Pakistan’s Leaders Try New Approach to Militants

By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Faced with a sharp escalation of suicide bombing in urban areas, the leaders of Pakistan’s new coalition government say they will negotiate with the militants believed to be orchestrating the attacks, and would use the military only as a last resort.

That talk has alarmed American officials, who fear it will mean a softening stance against the militants just as President Pervez Musharraf, an ally in the war on terror, has given the Bush administration a freer hand to strike at them using unmanned Predator drones.

Many Pakistanis, however, are convinced the surge in suicide bombings — 17 in the first 10 weeks of 2008 — is in direct retaliation for three such Predator strikes since the beginning of the year. The spike in attacks, combined with Mr. Musharraf’s crushing defeat in February elections, has brought a new mood in Pakistan: that there should be a change from his American-backed policies.

It is this atmosphere that the leaders of Pakistan’s new government coalition — Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan People’s Party, and Nawaz, Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N — want to capitalize on. Speaking in separate interviews, the two men sought to repackage the conflict in a more palatable way for Pakistanis, and to strike a more independent stance from Washington.

Though short on details, they said they were determined to set a different course from President Musharraf, who received generous military financial help of more than $10 billion from Washington for his support.

“We are dealing with our own people,” said Mr. Sharif, who was twice Prime Minister of Pakistan in the 1990s. “We will deal with them very sensibly. And when you have a problem in your own family, you don’t kill your own family.

“You sit and talk,” he added. “After all, Britain also got the solution of the problem of Ireland. So what’s the harm in conducting negotiations.”

For his part, Mr. Zardari said: “Obviously what they have been doing for the last eight years has not been working. Even a fool knows that.”

The war against the insurgents had to be redefined, he said, as “Pakistan’s war” for a public that has come to resent the conflict as being pushed on the country as part of an American agenda. It should be dealt with by talks and the use of a beefed up police force rather than the army, he said.

Washington has opposed past negotiations on the grounds that short term peace deals between the militants and the Pakistani military were a sign of weakness that resulted in the militants winning time to fortify themselves.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said on a visit here last month that talks with the militants, were not helpful in the “short term.”

In general terms, according to a retired senior Pakistani general who remains close to the current military leadership, new negotiations would likely involve a ban on non-Pakistani militants — such as Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens — coming from southern Afghanistan into Pakistan in return for reduced operations by the Pakistani army in the tribal areas.

But precisely how those talks would be different from the negotiations that led to failed peace deals under Mr. Musharraf was not entirely clear, except that negotiators would represent the newly elected government rather than the military government of the last eight years.

Neither Mr. Zardari nor Mr. Sharif was specific about whom among the militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas they favored talking to. Nor was it clear what kind of formula or quid pro quo the two political leaders had in mind for talks.

Mr. Sharif, whose Islamic religious background is conservative, refused to say whether he would negotiate with Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader whom the government blames for many if not most of the recent suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan.

American and Pakistani terrorist experts have said they believe that Mr. Mehsud was behind the assassination of the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December, and that he works in tandem with Al Qaeda. “Nobody gave me any presentation on this subject,” Mr. Sharif said.

Asked who the negotiations would be held with, Mr. Sharif replied: “With all the concerned elements. I don’t think guns and bullets have so far produced any positive results.”

Any result that smacks of Pakistan ceding further control over the tribal areas is not one likely to be welcomed in Washington. The Bush administration views the tribal areas as a sanctuary for Taliban forces who cross the border into Afghanistan to fight American and NATO forces, as well as a base for Al Qaeda to plot new terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.

Pakistanis, however, have come to see the tribal areas as something entirely different: a once peaceful region where a group of militants have turned their wrath on the rest of the country as punishment for the American alliance.

Many civilians are among the 274 people killed since the beginning of the year, but the dead also include young soldiers and policemen, according to a tally by the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn. A bomb explosion at an Italian restaurant favored by foreigners in Islamabad last Saturday injured four F.B.I. agents, and underscored for Pakistanis yet again the American involvement here.

Washington may have little choice but to adjust to the new policies, a retired army brigadier, Mehmood Shah, who was in charge of security in the tribal areas, said.

Of the new Pakistani government, Mr. Shah said: “They will not like to be seen as dictated to by the United States, they would like it to be seen as ‘our war.’ ”

Mr. Shah, who met with Admiral Mullen when he was in Islamabad, said there was a popular sense in Pakistan — prevalent on television talk shows as well as the halls of parliament — that it was time to “keep a distance from the United States.”

As Pakistan’s new leaders fashion their strategy, however, they will unavoidably be dealing with programs devised by Washington to help Pakistan regain control of the lawless tribal areas. In some places, the approaches may yet dovetail.

For instance, one element of the stepped-up American aid effort is a $400 million plan to train the Frontier Corps, an under funded paramilitary force that is used to patrol the border with Afghanistan.

Mr. Sharif said he had heard about the plan, expected to begin in October, but had no details.

Mr. Zardari favored employing such a force over relying on the army, which he said was the “wrong instrument” to use against the militants. “We need to use the police force,” he said. “They had few guns, made in 1952. You have to upgrade them. You have got to give them modern technology and they will stand better than anybody else.”

Mr. Sharif, who is regarded as a nationalist — he gave the go ahead for the explosion of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb in 1998 — said he was not in favor of foreign aid. “I think frankly we should rely less on aid,” he said. “It makes us, you see, lazy. We should generate our own resources.”

Both men stressed that the new parliament, which held its first session this week, would be consulted on the strategy toward the insurgency, a sharp distinction from the go-it-alone behavior of Mr. Musharraf, who until last year served as both head of the army and president.

The two leaders have made much of the fact that they received a broad mandate in the elections last month. To that end, they said, they would revive the role of parliament.

As an example of the docile legislature, a recent report of the parliament’s committee on defense for the last four years consisted of 67 pages. The panel was apparently so short of funds, the report was published with funding from the United States Agency for International Development whose logo appears on the last page.

The only mention on the war on terror was a resolution by the committee in 2007 criticizing the United States for threatening to link the amount of aid to Pakistan to the performance of the army.

Another important distinction from the past is that the new government would not use “the same tainted network of agencies and the army who have created this” situation, said one of Mr. Sharif’s senior lieutenants, Nisar Ali Khan, who has relatives in prominent positions in the army.

“The new start won’t be with them,” he said. “It has to be a multifaceted operation with the tribal chiefs who are operating in the area.”

Both parties have long accused Pakistan’s intelligence agencies of backing militant groups even as the government has been forced to negotiate with them. Many of the groups were used to pressure India and Afghanistan, but have more recently turned their fury back on Pakistan as they have become more radicalized.

Those intelligence agencies will almost certainly have new leadership chosen by the new prime minister. Whether fresh faces at the top will mean change in the ingrained behavior of the agencies is an open question, however.

The head of the Inter Services Intelligence agency, Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj, a relative of Mr. Musharraf, is likely to be replaced in the coming months, Pakistani officials said. The head of the Intelligence Bureau, another powerful agency, Ijaz Shah, a confidant of Mr. Musharraf, resigned this week. His replacement will be named by the new prime minister, who is expected to be named on Monday by Mr. Zardari.

