Center for a New American Security

There was a good article in the Independent today about the situation in Yemen. Keeping in mind the recent discussion on this blog about what to do, two paragraphs particularly stood out.

Nearly two years ago, Londonstani wrote his first post for this blog. It was based around an interview Londonstani conducted near one of the Palestinian camps in Lebanon with a young al-Qaeda fighter returning from Iraq. The camp itself looked like a transiting station. Londonstani saw young Arab fighters buying military clothing, handing out ammunition, testing weapons and picking up documents.

British politicians are fond of telling the public that fighting in Afghanistan prevents bombs going off at home. Considering that more than half the population wants the army out of Afghanistan, and there's an election coming, it's not a surprise that the people hoping to keep their jobs (who are the same people who decided to the send the troops there in the first place) like to stress the most obvious, stark justification. "The army stays in Afghanistan so you don't blown up on your way to work".

Eli Lake was asking me the other day whether or not we had been defeating al-Qaeda these past eight years. I replied that I thought we had not been "beating" al-Qaeda, per se, but that we had made fewer mistakes than al-Qaeda has. Our strategic blunders (going to war in Iraq; diverting resources from Afghanistan) were less signficant than theirs (killing more Afghan and Arab Muslims than Americans and other Westerners).

Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung have the A1 above-the-fold article in the Post today on how the Obama team is considering what the appropriate response to the problems in the Horn of Africa should be.

As we are much into reading lists on this site, Londonstani thought he'd contribute a list of what the other side recommends you read.

In his March 14 statement, Osama Bin Laden talked about launching jihad to liberate Palestine and all the usual stuff. But he also set forth the books that scholars and preachers should use to "correct" the "thought and life" of the umma.

James Brandon of our* very own Quilliam Foundation has an article out in the Sentinel arguing that the self-starting terror attacks launched out of the UK weren't actually all that self-starting.

Some important weekend reading courtesy of the NYT.

Nicholas Schmidle's portrait of violent extremism in the maghreb pretty much nails it as far as Londonstani is concerned. The six-page article is worth reading if you want to put a personality to the image of a young jihadi, and get a taste of where the "al Qaeda business model" might be going.

The grown ups over at the Small Wars Journal put up the latest from Tom Ricks' Inbox.  He notes:

I can't even get excited about this story. How many times, for example, have we killed Al-Qaeda's "#3 man"? Surely 15-20 times since 9/11.