshed could prove extremely difficult, if possible at all. More:

Bin Laden: Digital mug shot

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on January 15, 2010

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[Digitally enhanced photo of Osama bin-Laden released by the US Department ofDefense and Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] which shows an age-progression imageof Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden. Click here]

From The Times:

Osama bin Laden has aged a little since he was last seen in September 2007 but has put on little or no weight in the arid surroundings of the Afghan-Pakistani border — that, at least, is the assumption made by FBI forensic artists as the agency continues its relentless search for the al-Qaeda leader.

Digitally enhanced photographs have been released showing how he might look today; one in his traditional outfit, the other showing him with trimmed beard and Western clothing.

The ”age-progression images” were produced in the latest effiort to find the elusive al-Qaeda leader. FBI forensic artists modified bin Laden’s facial features to show what they might look like today. More:

Growing up bin Laden

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on January 12, 2010

in Books and Terrorism

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In The National, a review of a new memoir of Osama bin Laden by his wife and son, “Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World” by Jean Sasson, Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden:

“I remember staring into his kindly eyes, tartly thinking to myself that my cousin was shyer than a virgin under the veil.” Thus Najwa Ghanem recalls a meeting with 16-year old Osama bin Laden shortly before she became his first wife: “My life progressed from childhood into adulthood by the end of that evening. I was a married woman in every way.”

It’s anyone’s guess how much money has gone into the quest for information about Osama bin Laden since he rose to prominence in the mid-1990s. Now, for less than Dh100, we can get details on his personal life that are more reliable than all previous works combined. The publication of Growing up bin Laden is astonishing, not because of its tame bedroom confessions, but because nobody in the bin Laden family has ever spoken publicly about Osama before. The development is so unlikely that one inevitably wonders: is this for real?

The sheer number of bin Laden biographies published in the past decade leaves room for doubt. A few of these books have been serious, such as Jonathan Randal’s Osama and Peter Bergen’s The Osama bin Laden I Know. However, the majority are filled with inaccuracies and in some cases sensationalist fabrications. In one dubious book, Adam Robinson wrote that bin Laden was an avid Arsenal FC supporter who regularly attended matches at Highbury stadium in the 1990s. In another, a woman named Kola Boof claimed – falsely, by most accounts – to have been raped by bin Laden in Morocco in 1996. And the fake rumour that bin Laden was a playboy in 1970s Beirut has proved remarkably persistent. More:

Osama bin Laden: sunflower enthusiast with a passion for fast cars

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on October 18, 2009

in Terrorism and Women

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Osama bin Laden’s first wife has given a revealing insight into the complex character of the man behind the world’s most wanted terrorist. From The Telegraph, London:

Najwa bin Laden has published a memoir claiming he was a contradiction of personality traits.

She reveals he was a disciplinarian who would beat his children for showing too many teeth when they smiled, but maintained a passion for sunflowers and fast cars his first wife has said.

He also banned the use of electrical appliances in his home and tried to toughen up his sons by making them climb desert mountains without water.

Details from the home life of the founder of al Qaeda have emerged in the book Najwa has written with his fourth son Omar.
Growing Up Bin Laden charts his journey from teenage newly-wed to the face of international terrorism, revealing along the way that he was fond of mangos and the BBC.

Alongside details of his domestic life, the memoir portrays a man who became increasingly severe as he was pursued by the Western powers. More:

Eight Years After 9/11: Why Osama bin Laden Failed

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on September 13, 2009

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From TIME:

He may have eluded justice and the long reach of the world’s most powerful military force; his followers may (and probably will) strike again at some point in the future, near or distant; but history’s verdict on Osama bin Laden has been in for some time now: al-Qaeda failed.

The 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington – like those that preceded them in East Africa in 1998 and those that followed in London, Madrid, Bali and other places – were tactical successes in that they managed to kill hundreds of innocent people, grab the world’s headlines and briefly dominate the nightmares of Western policymakers. But the strategy those attacks were a part of has proved to be fundamentally flawed. Terrorism departs from the rules of war by deliberately targeting the innocent, but it shares the basic motivational force of conventional warfare – “the pursuit of politics by other means,” as Clausewitz wrote. More:

Former CIA agent’s hunt for bin Laden in Pakistani badlands

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on September 9, 2009

in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Terrorism

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Tim Reid from Washington in the Times:

Art Keller, a blond, blue-eyed CIA agent, sits inside a decrepit building deep inside al-Qaeda territory, staring at his computer screen. He is forbidden by his Pakistani minders from venturing out into the badlands of Waziristan to help to find and kill the world’s most wanted man.