Mr. Zardari is not immediately eligible to become prime minister himself because he did not run for Parliament. But it is likely he will do so in the coming months and then assume the mantle.

Iraq Attacks Lower, but Steady, New Figures Show

By JAMES GLANZ and ERIC SCHMITT

BAGHDAD — Newly declassified statistics on the frequency of insurgent attacks in Iraq suggest that after major security gains last fall in the wake of an American troop increase, the conflict has drifted into a stalemate, with levels of violence remaining stubbornly constant from November 2007 through early 2008.

The new figures, presented Tuesday at a Senate hearing in Washington by David M. Walker, the top official at the Government Accountability Office, emerged a day after eight American soldiers were killed in bomb attacks, five in downtown Baghdad and three in Diyala Province. And the trend appeared to continue Tuesday, as bombings and small-arms attacks led to casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces in or near at least eight cities.

In the deadliest of those attacks, a roadside bomb between the southern cities of Nasiriya and Basra struck a bus full of Iraqi civilians, killing at least 16 and wounding 22, Iraqi police officials said. But Iraqi security forces also reported deadly attacks in Hilla, Karbala, Baquba, Mosul, Kut, Baghdad and Dulia, just north of the capital.

In a report presented to the Senate Appropriations Committee, Mr. Walker, the comptroller general, acknowledged that the insurgent attacks tallied by the American military had decreased to an average of about 60 a day in January, in the latest available count, from about 180 a day in June 2007.

But that lower number, which is roughly equivalent to the levels of violence in the spring of 2005, has remained essentially unchanged since the last significant decrease between October and November.

“While security has improved in Iraq, a permissive security environment has yet to be achieved,” Mr. Walker wrote, using a term meaning an environment safe for ordinary business and social activity.

Mr. Walker and two other federal officials also testified about concerns over corruption in contracting and about problems tracking arms shipments to Iraqi and American forces.

American commanders in Iraq have been warning for months that the security gains were far from irreversible, particularly since progress in Iraqi political reconciliation, which would presumably address the tensions underlying the violence, has been halting.

Smaller security improvements in the past have been followed by surges in violence. Modest gains in security near the end of 2005, for example, were obliterated a few months later when the bombing of a sacred mosque in Samarra set off nearly a year of sectarian killings.

Based on reports from February, violence may already be increasing. An independent tally by The Associated Press recorded a jump last month in the average number of Iraqis killed per day compared with January’s figures.

The accountability office figures use a different measure, the number of attacks recorded against security forces and Iraqi civilians.

Daily reports of violence are, by their nature, grainy and uncertain measures of trends in Iraq, but following the large American death toll the day before, the attacks on Tuesday were strikingly widespread.

A health directorate official in Kut said clashes between the police and the Mahdi Army, the dominant Shiite militia, left 14 people dead and 47 wounded. In Dulia, a police official said, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives at a checkpoint, killing five and wounding 30.

And in Baghdad, a bomb exploded in a neighborhood council meeting, killing one council member and wounding eight others, while gunmen in another part of the city attacked a prison for juveniles, wounding three guards and freeing three inmates, an Interior Ministry official said.

The Senate hearing also dealt with findings by both the accountability office and an independent federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, that thousands of pistols, automatic rifles and other equipment delivered to Iraq cannot be accounted for.

Under questioning by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the Defense Department’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Claude M. Kicklighter, said a system was in place to prevent “a major leakage” of weapons to insurgents or the black market. He said weapons of Iraqi forces and the American-led coalition were now accounted for by serial number, down to the company level.

“That’s not awfully comforting,” Mr. Leahy said. “I mean, I’m not trying to quibble words here, but obviously the first sets of weapons came out with really no adequate way of checking them.”

James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Mudhafer al-Husaini contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Ramadi, Kut, Karbala, Basra, Diyala and Salahuddin.

8 U.S. Soldiers Killed in 2 Iraq Attacks

By ERICA GOODE and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD — A man walked up to a group of American soldiers on foot patrol in an upscale shopping district in central Baghdad on Monday and detonated the explosives-filled vest he was wearing, killing five soldiers and wounding three others and an Iraqi interpreter who accompanied them.

In eastern Diyala Province, north of the capital, three more American soldiers and an interpreter were also killed Monday when they were attacked with an improvised bomb, according to the military, which did not release any more details.

Another soldier was wounded in the blast.

The suicide bombing in Baghdad was the deadliest single attack on American soldiers in the capital since the height of the troop buildup here last summer. Nine Iraqi civilians were also wounded in the blast, according to officials at Yarmuk Hospital, where the victims were taken.

Reports from Iraqi witnesses suggest that the soldiers may have let down their guard because of the relative quiet of the last few months, leaving the safety of their Humvees and chatting with residents and shopkeepers.

Hours later, a car bomb exploded outside a hotel in the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, killing two people and wounding 30 in the first significant attack in that city in several years.

The attacks underscored how fragile security in Iraq remains despite a recent drop in violence and statements by American military officials that Sunni insurgents were on the run.

In Baghdad, the suicide bombing, in the Mansour neighborhood, shattered a perfect springlike afternoon, with shoppers out sampling hamburgers and sausage from street vendors and browsing through boutiques for the latest fashions.

The owner of a clothing store on Mansour Street said five soldiers and an interpreter entered his shop about 3 p.m.

“The soldiers were asking about the security situation and also making jokes and laughing,” said the store owner, who refused to give his real name for fear of reprisals from local militias. “Some of them said, ‘Be sure that we’ll come back again in order to buy clothes from you before we leave on vacation.’ ”

After the soldiers left the store, he said, he climbed up a ladder to a storeroom to retrieve his lunch and then heard a large explosion. He scrambled back down, he said, to find the bodies of two of the soldiers he had just been chatting with lying in the doorway of the store. Four of the soldiers died at the scene, and a fifth died later of his wounds.

Muhammad, a hamburger vendor whose stand is about 175 feet from the site of the bombing, said the same group of eight or nine American soldiers had been coming to the street for the last three days, getting out of their Humvees and walking around the shopping area, called the Rawad intersection after a popular ice cream parlor there.

“Usually, we see the Americans come in Humvees and they don’t stop, they just keep driving,” said Muhammad, who was afraid to give his last name. On Monday, he said, a soldier carrying a notebook walked into a currency exchange called The Ship. The other soldiers gathered in a small group.

“When the explosion happened we panicked and started running, and the gunner on one of the Humvees started shooting,” he said. “Even the Iraqi soldiers and police started firing in the air, so we jumped into one of the narrow alleys and remained there hiding until the Iraqi soldiers ordered us to walk at least two blocks away from the spot.”

He said that before the bombing, he had been surprised that the soldiers had allowed pedestrians to come up and talk to them, instead of keeping them at a distance as they normally do.

