Peter Bergen (Continuación)

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" is an aphorism attributed to the great baseball player Yogi Berra.

But one topic where pundits, politicians and prognosticators of every persuasion don't have any problem about making pessimistic predictions is terrorism.

The Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, was an Olympic-level example of this. In the lead-up to the Games, the airwaves were filled with glum predictions that Sochi would be the 1972 Munich Olympics on steroids.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, told Fox News, "There's a high degree of probability that something will detonate, something will go off.…  Seguir leyendo »

When even al Qaeda publicly rejects you because you are too brutal, it's likely a reasonable indicator that you are.

A long simmering dispute between "al Qaeda Central," headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the most brutal al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, generally known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, surfaced publicly on Monday.

On jihadist websites, al Qaeda's central leadership posted a notice saying ISIS "is not a branch of the al Qaeda group."

It is the first time in its quarter century history that al Qaeda has officially rejected one of its affiliates.

Why did this happen? ISIS and another al Qaeda affiliate known as the Nusra Front have been fighting each other in Syria for several weeks now.…  Seguir leyendo »

A gruesome snuff video that has garnered more than 180,000 views on YouTube underlines just how grim the Syrian conflict has become.

This video appears to document one of the worst kinds of war crimes: The summary executions of wounded men. (Warning: The scenes are extremely graphic.)

Several paramilitaries in battle fatigues armed with automatic weapons -- some speaking Arabic in distinctive Lebanese accents -- pull wounded men out of the back of a van and drop them on to the ground, then shoot them in their heads at point-blank range.

As they shoot their victims, some of the paramilitaries seem almost giddy with excitement.…  Seguir leyendo »

Al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda's brutal Somali affiliate, has claimed credit for the attack by multiple gunmen at an upscale shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya that has already killed at least 59 people.

This should not be a surprise. For Al-Shabaab, the mall was an attractive target because Westerners, including Americans, frequented it. The mall is also in the capital of Kenya, a country that Al-Shabaab has good reason to dislike, as the Kenyan military played a major role in handing their forces a defeat last year when they liberated the key Somali port of Kismayo from their control.

Al-Shabaab ("the Youth") tweeted Saturday that "all Muslims inside #Westgate" -- referring to the mall that was attacked in Nairobi -- "were escorted out by the Mujahideen before" the armed assault commenced.…  Seguir leyendo »

Mientras contemplan una acción militar contra  Siria, los miembros del Congreso y funcionarios del gobierno de Barack Obama deben, entre otras cosas, tomar en cuenta cuál sería el efecto de un ataque de los Estados Unidos contra el régimen de Bachar al Asad en el ya complicado, incluso venenoso, estado de las relaciones entre suníes y chiítas en la región.

Tres de los principales estados suníes, Arabia Saudita, Turquía y  Emiratos Árabes Unidos, ya han ofrecido sus activos militares en caso que ocurra un ataque de  EE.UU.

La semana pasada, el presidente Hassan Rouhani dijo que el gobierno chiita iraní y su aliado Rusia trabajarían en una "cooperación amplia" para proteger a Siria.…  Seguir leyendo »

Barack Obama came to Washington to end wars. Not to start them.

That much was crystal clear only three months ago when Obama gave a keynote speech on May 23 at the National Defense University in Washington in which he called for an end to the "boundless war on terror" and "perpetual wartime footing" that has existed in the U.S. since 9/11.

Obama focused part of this speech on the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Congress passed days after 9/11 and that gave President George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Afghanistan.

No one in Congress who voted for this resolution at the time realized that he or she was in effect authorizing in Afghanistan what would become America's longest war.…  Seguir leyendo »

Why has the Obama administration been so reluctant to intervene in Syria? There are a host of reasons -- American fatigue with war, President Barack Obama's disinclination to start another conflict in the Middle East, and the splintered, fractured opposition to Bashar al-Assad.

But one reason looms large: al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, is generally acknowledged to be the most effective force fighting al-Assad.

Its fighters are willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause, are widely viewed as uncorrupt and are not involved in looting as other opposition forces are. A number of them are battle-hardened from other conflicts such as the Iraq War.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Friday the U.S. State Department issued a worldwide travel alert because of an unspecified al Qaeda threat. The location of that threat, the department said in a bulletin, is "particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, and possibly occurring in or emanating from the Arabian Peninsula." As a result, an unprecedented 21 embassies and consulates in 17 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia will close on Sunday.

Sunday is also the 27th day of Ramadan and a particularly holy day for the world's Muslims as it is the "Night of Power," when the first verses of the Koran were revealed to the Prophet Mohammed.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Monday, Pakistan's long-awaited report into the death of Osama bin Laden in the city of Abbottabad two years ago was leaked in full to Al Jazeera.

The independent Abbottabad Commission was established by Pakistan's parliament to investigate what for many Pakistanis was an embarrassing double national humiliation. First, that bin Laden lived in Pakistan for nine years undetected before he was killed. Second, that the U.S. conducted a military operation inside Pakistan that, from the moment that four U.S. helicopters penetrated Pakistan's airspace, lasted for more than three hours without detection by the Pakistani military.

In more than 300 pages, the report paints an intimate picture of the final days and years of the leader of al Qaeda and is also a devastating indictment of what it describes as the incompetence of many institutions of the Pakistani state.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Monday, a U.N. official said that Syrian rebels had likely used the nerve agent sarin.

Carla Del Ponte, the veteran war crimes prosecutor and a commissioner of the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry for Syria, made this claim on a Swiss-Italian TV station.

Del Ponte explained, "Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated".

Del Ponte added, "This was used on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities".…  Seguir leyendo »

The man charged Wednesday with attempting to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the latest alleged jihadist to be charged in a law enforcement sting, may or may not have had the capability to create a major terrorist incident. But if his case follows the pattern of other similar sting operations, what is clear is that he faces very long odds in court.