He is sick and exhausted, and suffering from food poisoning. Back home in the US his father is dying of cancer. The plumbing is basic, the heat intense – the generator has failed again. He pores over cables looking for any scrap of information – an intercepted phone call, an aerial photograph – that might finally end the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

The fruitless search has essentially been outsourced by the US to a network of Pashtun spies run by the Pakistani intelligence services.

Mr Keller was one of an estimated 50 to 100 CIA agents and special operations officers whose mission for the past eight years has been to find and kill bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders in the hostile and forbidding Pakistani border region, where he is believed to be hiding. More:

Al-Qaeda’s focus has moved from UK, but the threat has not gone away: Andy Hayman, former Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations at Scotland Yard, in the Times:

Osama in America

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on July 5, 2009

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Steve Coll in the New Yorker:

The question of whether Osama bin Laden has ever visited the United States, a subject on which I have expended an unhealthy amount of energy in the course of various journalistic and biographical research, has now seemingly been settled. Osama was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Indiana and Los Angeles, among other places. He had a favorable encounter with an American medical doctor; he also reportedly met in Los Angeles with his spiritual mentor of the time, the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam. All this is according to a forthcoming book by Osama’s first wife, Najwa Bin Laden, and his son Omar Bin Laden, to be published in the autumn by St. Martin’s Press.

First, some context for the book’s disclosures:

In the autumn of 2005, while conducting research in Saudi Arabia for the book that became “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” I met a Saudi journalist named Khaled Batarfi, who had been a neighbor and friend of Osama Bin Laden in their teenage years. During one of our interviews, Batarfi offered an account of Osama’s early travels-to London, to Africa on Safari, and to the United States-that was suggestive of a young man who had more direct experience of the West than was generally understood. Batarfi’s account of Osama’s American trip was particularly striking. In December of that year, I wrote a story for this magazine about the private high school Osama had attended in Jedda, and how he was first introduced to the tenets of radical Islamic politics. In that story, I also reported Batarfi’s on-the-record but unconfirmed account of Osama’s visit to America; Batarfi believed the travel had occurred not long before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979. U.S. customs and immigration records from the relevant period had been routinely destroyed-and so the question of whether Osama had personal experience of America, and what that experience might have been, remained elusive. (Bin Laden has never referred to any trip to this country in his writings or statements.) While I found Batarfi to be credible, a single-source account, based on hearsay, could hardly be regarded as satisfactory. More:

Finding Osama: Eight years and counting …

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on June 25, 2009

in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Terrorism

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Osama bin Laden is believed to be in mountains on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. But is he any nearer to being captured? Julian Borger and Declan Walsh in the Guardian:

He is still alive. That is the one thing that can be said about Osama bin Laden these days with any degree of certainty. At least, he was still alive at the beginning of the month, when an audio tape was delivered to al-Jazeera bearing words in a familiar voice.

The tape, aired by al-Jazeera on 3 June, is genuine, according to British and US intelligence, and his references to recent events are proof that it is contemporary. It is a muttered sermon, mainly devoted to decrying Barack Obama on the day the new US president arrived in Saudi Arabia on the start of a Middle East tour – to sow “seeds of hatred”, Bin Laden claimed.

But that is where the certainty ends, the facts peter out and the guesswork begins. We do not know what he looks like these days. His last 10 messages have been audio only. There has been no video of him since September 2007, and even that raised questions over exactly when it had been made. More:

[Image: FBI Most Wanted]

On the trail of Osama bin Laden

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on March 12, 2009

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Geographers at the University of California, Los Angeles, believe that they have a good idea of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts – assuming he is still alive. Using scientific tools, they have zeroed in on three buildings in Parachinar in Pakistan. They have published their analysis in MIT International Review also submitted it to the FBI.

From Boston Globe: Using satellite images, the researchers traced concentric circles at 10 kilometer intervals around Tora Bora. The scientists then charted possible urban hideaways within a 20-kilometer radius of his former Afghan lair. Parachinar seemed most likely. It’s accessible by mountain trail from Tora Bora while offering urban anonymity, has dependable electricity (as measured by nighttime satellite images of brightness), and offers effective insulation against US troops – Pakistan’s tribal districts are notoriously hostile, both in terms of terrain and local temperament.

From Scientific American: They fingered the spots based on two theories on the distribution of biological species. One of them, the so-called distance-decay theory, states that the similarity and correlation between species at two locations decreases as the distance between them increases. As such, the geographers figure bin Laden can’t have gone far-he is believed to have fled Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region at the end of 2001-if he wished to remain on similar terrain in a familiar cultural environment.