Military officials did not release details of the attack or explain how the suicide bomber was able to approach the soldiers so easily. But an Iraqi Army officer at a checkpoint near the site of the bombing said the suicide bomber was a young man who had walked up to the soldiers and engaged them in conversation. “He came and stood beside them and started talking to them and then detonated himself,” the officer said.

The attack in Baghdad was the worst of a string of attacks throughout the country that appeared to be directed at Iraqis sympathetic to American forces.

In Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed a tribal leader in charge of local forces known as Awakening Councils, groups of American-backed former insurgents who have risen up against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely homegrown group that intelligence officials say is led by foreigners.

The bomber, a woman, went to the door of Sheik Thaer Ghadhban al-Karkhi’s house in Kanaan, about 12 miles east of Baquba, shortly before 8 a.m., while the sheik was sitting in the garden with his 9-year-old nephew, one of his guards said.

When Sheik Karkhi, accompanied by his nephew, went outside to see who it was, the woman blew herself up, killing the sheik, his nephew and two of his bodyguards. Six other bodyguards were wounded.

In Basra, Dr. Khalid Nasir al-Mayah, one of only two psychiatrists left in the region, was shot and killed by gunmen at Basra al-Sadr Hospital. Since 2003, Basra’s medical professionals have been in peril: 5 doctors have been assassinated, 12 have been kidnapped, 16 have left the area and 23 have fled Iraq.

The attack in Sulaimaniya occurred about 7 p.m., striking a hotel favored by Western investors who have been racing into eastern Kurdistan to exploit new opportunities to drill for oil.

Witnesses said the blast sent a shock wave through the center of the city. “There was a big noise from the blast and a wave of hot air,” said Shamal Ahmed, 35, who was driving by the hotel. “I got shrapnel in my face and arms because the front windshield of my car was completely destroyed.”

Mudhafer al-Husaini and Ahmed Fadam contributed reporting from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Sulaimaniya, Basra and Diyala.

Ominous Rise in Baghdad Bombings

By Charles Crain/Baghdad

Thursday's double bombing in Baghdad, which killed nearly 70 people and left hundreds more wounded, was the worst attack in Iraq since June 2007. It continues a troubling trend: a slow but steady increase in deadly bombings across the country. The troop surge is ending and the U.S. has begun withdrawing soldiers from Baghdad, but these attacks may indicate that a military or political solution to the Sunni insurgency may be as far off as it was a year ago.

The attacks capped off a violent week. Last Sunday more than 20 people died in bombings across the capital. And last month nearly 100 people were killed when two women detonated suicide vests in a crowded Baghdad market. According to statistics released by the U.S. military such attacks declined sharply for most of 2007, bottoming out in December. Since late last year, though, car bombings and suicide vest bombings have increased steadily.

Despite this week's carnage the absolute number of bombings is still far lower than it was one year ago. The problem, however, is not simply lives lost, but also what the slow increase in attacks says about the resiliency of the Sunni insurgency. Battered by Shi'ite militias, the U.S. military and the defection of more moderate insurgents, al-Qaeda in Iraq and other radical insurgent groups are much weaker now than they were just last summer. But, as U.S. officials are quick to acknowledge, they still have the men, the money and the organization to pose a serious threat.

The question now is how that threat will be kept under control. American troop levels in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq will return this year to about the same level as 2006 — the year that saw the worst of the country's sectarian violence. Helping to fill that void, supposedly, will be former members of the Sunni insurgency: thousands have become U.S.-paid counter-insurgents and, in some cases, members of the Iraqi government security forces. Unlike the mostly Shi'ite Iraqi army and police, these Sunnis have credibility in their towns and neighborhoods and have proven effective in fighting their former insurgent allies.

The trouble is that this ground-level military solution may be in conflict with other government efforts to reduce the violence and foster stability in Iraq. The Karrada bombing came on the heels of a state visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and struck a neighborhood that is home to Iraq's largest Shi'ite political party and many Shi'ite government officials. The timing and location of this bombing may have been a coincidence, but Karrada makes a nice target for Sunni militants who frame their fight as a struggle against Iranian domination.

The long-term difficulty for the United States and the Iraqi government is that this suspicion of Iran is not simply a fantasy of radical Sunni insurgents. It is a very real fear of Sunni former insurgents currently cooperating in the fight against al-Qaeda. Former insurgent leaders routinely scorn the Iraqi government's intentions, casting it as a pawn of the Iranians. So, as the Iraqi government strives to reduce violence by improving its relationship with Iran, it may be setting the stage for continued conflict with disaffected Sunnis.

Bombs Kill 54 and Wound 123 in Baghdad

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and MOHAMMED OBAIDI

BAGHDAD — Two bombs struck a bustling shopping district in the heart of Baghdad on Thursday evening, turning display windows and cabinets and glass shelves into deadly shrapnel, and killing 54 people and wounding 123, the Iraqi authorities said.

The attack, in the Karada neighborhood, was the worst here in the capital since early February, when bombings killed almost 100 people at two pet markets, and it reinforced fears that insurgents could still carry out devastating attacks in well-guarded areas. While violence has declined sharply from last year, bomb attacks in Baghdad have increased in recent weeks.

No one claimed responsibility. But the attackers used an old tactic to maximize casualties: detonating one bomb, then setting off a second blast to kill passers-by and emergency workers who rushed to the scene to aid the victims.

A shoe salesman who would identify himself only by his first name, Hatam, said the first bomb slammed him to the ground. He got up, looked behind him, and ran to aid a woman whose leg had been ripped off by the blast.

“We managed to drag her away from the spot, and then the police came really quickly, and they were shouting at the people to move back because there might be another explosion,” he said. “But the people didn’t listen, and even some of the policemen who were already there didn’t pay attention, and that is when the second explosion happened.”

This time, Hatam said, he walked away. “I couldn’t go back again,” he said. “The scene was so horrible, and I lost the energy to see dead people.”

The explosions sprayed chunks of human flesh for 50 yards. The second bomb, about 10 minutes after the first, killed more people. A number of Iraqi soldiers and police officers who hurried in after the first attack were among the dead and wounded.

Some witnesses said the first bomb had been hidden in a trash can. The second explosion may have originated in a vest worn by a suicide bomber, the American military said. One witness said a man on a motorcycle carried the bomb into the crowd. But other witnesses interviewed later said the second bomb had been planted previously.

In the chaos that followed the attacks, Iraqi security forces fired Kalashnikov rifles into the air to scare people away. But many people pushed forward anyway to search for family members feared dead.

The attack “was like an electric shock, it happened so suddenly nobody could avoid it,” said Abu Abdullah, who operates a kebab stand nearby. “Some people were burning, and I saw some without legs.”

In other violence reported Thursday, insurgents struck in the north, Iraqi authorities in Mosul said, killing one guard and wounding another at Badoosh Prison with an improvised bomb. The bodies of four guards who were kidnapped Wednesday were found Thursday.

On the political front, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, refused to proceed with the execution of the man known as Chemical Ali, one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious henchmen, in what seemed to be an effort to press other top Iraqi leaders to ratify the death sentences of two other former military commanders.

