Word: qaeda
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...Afghanistan - the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win - has become an aimless absurdity. It began with a specific target. Afghanistan was where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda lived, harbored by the Islamic extremist Taliban government. But the enemy escaped into Pakistan, and for the past seven years, Afghanistan has been a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces that we continue to call the "Taliban." These ragtag bands are funded by opium profits and led by assorted religious extremists and druglords, many of whom have safe havens...
...know what the mission used to be - to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and destroy his al-Qaeda command. But once bin Laden slipped away, the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation - building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government. There was a certain logic to that. The Taliban and al-Qaeda can't base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions...
...flimsy state with illogical borders, nuclear weapons and a mortal religious enmity toward India, its neighbor to the south. Pakistan is where bin Laden now lives, if he lives. The Bush Administration chose to coddle Pakistan's military leadership, which promised to help in the fight against al-Qaeda - but it hasn't helped much, although there are signs that the fragile new government of President Asif Ali Zardari may be more cooperative. Still, the Pakistani intelligence service helped create the Taliban and other Islamic extremist groups - including the terrorists who attacked Mumbai - as a way of keeping India...
...planned terror strike in Europe that Belgian police claim to have foiled on Thursday was linked to al-Qaeda, authorities say. Some of the 14 suspects arrested had recently traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, officials said, and had planned to launch a suicide strike - although the target remains unknown. "When you have people returning from Afghanistan, as most of these people had, they're sufficiently hard-core that the question isn't whether they'll be undertaking plotting activity but when, and in what form," said a European counterterrorism official with knowledge of the case. "What's important...
...That question reflects the resurgence of Pakistan and Afghanistan as prime destinations for aspiring Europe-based jihadists in search of training. Following the ouster of the Taliban and the scattering of al-Qaeda from Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq became the theater of choice for the volunteer jihadist, like 38-year-old Belgian convert Muriel Degauque, who blew herself up in an attack on U.S. troops north of Baghdad in November...