More also in Popular Mechanics. Click here to download pdf

Oh the humanity

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on December 29, 2008

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Robyn Creswell contemplates the provocations of Faisal Devji, whose fascinating new book, “The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics,” upturns conventional accounts of al Qa’eda by investigating ‘the rich inner life of jihad’. From the National:

To Faisal Devji, Gandhi is the embodiment of a kind of humanitarian sacrifice, and ‘would probably have welcomed the comparison between his methods and those of Osama bin Laden, whose practices he might have seen as the evil perversion of his own.’ Courtesy Corbis

To Faisal Devji, Gandhi is the embodiment of a kind of humanitarian sacrifice, and ‘would probably have welcomed the comparison between his methods and those of Osama bin Laden, whose practices he might have seen as the evil perversion of his own.’ Courtesy Corbis

The field of jihadi studies, situated at the crossroads of policy-making, intelligence work, journalism and academic research, sprang up almost overnight following the attacks of September 11. It now boasts all the infrastructure that comes with the discovery of a glittering new frontier, as fascinating in its way as superstrings or Martian ice. Conferences, courses and research centres are devoted to explaining the intricacies of holy war. Amidst this mushroom patch of interlocking institutions and individuals, the work of Faisal Devji – an assistant professor at the New School for Social Research in New York – sticks out like a rare flower. Devji’s studies, which focus on the doings and sayings of al Qa’eda, are so at odds with what passes for common sense in this field that one sometimes wonders if he isn’t merely thumbing his nose at received wisdom. In his latest book, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, he suggests that al Qa’eda has in some sense inherited the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. He also argues that the ideology of jihad is a “humanitarian” one, and that the militants of al Qa’eda are “the intellectual peers” of environmentalists and pacifists. What does he mean by such provocations?

The Terrorist in Search of Humanity is in many ways a sequel to Devji’s equally provocative 2005 book, Landscapes of the Jihad. In that work, rather than concentrating on the spectacular violence that has been the focus of most experts, Devji argues that al Qa’eda’s real achievement is to have created “a new kind of Muslim”, one whose attachments to the traditions and institutions of Islam are radically unlike those of his predecessors. The new militancy cannot be understood by inserting it into a now-familiar history of Islamic extremism (Wahhabism, Sayyid Qutb, the Taliban, etc.), because what is significant about the jihadis of today is their relation to the present, or even to the future. “Al Qa’eda’s importance in the long run,” Devji writes, “lies not in its pioneering a new form of networked militancy… but instead in its fragmentation of traditional structures of Muslim authority within new global landscapes.”

What do you mean, bin Laden doesn’t exist?

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on November 6, 2008

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Barack Obama must rethink America’s muddled strategy in Pakistan if he is to defeat the threat from militants. Anthony Loyd in the Times:

As Barack Obama’s face shone from a huge wide screen television into the officers’ mess at a Pakistani army fortress in Khar, in the tribal area of Bajaur, the room shook to heavy artillery blasting from gun positions at the gates. Barely a mile up the road Pakistani troops traded fire with Taleban raiding parties.

“I want to increase non-military aid,” Mr Obama, interviewed on CNN, announced to a handful of officers between explosions. “But we also have to help make the case that the biggest threat to Pakistan right now is not India, which has been their historical enemy, it is actually the militants within their own borders.”

The officers did not look overly convinced, despite the shenanigan outside.

Flirting with Palin earns Pakistani president a fatwa

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on October 2, 2008

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From The Christian Science Monitor [via 3quarksdaily]:

NYTimes

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska met with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan at the Intercontinental Hotel in New York. Photo: NYTimes

With some overly friendly comments to Gov. Sarah Palin at the United Nations, Asif Ali Zardari has succeeded in uniting one of Pakistan’s hard-line mosques and its feminists after a few weeks in office.

A radical Muslim prayer leader said the president shamed the nation for “indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt.”

Feminists charged that once again a male Pakistani leader has embarrassed the country with sexist remarks. And across the board, the Pakistani press has shown disapproval.

More here and below:

Pakistani Leader Repeats a Long Debunked Hoax

From The New York Times:

The president of Pakistan apparently believes an Internet hoax alleging that Oliver L. North warned of the dangers posed by Osama bin Laden 20 years ago.

President Asif Ali Zardari, in an interview with the Fox News Channel that was televised on Tuesday, claimed that Mr. North installed a security system for his home in the late 1980s “because he was ‘scared of Osama bin Laden.’ “

That rumor emerged on the Internet shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has been thoroughly debunked by a number of reliable sources, including the United States Senate’s Web site and Mr. North himself.