Chemical Ali, whose real name is Ali Hassan al-Majid, commanded the brutal Anfal campaign in the late 1980s that killed as many as 180,000 Kurds. He was sentenced to death last summer, and Iraq’s three-member Presidency Council, which has the constitutional power to ratify death sentences, approved his punishment last week.

Now, Mr. Maliki is arguing that Mr. Majid should not be sent to the gallows unless the American military also hands over for execution two other former military commanders who were sentenced to death at the same time.

One of the men, Sultan Hashem Ahmed al-Jabouri al-Tai, was a former defense minister and general who remains a hero to many Sunni Arabs. Some Iraqi leaders and American commanders question the appropriateness of his sentence and fear that executing him would anger Sunnis already wary of the Iraqi government, which is dominated by Kurds and Shiites. But many Shiites say he deserves to be executed and that sparing him would set a dangerous precedent.

The other condemned man is Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti, a former senior Iraqi armed forces commander.

The Presidency Council — President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni; and Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite — has refused to ratify the execution of Mr. Hashem. Mr. Talabani and Mr. Hashemi have said they do not approve of his sentence.

The American military, which holds all three of the condemned prisoners, is unlikely to transfer custody until the issue is resolved with the Presidency Council.

But Mr. Maliki contends that the council’s power to ratify executions does not extend to sentences on members of Saddam Hussein’s former government that were handed down by the Iraqi High Tribunal, the court that tried Mr. Hussein and his top lieutenants, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman.

“The prime minister feels the Presidency Council has no power to reduce the sentence or give any amnesty to the convicted persons, so it is not necessary for them to approve this verdict,” Mr. Dabbagh said. “That is why the prime minister feels the execution cannot be done unless the other two are also handed over.”

It remains unclear how long this latest twist could leave the fates of all three in limbo. Mr. Dabbagh suggested that Mr. Maliki was not interested in any political deal to resolve the conflict with the council. “There is no compromise on this,” he said.

A senior American military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, said Wednesday that the Iraqi government had not presented the Americans “with a request yet for the release of Majid” into Iraqi custody. “We will fulfill our responsibility once that request has been submitted to us,” he said.

Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.

Suicide Blast Kills 40 in Northwest Pakistan

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:10 a.m. ET

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) -- A suicide bomber blew himself up Sunday at a large meeting called by tribal elders pushing for peace in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 40 people and injuring more than 100, witnesses and officials said.

It was the third suicide bombing in as many days in the volatile northwest, where security forces were battling pro-Taliban Islamic militants.

Thousands of people were at the meeting in Darra Adam Khel in North West Frontier Province about 25 miles south of the provincial capital, Peshawar. The five tribes involved wanted to finalize a resolution calling for punishing anyone who sheltered or helped militants, including those of al-Qaida and the Taliban, Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said on state-run Pakistan Television.

Alam Khan, a tribesman who attended, said a young man walked up to a group of elders and blew himself up.

''It was a huge explosion and left body parts and blood scattered on the ground,'' said Ramin Khan, whose left leg and face were wounded.

President Pervez Musharraf said the attack was an attempt to sabotage the peace process and reiterated the government's ''resolve and commitment'' in the fight against terrorism and extremism.

Dr. Hamid Afridy, the area's chief medical officer, said he counted 40 bodies, some with severed limbs and mutilated faces, at the site.

''We have dispatched more than 100 injured to .. hospitals'' in Peshawar and Kohat town, he told The Associated Press. He said he feared the death toll could rise because many of the injured were in critical condition.

Pakistan Television said the suspected bomber's severed head was found.

Television footage showed blood, shoes and caps littering the bombing site -- a tree-lined ground amid wheat fields that is only a few yards away from brick homes.

On Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the funeral of a slain police officer in Mingora town in Swat Valley, killing more than 40 people and injuring at least 60. The next, day another suicide bombing in nearby Bajur killed one person and wounded 19 others, mostly security personnel.

Friday's bombing was the bloodiest attack in the Swat Valley since militant followers of a pro-Taliban cleric, Maulana Fazlullah, grabbed control of large parts of the scenic corner of Pakistan's restive northwest, an apparent reflection of how Musharraf's government has lost control of parts of the region.

Meanwhile, a prominent opposition lawyer who had been under house arrest since Musharraf declared a state of emergency more than three months ago was freed Sunday, police said.

The attorney, Aitzaz Ahsan, said the police who had been restricting him to his home in Lahore have left.

Ahsan, a strong critic of the president, had been under house arrest since Nov. 3, when Musharraf declared a state of emergency and fired dozens of independent-minded judges, including the country's Supreme Court justices, who had been expected to rule on the legitimacy of his October re-election.

Ahsan, who is president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, has been at the forefront of demands that Musharraf reinstate the justices. Hours after being freed he led a rally of lawyers and called for the judges to be reinstated.

------

Associated Press reporters Zarar Khan and Sadaqat Jan in Islamabad contributed to this report.

US Military Kills al - Qaida Leader

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:50 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (AP) -- A U.S. military helicopter fired a guided missile to kill a wanted al-Qaida in Iraq leader from Saudi Arabia who was responsible for the bombing deaths of five American soldiers, a spokesman said Sunday.

U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith said Jar Allah, also known as Abu Yasir al-Saudi, and another Saudi known only as Hamdan, were both killed Wednesday in Mosul.

According to the military, al-Saudi conducted numerous attacks against Iraqi and U.S. forces, including a Jan. 28 bomb attack that killed the five U.S. soldiers.

In that attack, insurgents blasted a U.S. patrol with a roadside bomb and showered survivors with gunfire from a mosque. The soldiers died in the explosion, the deadliest on American forces since six soldiers perished Jan. 9 in a booby-trapped house north of Baghdad.

Intelligence gathered in the Mosul area led the U.S. military to al-Saudi, who was in a car with Hamdan. A precision helicopter strike killed both and destroyed their vehicle. U.S. forces then confirmed the men's identities.

Smith said their deaths brought to 142 the number of al-Qaida insurgents killed or captured in Mosul since the beginning of the year.

Al-Saudi was the man who headed up the al-Qaida network in southeast Mosul, an insurgent hotbed where U.S. forces wage daily battles against the group.

''Mosul is the center of al-Qaida's terrorist activities today. Mosul is a critical crossroads for al-Qaida in Iraq. Baghdad has always been al-Qaida's operational center of gravity, but Mosul remains their strategic center of gravity as it provides access to the flow of foreign fighters,'' Smith said.

Mosul is located at the locus of roads that connect Iraq with Syria to the west, Turkey to the north and Iran to the east. Many fighters smuggled in from Syria make their way through Mosul, where they can easily blend in with city's ethnically and religiously diverse population.

''It is their strategic center of gravity. One-half to two-thirds of attacks in Iraq today are in and around Mosul,'' Smith said.

A successful program to recruit and fund Sunni tribesmen has also slashed al-Qaida's influence in Baghdad and western Anbar province, pushing the group into Diyala province and up toward Mosul -- fighting as they retreat north.

