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MADRID.- Osama bin Laden cumple hoy 50 anos. Cuando nos representamos su aspecto en la actualidad, los occidentales imaginamos a un hombre que, carcomido fisicamente por las enfermedades y psicologicamente por los reiterados golpes que Estados Unidos ha propinado a su causa, tiene un aire mucho mayor del que corresponde a su edad: una figura delgada y adusta, arrastrandose de cueva en cueva a lo largo de la frontera entre Afganistan y Pakistan mientras las fuerzas de Estados Unidos le pisan los talones, rodeado quizas de un pequeno grupo de leales pero marginado del resto del mundo, con lo que ahora se habria convertido en practicamente inexistente su capacidad, en otros tiempos formidable, para planear espectaculares actos de violencia.

The Iraq Effect The War in Iraq and its Impact on the War on Terrorism By Peter Bergen, New America Foundation with Paul Cruickshank, research fellow, Center on Law and Security, NYU School of Law Mother Jones | March/April 2007   The globalization of jihad and martyrdom, accelerated to a significant degree by the Iraq […]

As the security situation in Iraq has deteriorated, President Bush has depicted the war in Iraq as crucial to the wider war on terrorism. He claims that terrorists who otherwise “would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders” are being drawn to Iraq and defeated there, like moths to a flame.

2007 will likely be a make or break year for Afghanistan, for the international efforts there, and, conversely, for the efforts of the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies to turn the country back into a failed state. Our efforts in Afghanistan are important because what happens there can have a large impact on our national security interests as we found to our cost on 9/11, and failure to create a viable state in Afghanistan will help empower jihadist terrorists who are planning to attack the United States and its allies.

President Bush delivered a speech in Washington on Thursday that focused on the once-forgotten war in Afghanistan. The president enumerated a range of measures to fix the detiorating situation in Afghanistan for which he is to be applauded—including, increasing the size and professionalism of the Afghan police and army; adding more than 3,000 US troops; investing in the rural economy to give farmers growing poppy for opium incentives to substitute other crops; helping the Pakistani government set up additional border posts to prevent militants crossing the Afghan border, and creating “reconstruction opportunity zones” in the tribal regions on the Afghan-Pakistan border that can export duty-free goods to the United States. The administration is asking Congress for more than ten billion dollars over the next two years to pay for these measures– 80% of the money is to go to beefing up Afghan national security forces, and the rest will pay for civilian aid.

Issue date: 01.29.07

An American aid worker named Marla Ruzicka and her Iraqi colleague, Faiz Ali Salim, were killed by a suicide bomber on April 16, 2005, as they drove along the road connecting Baghdad and its airport. It says much about the U.S. occupation of Iraq that this road is probably the most dangerous one in the world, but it says far more about Ruzicka and Salim that, despite the risks, they were driving along it to visit an injured Iraqi girl.

On a dimly lit road in Wazir Akbar Khan, the Upper East Side of Kabul, a couple of street kids gesture toward an unmarked iron gate behind which they assure us we can find what we are looking for. An Afghan guard gives us a wary once-over and opens the gate onto a dark garden at the end of which a door is slightly ajar. I open it and step into a world far removed from the dust-blown avenues of Kabul, where most women wear burqas and the vast majority of the population live in grinding poverty.

winter 2007Peter Bergen & Michael LindA Matter of PrideWhy we can’t buy off the next Osama bin Laden.Peter Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History ofal Qaeda’s Leader, is a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.Michael Lind, author of The American Way of Strategy, is the WhiteheadSenior Fellow, […]

The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader, by Peter L. Bergen (Free Press). Bergen has written what will long be a “go-to” resource. — Richard A. Clarke