The future of ‘the long war’

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on August 14, 2008

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Want to know what western elites are thinking about global terrorism? Head to the Kennedy School of Government. Iason Athanasiadis in The Guardian:

A course about al-Qaida and the rise of international terrorism was one of the most popular last term at Harvard’s elite Kennedy School of Government. The international students crowding into the school’s largest auditorium for the twice-weekly classes were a cross-section of Americans, Europeans and Middle Easterners, including current members of the US army and intelligence community on sabbatical leave. Simply attending it gave me a sense of where tomorrow’s western and westernised elites stand vis-a-vis “the long war”.

The instructor for the course was Peter Bergen, the journalist who bagged Osama bin Laden’s first face-to-face interview on CNN. In the 1990s, long before Islamist activism dominated the thinking of western intelligence organisations, Peter Bergen interviewed several jihadist in the Middle East and Europe about their views. His book, The Osama Bin Laden I Know, made him sought-after in the aftermath of September 11, as his international relations colleagues scrambled to shed backgrounds in Soviet studies and switch to the geopolitics of the Middle East. Bergen became a transnational terrorism analyst who challenged the tendency to lump all terrorists into one group. Instead, he classified them by generation, regional provenance and the conflict that shaped their intellectual outlook.

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The heretic

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on July 13, 2008

in Religion and Terrorism

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How Al-Qaeda’s mastermind turned his back on terror. Lawrence Wright in The Observer:

In May 2007, a fax arrived at the London office of the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat from a shadowy figure in the radical Islamist movement who went by many names. Born Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, he was the former leader of the Egyptian terrorist group al-Jihad, and known to those in the underground mainly as Dr Fadl. Members of al-Jihad became part of the original core of al-Qaeda; among them was Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant. Fadl was one of the first members of al-Qaeda’s top council. Twenty years ago, he wrote two of the most important books in modern Islamist discourse; al-Qaeda used them to indoctrinate recruits and justify killing. Now Fadl was announcing a new book, rejecting al-Qaeda’s violence. ‘We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that,’ Fadl wrote in his fax, which was sent from Tora Prison, in Egypt.

Fadl’s fax confirmed rumours that imprisoned leaders of al-Jihad were part of a trend in which former terrorists renounced violence. His defection posed a terrible threat to the radical Islamists, because he directly challenged their authority. ‘There is a form of obedience that is greater than the obedience accorded to any leader, namely, obedience to God and His Messenger,’ Fadl wrote, claiming thathundreds of Egyptian jihadists from various factions had endorsed his position.

[Photo: Osama Bin Laden walks with Afghanis in the Jalalabad area in this 1989 photo. Photograph: EPA / The Observer]

Is Al Qa’ida in pieces?

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on June 22, 2008

in Politics and Religion

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It continues to mount brutally effective operations around the world, but from Saudi Arabia to the streets of east London, hardline Islamists are turning against Al-Qa’ida in unprecedented numbers. Is the global terror network self-destructing? A special report by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in The Independent:

Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman’s arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard – 17 hours in a Toyota pick-up truck, bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by Bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since al-Qa’ida had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an aristocratic family marginalised by Qaddafi, had known Bin Laden from their days fighting the communist Afghan government in the early 1990s, a period when Benotman established himself as a leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

The night of Benotman’s arrival, Bin Laden threw a lavish banquet in the main hall of his compound, an unusual extravagance for the frugal al-Qa’ida leader. As Bin Laden circulated, making small talk, large dishes of rice and platters of whole roasted lamb were served to some 200 jihadists, many of whom had come from around the Middle East. “It was one big reunification,” Benotman recalls. “The leaders of most of the jihadist groups in the Arab world were there and almost everybody within al-Qa’ida.”

‘Osama bin Laden is planning something for the US election’

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on May 6, 2008

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US author Steve Coll spent years looking into Osama bin Laden’s family. Now, his new book, The Bin Ladens, provides a unique insight into the clan. SPIEGEL spoke with him about where the terrorist might be hiding, how his father got his start, and the unique romantic liaisons pursued by one of his brothers:

SPIEGEL: Where is bin Laden now?

Coll: I am firmly convinced that he is on Pakistani soil, and I would even venture to say where: in the mountainous region of North Waziristan, near the city of Miram Shah. Bin Laden knows the area like the back of his hand. It is controlled by the Haqqani clan, in which he has deep roots. Pakistan’s army doesn’t dare enter the region.

SPIEGEL: Do you think he’s in some sort of al-Qaida camp where he can play a role coordinating the group’s activities?

Coll: Osama probably moves from place to place, protected by friends — which doesn’t mean that someone won’t betray him one of these days. And he apparently has access to modern means of communication, like satellite TV. The Miram Shah region, unlike rural Afghanistan, is further developed in this respect than we in the West generally assume. I imagine that Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy, isn’t in the same place as bin Laden.