In one incident Sunday, 13 gunmen were killed and eight were injured in clashes with American and Iraqi forces in the town of Tal Afar -- on the road from Syria to Mosul. Tal Afar Mayor Maj. Gen. Najim Abdullah said that two police officers were also killed and four were injured.

In two other separate attacks in Diyala, police reported that five people were killed when a roadside bomb hit a bus, while another assault killed a patrolling police officer.

It remains unclear if al-Qaida was responsible for Friday's kidnapping of Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho and the killing of three people who were with him. Smith said that Iraqi and U.S. forces were searching for those who abducted the cleric as he left Mass in the northern city of Mosul. The European Union also appealed for his release and condemned the kidnapping in an announcement.

Smith said there was no way to predict when Mosul would be rid of al-Qaida, adding that ''there is no timetable per se to turn over security in any particular area of Iraq, including Baghdad'' to Iraqi forces.

According to the military, al-Saudi planned and conducted numerous attacks against Iraqi and U.S. forces, including a reported attempt with a 5,000-lb vehicle bomb that would have killed hundreds of people if it had exploded.

Al-Saudi was a close associate of al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri and arrived in Mosul with a group of foreign fighters last August after spending time fighting in Afghanistan.

''After fighting and training in Afghanistan, he was brought to Iraq by Abu Ayyub al-Masri in November 2007, one of four Saudi Arabians appointed to supervise al-Qaida activities in Mosul. He was quickly moved up to run all of the terror network's operations in southeast Mosul, becoming the most visible and active al-Qaida operative in the area,'' Smith said.

In another incident, the military expressed regret over the killing of a teenager Friday by a helicopter gunship that thought it was firing on suspected roadside bombers planting a device, the military said.

It added that residents later told troops that a group of boys had been digging up roots for firewood.

Dozens killed in Pakistan blast

Suicide bomber targets funeral of policeman in militant-ridden northwest
BREAKING NEWS
MSNBC News Services
updated 12:46 p.m. ET, Fri., Feb. 29, 2008

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A suicide bombing at a funeral for a police officer killed at least 30 people and wounded 62 others Friday in northwestern Pakistan, a police official said.

The attack occurred in a government high school in the town of Mingora while funeral prayers were being held for a police officer killed in a roadside bombing earlier in the day, said Deputy Inspector General of Police Syed Akhtar Ali Shah.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said the attack occurred in Swat, a mountainous region where Pakistani security forces have been battling Islamist militants for months.

Waqif Khan, a senior police officer in the region, said officials have been trying to gain a better handle on the death toll.

The policeman being buried was one of three killed by a roadside bomb in Bannu, a town at the gateway to the troubled North Waziristan tribal region.

Pakistan's army deployed to Swat earlier this year to quell an uprising led by a pro-Taliban cleric, and claims it has dispersed thousands of militant followers but attacks persisted. Last Friday, a roadside bomb hit a wedding party, killing 12 people.

Taliban militants have stepped up attacks and taken control of tracts of northwestern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan in the past couple of years. Before militants took root last summer, Swat was once a draw for tourists because of its fine mountain scenery.

Please check back for details on this breaking story.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
© 2008 MSNBC Interactive

The IED problem is getting out of control. We've got to stop the bleeding.

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 29, 2007; A12

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- By the late summer of 2002, as the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington approached, an American victory in Afghanistan appeared all but assured. A pro-Western government had convened in Kabul. Reconstruction teams fanned out through the provinces. U.S. and coalition troops hunted Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants in the mountains along the Pakistani border.

Among the few shadows on this sunny Central Asian tableau -- besides the escape of Osama bin Laden -- was the first appearance of roadside bombs triggered by radio waves.

There were not many. U.S. forces would report fewer than two dozen improvised explosive devices of all sorts in Afghanistan in 2002. But the occasional RC -- radio-controlled -- bombs were much more sophisticated than the booby traps with trip wires typically seen by American troops.

A triggerman with a radio transmitter could send a signal several hundred yards to a hidden bomb built with a receiver linked to an electrical firing circuit, which in turn detonated an attached artillery shell or a scavenged land mine.

That receiver included a slender box about three inches square housing a modified circuit board resembling a long-legged spider. The Spider Mod 1, as the device was dubbed, would remain a weapon of Afghan bombmakers in various iterations for more than five years -- and an emblem of defiance against the world's only military superpower

Captured Spider devices were shipped to the United States for forensic examination. Maj. Gen. John R. Vines, commander of the U.S. task force in Afghanistan, had a sense of what his troops were up against. "What can we do to protect our forces?" he asked his subordinates. "I'll take a 30 percent solution. That's better than zero."

Even that modest request seemed daunting. U.S. soldiers and Marines had no mobile electronic countermeasures capable of disrupting RC triggers by blocking the radio signal.

Bomb squads -- known in the military as EOD teams, for explosive ordnance detachment -- carried a feeble jammer called the Citadel, which created a stationary protective "bubble" around technicians defusing a device. But the few Citadels in service could not be mounted on vehicles to protect patrols and convoys, and they were too weak to provide protection beyond a few yards.

Special Operations units employed electronic countermeasures, and the Secret Service used powerful mobile jammers to shield presidential motorcades and other prominent targets. Yet such gadgets were also few in number, much in demand and highly classified.

That left the Navy as a solution. For decades, electronic countermeasures had been a vital part of airborne combat for Navy fliers. Submariners also considered it a "core mission," as did surface ship officers. "It's how I deal with cruise missiles coming at me," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington.

After a yellow Mercedes-Benz truck stuffed with explosives killed 241 U.S. troops in Beirut in October 1983, the Navy began investing in a top-secret program in counter-RC technology. That led to a family of jammers, known as the Channel series, intended to protect ships arriving at foreign ports where RC bombs could be hidden in the docks.

By 2002, some of these devices were considered obsolete and had been consigned to a warehouse shelf. But Navy specialists in Indian Head, Md., 30 miles south of Washington, reconfigured a jammer they called Acorn, which neatly matched the frequencies used by the Spider Mod 1 in Afghanistan. In November 2002, 45 days after the first plea for help from Afghanistan, several dozen Acorns began arriving at Bagram Air Base.

Army EOD experts distributed each device, mounting the gray box and antenna on Humvees and Special Forces sport-utility vehicles. Instructing soldiers in the nuances of wave propagation and other electronic mysteries proved challenging; one device reportedly was installed on a water truck that never left the base. Successful jamming meant troops had no way of recognizing that they were even under attack by a radio-controlled IED. Acorns could also interfere with radios and other electronics.

Still, Vines's "30 percent solution" was more than fulfilled. As one retired Navy captain later recalled of Acorn: "We expected it to last six months before the bad guys figured it out." Instead, more than 2,000 Acorns eventually outfitted the force in Afghanistan where, like the Spider, it would remain a fixture on the battlefield for the next five years.