Quazi Mohammad Rezwanual Ahsan Nafis, a 21-year-old Bangladeshi from Queens, is accused of plotting to detonate a 1,000-pound bomb outside the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan.

Sounds pretty terrifying. But as acting Assistant FBI Director Mary Galligan explained, "It is important to emphasize that the public was never at risk ...…  Seguir leyendo »

On November 2, 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was bicycling to work in Amsterdam when he was shot eight times at close range. He died instantly, but in a fit of rage, his assailant, Dutch-Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri, also attempted to cut off his head with a machete.

Bouyeri killed van Gogh because of a short film he had recently produced with Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali that criticized Islam's treatment of women.

The film showed verses of the Quran projected onto the bodies of several naked young women. It was a film designed to provoke. And it did. Ali subsequently went into a self-imposed exile in the United States.…  Seguir leyendo »

Pakistan can't get no respect.

In 2007, Newsweek published an influential cover story proclaiming it "the most dangerous country in the world."

The bill of particulars for this indictment typically includes the inarguable facts that the Taliban is headquartered in Pakistan, as is what remains of al-Qaeda, as well as an alphabet soup of other jihadist terrorist groups.

And in 2011, it became embarrassingly clear that Pakistan had harbored Osama bin Laden for almost a decade, even if unwittingly, in a city not far from the capital, Islamabad.

Leading Pakistani liberals are routinely assassinated by militants. Two-time Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was killed when she returned from exile in 2007.…  Seguir leyendo »

Last week, a U.S. drone attack killed 19 suspected Taliban militants at a compound in North Waziristan on the Afghan border, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Dawn, a leading English-language Pakistani newspaper, later reported that the drone actually launched two separate strikes, the second of which occurred "when tribesmen were still carrying out rescue work," and killed an additional three people.

It was unclear whether the three were civilians or militants. If they were civilians, the incident would run counter to a marked decline in reports of civilian deaths in Pakistan caused by CIA drone strikes.

The New America Foundation has been collecting data about the drone attacks systematically for the past three years from reputable news sources such as the New York Times and Reuters, as well as Pakistani media outlets such as the Express Tribune and Dawn.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Sunday a missile launched from a U.S. drone struck a house in Pakistan's remote tribal agency of North Waziristan, killing eight suspected militants, most of whom were loyal to the Pakistani Taliban commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadur. Bahadur has reportedly overseen multiple attacks against NATO troops in Afghanistan.

While the CIA drone war against al Qaeda in Pakistan is well known and is even, on occasion, publicly acknowledged by senior Obama administration officials, the strike against Bahadur's fighters is part of a lesser-known campaign to target Pakistani militants, who are less able to pose a threat to the U.S. homeland. This represents an expansion of the drone program that was overseen by President Barack Obama's administration.…  Seguir leyendo »

There’s nothing like finally getting the top job after a decade of faithfully playing second fiddle to a high-profile boss. But for al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri, the dour Egyptian surgeon and longtime deputy to Osama bin Laden, succeeding his old leader comes with an unexpected challenge: His predecessor, it turns out, has gifted him a bit of a lemon. In recent years, al-Qaeda has become the Blockbuster Video of global jihad.

The organization and brand are in deep trouble, and Zawahiri is quite unlikely to become the leader who can turn things around.

Al-Qaeda is peddling an ideology that has lost much of its purchase in the Muslim world, and it hasn’t mounted a successful terrorist attack in the West since the July 7, 2005, transportation bombings in London.…  Seguir leyendo »

The highly classified C.I.A. program to kill militants in the tribal regions of Pakistan with missiles fired from drones is the world’s worst-kept secret.

The United States has long tried to maintain plausible deniability that it is behind drone warfare in Pakistan, a country that pollsters consistently find is one of the most anti-American in the world. For reasons of its own, the Pakistani government has also sought to hide the fact that it secretly agreed to allow the United States to fly some drones out of a base in Pakistan and attack militants on its territory.

But there are good reasons for the United States, which conducted 53 such strikes in 2009 alone, and Pakistan to finally acknowledge the existence of the drone program.…  Seguir leyendo »

The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is right to warn that efforts to rebuild that country depend on winning the “struggle to gain the support of the people.” And few issues do more to stoke the resentment of ordinary Afghans than the tens of billions of dollars of foreign aid from which they have seen little or no benefit. They see legions of Westerners sitting in the backs of S.U.V.’s clogging the streets of Kabul and ask themselves what exactly those foreigners have done to improve their daily lives.

Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world.…  Seguir leyendo »

Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul and Said Ali al-Shihri may be the two best arguments for why releasing detainees from Guantánamo Bay poses a real risk to America. Mr. Rasoul, who was transferred to Afghanistan in 2007 and then released by the Kabul government, is now the commander of operations for the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. Mr. Shihri, sent back to his native Saudi Arabia in 2007, is now a leader of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.

Are these two men exceptional cases, or are they emblematic of a much larger problem of dangerous terrorists who, if released, will “return to the battlefield”?…  Seguir leyendo »

As President Obama orders an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, he faces growing skepticism over the United States’ prospects there. Critics of the troop buildup often point out that Afghanistan has long been the “graveyard of empires.” In 1842, the British lost a nasty war that ended when fierce tribesmen notoriously destroyed an army of thousands retreating from Kabul. And, of course, the Soviets spent almost a decade waging war in Afghanistan, only to give up ignominiously in 1989.

But in fact, these are only two isolated examples. Since Alexander the Great, plenty of conquerors have subdued Afghanistan. In the early 13th century, Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes ravaged the country’s two major cities.…  Seguir leyendo »