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India-Pakistan
Why al-Qaeda favors Pakistan as a base
2006-03-04
The Secret Service is not the only agency losing sleep over President Bush's trip to Pakistan. In many ways, the security challenges of the trip pale in comparison to the many riddles and incongruities that other parts of the foreign policy bureaucracy have been trying to overcome regarding this trip.

First and foremost among the administration's preoccupations is to fully understand the nature and structure of the terror threat in Pakistan. The bombing Thursday in Karachi illustrates a fundamental and irreversible mutation in the nature of al Qaeda. Although it is still too early to formally identify the perpetrators, and — as in the London bombings — we may never fully uncover the attack's trail back to Osama bin Laden or his lieutenants, it is safe to assume that the attack is the product of a phenomenon best described as the "Pakistanization" of al Qaeda.

While it was created in Pakistan in 1988, and with important input from several Pakistani clerics and veterans of the jihad against the Soviets, al Qaeda remained for many years essentially an Arab organization, drawing mostly on Ayman al Zawahri's Egyptian terrorist networks and bin Laden's Saudi and Yemeni recruits.
Posted by:Dan Darling

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