* * *

While U.S. forces parried the fledgling IED threat in Afghanistan, secret planning for the invasion of Iraq had accelerated. Little thought was given to roadside bombs as a serious obstacle to the American juggernaut. But U.S. strategists feared that Saddam Hussein would destroy his own oil production facilities rather than let them be captured. Scorched-earth tactics by retreating Iraqi troops in 1991 had turned Kuwait's oil fields into an inferno.

U.S. intelligence in early 2003 reported that wellheads in southern Iraq had been wired for detonation, and that Iraqi forces probably had the ability to use radio-controlled triggers to detonate those demolition charges. Jammers would be needed to secure the fields.

Even as the Navy converted Acorn into a battlefield countermeasure, Army engineers at Fort Monmouth, N.J., were working on their own mobile jammers. First in a laboratory and then in field tests, they modified an old system called Shortstop, originally built in 1990 as a footlocker-sized gadget to confound the proximity fuses in incoming artillery and mortar shells.

By intercepting and modifying the radio signals emitted by such fuses, Shortstop tricked the shells into believing they were approaching the ground, causing them to detonate prematurely. Shortstop had been completed too late for use in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and it was deployed to Bosnia only briefly. A Pentagon inventory showed that the Army had almost 300 systems in storage.

With different computer chips and a cleverly modified ham radio antenna, Shortstop made an admirable jammer. The wife of one Fort Monmouth engineer collected miniature kitchen witches that inspired a new name for the device: Warlock Green. After final fixes in California, five Warlocks were shipped to Kuwait in time to accompany the invasion forces plunging into Iraq in March 2003, according to a senior officer involved in the effort.

The countermeasure proved unnecessary. Not a single oil well was rigged for radio-controlled detonation. Some oil facilities were sabotaged, but the damage was less grievous than feared.

Yet the Army jammer had found a home on the battlefield. As Shortstops were transformed into Warlock Greens -- each device cost about $100,000, according to a contractor involved in the program -- they were shipped in large Rubbermaid storage cases to Afghanistan, where a technician laminated his business card onto the devices so soldiers knew whom to call for help. Others would be packed up, driven to the Baltimore-Washington international airport in a rented van and flown to Iraq.

By late summer 2003, almost 100 Warlocks had been deployed, according to an Army document that said IEDs were "increasing in number and complexity at an alarming rate." Another Navy jammer, originally designed to protect four-star flag officers, also began arriving in the theater -- first six, then 30 and eventually 300.

If no one foresaw that within four years more than 30,000 jammers of all sorts would be in Iraq, a few suspected that something big had started. "We're going to need a lot more jammers," Col. Bruce Jette, who commanded the Army's Rapid Equipping Force at Fort Belvoir, told a Fort Monmouth engineer in August 2003. "And eventually we're going to need a jammer on every vehicle."

***

Bombmaking by definition required explosives, and in that commodity, as in oil, Iraq was richly endowed. "The entire country was one big ammo dump," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would observe this past March. "It's just a huge, huge problem."

The problem was also huge in 2003. Yet U.S. strategists, who before the invasion failed to anticipate an insurgency, also drafted no comprehensive plans for securing thousands of munitions caches, now estimated to have held at least 650,000 tons and perhaps more than 1 million tons of explosives. "There's more ammunition in Iraq than any place I've ever been in my life, and it's not securable," Gen. John P. Abizaid told the Senate Appropriations Committee shortly after taking over U.S. Central Command in July 2003. "I wish I could tell you that we had it all under control. We don't."

To forestall looting, U.S. forces tried spreading putrid substances across the dumps, as well as cementing artillery rounds together or burying large caches. "We're now finding people tunneling 30 feet down and carting the stuff away," an analyst noted earlier this year. Sloshing diesel fuel across the dumps and lighting it, among several haphazard "blow and go" techniques, often simply scattered the rounds. More than a year after the invasion "only 40 percent of Iraq's pre-war munitions inventory was secured or destroyed," the Congressional Research Service reported this summer.

Tens of thousands of tons probably were pilfered, U.S. government analysts believe. (If properly positioned, 20 pounds of high explosive can destroy any vehicle the Army owns.) The lax control would continue long after Hussein was routed: 10,000 or more blasting caps -- also vital to bombmaking -- vanished from an Iraqi bureau of mines storage facility in 2004, along with "thousands of kilometers" of detonation cord, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

In the summer of 2003, pilfered explosives appeared in growing numbers of IEDs. Main Supply Route Tampa, the main road for military convoys driving between Baghdad and Kuwait, became a common target. Three artillery shells wired to a timer west of Taji, discovered on July 29, reportedly made up the first confirmed delay bomb. Others were soon found using egg timers or Chinese washing-machine timers.

Radio-controlled triggers tended to be simple and low-power, using car key fobs or wireless doorbell buzzers -- Qusun was the most common brand -- with a range of 200 meters or less. Radio controls from toy cars beamed signals to a small electrical motor attached to a bomb detonator; turning the toy's front wheels completed the circuit and triggered the explosion.

U.S. troops dubbed the crude devices "bang-bang" because spurious signals could cause premature detonations, sometimes killing the emplacer. Bombers soon learned to install safety switches in the contraptions, and to use better radio links.

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind highway guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of guardrail.) Emplacers often used the same "blow hole" repeatedly, returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again and again. But early in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

Coalition forces tended to concentrate at large forward operating bases with few entry roads. "Insurgents seized the initiative on these common routes," according to a 2007 account of the counter-IED effort by Col. William G. Adamson. "The vast majority of IED attacks occurred within a short distance of the FOBs."

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys routinely began stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents planted easily spotted hoax bombs to halt traffic, then detonated explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would most likely pull over.

By the early fall of 2003, IED attacks had reached 100 a month, according to a House Armed Services Committee document. Most were a nuisance; some proved stunning and murderous. A large explosion along a roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a 70-ton M1A2 Abrams tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two crewmen. Even more horrifying was a truck bomb at 4:45 p.m. on Aug. 19 that demolished the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the U.N. special representative and 22 others.

Day by day, as Adamson would write, "the concept of a front, or line of battle, vanished" in Iraq, giving way to "360-degree warfare."

***

IEDs had quickly moved to the top of Abizaid's anxieties at Central Command. A Lebanese American who spoke Arabic and who had studied as an Olmsted scholar at the University of Jordan in Amman, the four-star general had seen for himself the aggravation that roadside bombs caused Israeli forces in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Two weeks after taking command from the retiring Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Abizaid publicly described resistance in Iraq as "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," a blunt appraisal that reportedly irked the Pentagon's civilian leadership. But the amount of unsecured ammunition in Iraq, particularly in Sunni regions, alarmed him. So did the realization that many Iraqi military officers -- unemployed and disgruntled after the national army was disbanded in late May -- possessed extensive skill in handling explosives.