Yak polo loses out to CIA outpost

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on May 2, 2008

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From The National:

Chitral, Pakistan: There are new casualties in the hunt for Osama bin Laden: yak-mounted, polo-playing herdsmen who have been told to shift their annual competition from a remote corner of Pakistan for “security reasons”.

Pakistan’s intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence, has ordered polo players to move their contest to a neighbouring district because the current site is too near a secret CIA surveillance post.

The hugely popular festival takes place in the Hindu Kush mountains – on what is probably the highest polo ground in the world – in Chagril, on the ancient Silk Road bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan corridor.

Rising leader for next phase of Al Qaeda’s war

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on April 4, 2008

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The growing prominence of Abu Yahya al-Libi tracks Al Qaeda’s emphasis on information in its war with the West. In The New York Times:

On the night of July 10, 2005, an obscure militant preacher named Abu Yahya al-Libi escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan and rocketed to fame in the world of jihadists.

The breakout from the Bagram Air Base by Mr. Libi and three cellmates – they picked a lock, dodged their guards and traversed the base’s vast acreage to freedom – embarrassed American officials as deeply as it delighted the jihadist movement. In the nearly three years since then, Mr. Libi’s meteoric ascent within the leadership of Al Qaeda has proved to be even more troublesome for the authorities.

Mr. Libi, a Libyan believed to be in his late 30s, is now considered to be a top strategist for Al Qaeda.

How Osama bin Laden’s family grew rich, powerful and divided

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on April 3, 2008

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In The washington Post, Milton Viorst reviews “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century“, by Steve Coll:

Change the names and locations, and Steve Coll’s marvelous book about the bin Laden family would begin like a familiar American saga. An illiterate youth arrives in a land of opportunity from his impoverished homeland and, by dint of ambition, talent and hard work, becomes immensely rich and powerful. He collects properties, airplanes, luxury cars and women — tastes he passes on to his sons. He earns a niche in the pantheon of great builders of his adopted country.

The youth is Mohamed bin Laden, justly venerated in Saudi Arabia. But collective memory plays funny tricks, and in the West he will be permanently remembered as the father of Osama. The bin Ladens, though their Horatio Alger story overlaps Western experience, emerge as unmistakably Middle Eastern — to the point of being torn asunder by today’s religious struggles. Coll, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post managing editor, leaves the psychology to his readers. He prefers writing on economics and politics, leavening them with anecdotes and gossip; the result is a fascinating panorama of a great family, presented within the context of the 9/11 drama.

A look inside Al Qaeda

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on April 2, 2008

in Afghanistan and Pakistan

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From Los Angeles Times:

If Al Qaeda strikes the West in the coming months, it’s likely the mastermind will be a stocky Egyptian explosives expert with two missing fingers.

His alias is Abu Ubaida al Masri. Hardly anyone has heard of him outside a select circle of anti-terrorism officials and Islamic militants. But as chief of external operations for Al Qaeda, investigators say, he has one of the most dangerous — and endangered — jobs in international terrorism.

He has overseen the major plots that the network needs to stay viable, investigators say: the London transportation bombings in 2005, a foiled transatlantic “spectacular” aimed at U.S.-bound planes in 2006, and an aborted plot in this serene Scandinavian capital last fall.

A bloody stalemate in Afghanistan

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on February 26, 2008

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Elizabeth Rubin in The New York Times Magazine.

We tumbled out of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the Americans’ small mountain outposts, but the area’s reputation among the soldiers was mythic. It was a known safe haven for insurgents. American troops have tended to avoid the place since a nasty fight a year or so earlier. And as Halloween approached, the soldiers I was with, under the command of 26-year-old Capt. Dan Kearney, were predicting their own Yaka China doom. [Photo: Specialist Carl Vandenberge, right, and Staff Sgt. Kevin Rice, left, are assisted as they walk to a medevac helicopter after being shot by insurgents in the ambush.]

US moves to expand its role in Pakistan

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on February 25, 2008

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Farah Stockman reports from Washington in the Boston Globe:

US officials are quietly planning to expand their presence in and around the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan by creating special coordination centers on the Afghan side of the border where US, Afghan, and Pakistani officials can share intelligence about Al Qaeda and Taliban militants, according to State Department and Pentagon officials.

The Bush administration is also seeking to expand its influence in the tribal areas through a new economic support initiative that would initially focus on school and road construction projects. Officials recently asked Congress for $453 million to launch the effort – a higher request for economic support funds than for any country except Afghanistan.