Word: afghanistanism
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...reaction to the two terrorist attacks during the last week in December is puzzling. One of the attacks, against a CIA outpost in Afghanistan, succeeded; the other, on an airplane landing in Detroit, failed. The Undiebomber was an amateur who was thwarted, rather neatly, by his fellow passengers on the plane. The Afghanistan operation was quite the opposite--highly sophisticated and devastating, with vast implications for both the war in Afghanistan and future clandestine CIA operations. And yet the Undiebomber has provoked an avalanche of attention in our twittery media--and from Republicans like Dick Cheney who yearn...
...Afghanistan bombing was not the deadliest in CIA history. That sad honor goes to the 1983 truck bomb that ripped off the face of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, killing eight members of the Beirut station, among many others. But this suicide bomber, a Jordanian doctor named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was the CIA's worst ever security breach. In an era when grandmothers are routinely screened at airports, al-Balawi was whisked into Forward Operating Base Chapman, the CIA headquarters for the drone war against al-Qaeda, without so much as a pat-down. He was then...
...This is a real kick in the teeth," says Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, a former CIA analyst. "You have to understand that the CIA considers Afghanistan its most successful arena. This is where the CIA believes it has won two wars, in 1989 and 2001. So this has to challenge a lot of assumptions." As a result, there will be two immediate and contradictory reactions to the attack. The more overt will be a flash of spook machismo. A published comment from a CIA official included this threat: "Last week's attack will be avenged. Some very...
...Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric who may have inspired both Abdulmutallab and accused Fort Hood gunman Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was born in New Mexico and studied at U.S. colleges; and John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, who grew up in San Francisco, was captured in Afghanistan and is now serving time in a U.S. prison. (See pictures of the privileged life of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
...Administration, for its part, needs a resumption of talks because it has declared Israeli-Palestinian peace a foreign policy priority and has made it a centerpiece of the President's outreach to the Muslim world - which remains an important political component of the Administration's efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and against al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Yemen. Although it failed to get Netanyahu's agreement to a complete settlement freeze, its leverage over Abbas may be sufficient to cajole him back to the table. But it's far from clear how the proposed two years of negotiations can bridge...