Abizaid hoped that American technical savvy would produce a gadget that could detect bombs at a distance, "a scientific molecular sniffer, or something," as he put it. "We thought the problem would spread," Abizaid later reflected, "but it didn't appear overly sophisticated." Underestimating the enemy's creativity and overestimating American ingenuity, a pattern established before the war began, continued long after the capture of Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. ground commander in Iraq, told Pentagon strategists that he hoped to minimize the military's "footprint" in Iraq by maintaining an occupation force that was two-thirds motorized and only one-third mechanized. "What I don't want is a lot of tanks and Bradleys," Sanchez said, according to a senior Army commander.

That meant mounting most troops on Humvees, few of which were built to withstand bombs or even small-arms fire. Soldiers had begun fashioning crude "hillbilly armor" for their vehicles from scrap metal. Even factory-built armored vehicles had been designed to resist projectiles fired at a distance, according to a senior Army scientist, and not against point-blank explosions in which steel fragments and blast overpressure -- from gases hotter than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit forming in 1/10,000th of a second -- struck simultaneously.

Production of the stout "uparmored" Humvee started in 1996, but as a specialty vehicle for military police and Special Forces; an average of one per day had been built before the war, according to congressional documents. The entire fleet of uparmored Humvees in the theater in 2003 totaled 235, the Army chief of staff would later report.

With no master list of where uparmored Humvees were deployed, logisticians searched U.S. motor pools around the world. Seventy were found in Air Force missile fields in North Dakota and elsewhere, according to a former senior officer on the joint staff, but it took a four-star order to pry them away for duty in the Middle East.

Protecting individual soldiers was a bit simpler. In June 2003, the Pentagon decided to outfit every trooper in theater with tough interceptor body armor. By December, eight vendors would produce 25,000 sets a month, according to congressional documents, and by April 2004 all U.S. military personnel in Iraq had received high-quality protection. The documents show that Congress has appropriated more than $4 billion for body armor so far.

But as summer yielded to fall in 2003, the final defense against roadside bombs often fell to a few hundred EOD technicians, whose informal motto -- "Initial success or total failure" -- suggested the hazards in what was known as "the long walk."

Summoned to neutralize a suspected bomb, a tech donned a cumbersome, blast-resistant outfit that resembled a deep-sea diving suit, with a transparent face shield and extra padding to protect femoral arteries, genitals and the spinal column. The robots then available to "interrogate" a device were crude and few in number, forcing the tech to conduct the examination himself.

"All you can hear is the fan in your helmet, your heart beating and your breathing," recalled Sgt. First Class Troy Parker, who served in Iraq in 2003. "And you're wondering if this is the last walk you're ever going to take."

Sometimes it was. On Sept. 10, 2003, in Baghdad, Staff Sgt. Joseph E. Robsky Jr. was trying to disarm an IED when an apparent RC-trigger detonated a mortar shell packed with C-4 plastic explosive. Robsky, 31, would be among more than 50 EOD technicians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the late summer of this year.

Within hours of his death, a call went out to assemble all EOD robots in Baghdad at the international airport for an inventory, according to a senior Navy EOD officer in Iraq at the time. They found 18 robots, and only six of them worked.

***

By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who included his two sons and a nephew, but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is getting out of control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've got to stop the bleeding."

A Lebanese American West Point graduate like Abizaid, Cody was the son of a Chevrolet dealer in Montpelier, Vt. Stocky and intense, with thick hair the color of gunmetal, he had fired the first shots of the Gulf War in January 1991 while attacking an Iraqi radar site as commander of an Apache helicopter battalion. His appetites ran to hard work, New York Times crossword puzzles, Red Man chewing tobacco, Diet Coke and two-pound bags of peanut M&Ms, which he could eat in one sitting.

Hughes drafted a sheaf of PowerPoint slides labeled "IED Task Force: A Way," which proposed forming a small unit with a Washington director and two field teams "designed to respond to incidents." To recruit active-duty Special Operations troops would take at least nine months, so with Cody's approval and a chit for $20 million, Hughes hired Wexford Group International, a security consultant in Vienna, Va. Two retired Delta Force soldiers soon arrived in room 2D468 of the Pentagon to begin assembling the field teams from a "black Rolodex" of former special operators.

To run his task force, Cody chose one of the Army's most charismatic young officers, Joseph L. Votel, then 45, who had just been selected for promotion to brigadier general. A tall, good-humored Minnesotan, Votel had commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. More recently, in Iraq, three of his Rangers had been killed near Haditha with a suicide bomb detonated by a pregnant woman; two other Rangers had died in a roadside bombing on Route Irish, near the Baghdad airport.

Votel expected the job of controlling IEDs to take six months, maybe eight. "And then we move on," he said. He moved his small staff into a shabby, malodorous corner of the Army operations center in the Pentagon basement and posted a sign on the wall: "STOP THE BLEEDING."

Even by Pentagon standards, the hours were brutal. Those who lived in the Washington exurbs typically rose at 3:45 a.m. to be at their desks by 5:30, where they remained until 9 p.m. or later. To avoid bureaucratic friction with other agencies, Votel advised: "Stay small, stay light, be agile, move quickly. . . . There's goodness in smallness."

About a dozen former Delta Force operators were hired as contractors for the nucleus of the field teams. Some would earn $1,000 a day while deployed, according to two knowledgeable officers. Cody sent them to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to interview soldiers wounded by IEDs, to learn "what they wished they had done" before being blown up.

To arm the teams, the task force borrowed rifles from the Old Guard ceremonial regiment at Fort Myer and drafted permission slips for the contractors to carry weapons in Iraq. Instead of standard Army pistols, the men requested the Glock 9mm. "Sir," Votel told Cody, "these guys want Glocks." Cody gestured impatiently. "So get them Glocks."

In his diary on Nov. 17, 2003, Cody scribbled: "We have to make sure our commanders and soldiers are not at the end of this process but are engaged throughout the process." Toward that end, Votel and Hughes flew to Baghdad to secure a small compound at Camp Victory and to explain the task force to senior officers in Iraq.

The intent was to train troops to recognize and counter IEDs, Votel said, and to "build an architecture between the theater and Big Army" back in the States. IED incidents would be documented in detail at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and notably effective tactics and techniques would be disseminated to units preparing to deploy.

Eventually, Votel added, the effort would move "left of boom" by attacking bomber networks before devices could be placed and detonated. In the IED battle, the task force was to help "protect, predict, prevent, detect and neutralize" -- known as "tenets of assured mobility" -- which Votel borrowed as his conceptual framework from the Army Engineer School.

"Why are you bringing me a 7,000-mile screwdriver to fix this from D.C.?" asked one skeptical general in Baghdad. "Nothing good ever comes from Washington." Still, most commanders welcomed the assistance.

The first seven-man field team flew to Iraq on Dec. 12, 2003. Several others were to follow, including one sent to Afghanistan. Working initially with the 4th Infantry Division, and shuttling between bases in unarmored Chevy Suburbans, the team members in Iraq advocated infantry basics: "shoot, move, communicate, clear routes, don't set patterns." Troops were advised to watch for wires and triggermen away from the road, to be unpredictable, to use a "porcupine approach" in patrols and convoys, with all guns bristling and flank guards deployed.

