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President Obama knows that the Afghan war is going badly, but he insists that the specter of an al-Qaeda comeback makes Afghanistan a "war of necessity." So he has ordered some 30,000 new troops to the front, hoping to hold the line enough that Afghan forces can be built up to eventually take over the mission from the U.S. It may sound like a limited goal, after the sweeping visions of democracy promised during the Bush years. But even that relatively modest strategy is based on some very questionable assumptions. (See a slide show...
...what was the reaction of the foreign press, in particular some of our NATO allies? Afghanistan is ultimately a very backward country, and as long as it doesn’t become a big base for al Qaeda, it has no real bearing on Europeans’ interests. It is more difficult for an American to speak that truth. We inflate the danger due to the shock of 9/11. We also started the war, so we naturally have a greater stake in seeing it through. Europeans clearly don’t feel that. They help us, but there?...
...Shabaab are a hard-core al-Qaeda group, and they are really establishing a foothold and deepening their bases in Somalia," Nuruddin Dirie, a London-based Somalia analyst and former presidential candidate in its Puntland region, tells TIME. "We knew they would target the government officials, but a hotel setting, targeting the graduating students, it tells us quite a lot about how ruthless, how uncaring this enemy is." (Read how Somalia's fishermen became pirates...
Sheikh Abdifatah, the al Shabaab official, says that the group had indeed received funding from al-Qaeda, along with other financers. He said the group does not distinguish between foreign or Somali fighters, so long as they seek the same goal. "We are in international Jihad against the enemies of Allah, so here on the ground we are all the same - we do not say this is al-Qaeda, this is foreign. We are all the same," he said. "Our next step is to continue the jihad until the foreign troops and TFG is removed together from the country...
Western powers offered their help after Thursday's blast, though they gave no specifics. The West has been unable to solve the al Shabaab riddle or figure out how to bestow enough power and authority on the Transitional Federal Government so that it can wrest control of the country back from the militants. President Barack Obama mentioned Somalia as one of the next battlegrounds in the fight against al Qaeda in his December 1 speech on Afghanistan. The United States supplied 40 tons of weapons to the TFG in June, but a security expert has told TIME that those guns...