By February 2004, the number of IED attacks in Iraq approached 100 a week. About half detonated, a proportion that would remain relatively constant for the next three years. The bleeding had hardly stopped, but to Central Command it seemed to have stabilized.

The casualty-per-blast ratio was dropping. Troops quickly learned counter-IED survival skills. Some bombers were arrested or killed. On good days the number of attacks dwindled to single digits, and U.S. bomb fatalities in February totaled nine, fewer than half the number in January.

"It looks to me like we're winning this thing," Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the Centcom deputy commander, told Abizaid at their forward headquarters in Qatar. "We're kicking ass."

Abizaid gave a thin smile. "Stand by," he said. "They're just plotting."

***

On March 28, 2004, U.S. troops shut down the incendiary newspaper of Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric with a volatile following in the Baghdad slums. "All hell broke loose," a Centcom officer later noted. By late spring, IED attacks had nearly doubled, with bombers apparently drawn from the ranks of disaffected Shiites as well as Sunnis.

IEDs had become "the greatest casualty producer" in Iraq, Abizaid told Congress, surpassing RPG-7s, a rocket-propelled grenade. Insurgents increasingly promoted their deeds with videotapes released to al-Jazeera and other Arab media outlets. Spectacular explosions of Abrams tanks and other "icon vehicles," as U.S. officers called high-value targets, soon filled airwaves and Web sites.

For Joe Votel and his task force in Washington, the IED fight had become a complex exercise in phenomenology. How did blast and shrapnel interact at close range? How did bomber cells thrive? Why did jammers seem to work in some areas and not others? The six- to eight-month time frame he foresaw for controlling IEDs would require an extension.

More than 500 mobile jammers had reached Iraq, but thousands more were needed. By late spring 2004, the task force had finally established a jammer strategy: get as many systems into theater as possible -- including Warlock Green, a sister device known as Warlock Red, and a Navy jammer called Cottonwood, which was removed from the Suburban in which it typically rode, installed in an armored vehicle and renamed Ironwood. Meanwhile, engineers would develop a single powerful variant that covered as much of the RC spectrum as possible.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a former paratrooper and Vietnam veteran from San Diego who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, watched the Army's response to IEDs with impatience. In February 2004, a committee memo to the service noted that "arsenals, depots, industry, and steel mills" were not at full capacity in making heavy plates for uparmored Humvees. House staffers visited the steel plants, extracting pledges to defer commercial work until almost 7,000 Humvee armor kits were finished in May, six months ahead of the Army's original schedule.

Hunter was particularly incensed to find skittish troops bolting thin steel and even plywood to military trucks traveling along Route Tampa and other hazardous Iraqi roads. In January, he had asked Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco to design an armored gun truck similar to those used in the Vietnam War, the sole surviving example of which he found in the Army's transportation museum at Fort Eustis, Va. In March, a five-ton prototype, with steel and ballistic fiberglass protection added to the cab and truck bed, was shipped for testing to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

On June 4, Hunter appeared at the Pentagon's River Entrance with a freshly painted gun truck and placards, mounted on easels, listing its virtues. Cody and others from the top brass wandered out to kick the tires. No one wanted to buck the powerful chairman, but several paratroopers soon appeared to inform Hunter "how much they loved the Humvee better than these big things, how nice and small and agile it was," he later recalled.

Hunter was not dissuaded. Nearly 100 gun-truck kits would be sent to Iraq, at $40,000 each, and 18 to Afghanistan. Some soldiers sang the truck's praises, while others found it top-heavy and "something of a grenade basket," according to a senior commander in the 10th Mountain Division. Still, of more than 9,000 medium and heavy military transport trucks rolling through Iraq in late 2004, only about one in 10 had armor, according to GlobalSecurity.org. The convoys remained vulnerable.

A Vietnam-era relic would hardly solve the IED threat permanently. Several influential voices in Washington now questioned the Pentagon's approach. Retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the president of the Institute for Defense Analyses and a former U.S. commander in chief in the Pacific, complained to the joint staff about the lack of systematic, rigorous analysis of IED trends. "The Army is not dealing with the IED problem well, because it's not in their nature," Blair said. "They're used to taking off from the line of departure, capturing the enemy capital and having a victory parade."

Moreover, the emphasis on defeating the device, Blair added, was "like playing soccer and you're spending all your money and attention on the goalie's gloves. At that point, not only is this the last line of defense, but the ball is already in the air."

At Centcom, Smith also was frustrated by the lack of urgency. Four months after concluding that "we're winning this thing," he now had doubts about the national commitment to overcoming IEDs. "We have got to get at this thing in a different way than we're addressing it right now," he advised Abizaid in Qatar in June 2004. "We've got to have something like the Manhattan Project."

The allusion to the crash program that had built the atomic bomb in World War II -- an effort eventually employing 125,000 people and many of the nation's finest scientific minds -- appealed to Abizaid's imagination. Several days later he wrote a personal message to the Pentagon leadership asking for a "Manhattan Project-like" approach to IEDs.

"What the [expletive] does he think we're doing?" Cody snapped upon learning of the request. But the Centcom commander's plea could hardly be brushed aside. In a meeting with Cody and Votel, according to a participant in the session, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked whether the Army could meet Abizaid's request.

The Army believed it could, particularly if the service was made the executive agent for an expanded effort that involved the entire Defense Department. That meant getting the other services to relinquish money, personnel and bureaucratic control, an encroachment that quickly triggered alarms.

Meetings convened, exchanges grew stormy. The Navy and Marine Corps had pursued their own counter-IED programs, and the Air Force particularly resisted putting the Army in charge of a Pentagon-wide enterprise.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz believed change was necessary. Why, he had asked his staff, did it take so long for armor, jammers and other counter-IED materiel to reach Iraq and Afghanistan? "Where is all this stuff?" he complained. "When is it going to get to theater?"

The effort seemed fragmented and ad hoc -- "sucked into technology rabbit holes," as Votel put it. A survey by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk that spring had found that at least 132 government agencies were now involved in IED issues, from the FBI and CIA to the National Security Agency and the National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Va., according to an Army brigadier general.

The battle against IEDs exceeded the management capacity of a single service, Wolfowitz concluded. On July 12, 2004, he signed a one-paragraph order that transformed the Army task force into a joint task force. Votel would remain director, with cramped offices in the Army operations center. But he now reported to Wolfowitz rather than to Cody, and the task force would draw expertise from all services.

Cody, who became the Army's four-star vice chief of staff in late June, accepted the decision graciously, even as he told one senior Army officer who now worked for Wolfowitz, "Don't forget where you came from."

Creation of the Joint IED Task Force would dramatically expand the U.S. effort. A $100 million budget in fiscal 2004 would mushroom to $1.3 billion in 2005. In subsequent meetings with industry executives and the national research laboratories, Wolfowitz declared that there was no higher priority. Within the Defense Department, countering IEDs would be second only to exterminating Osama bin Laden.

"This is a major strategic effort," Wolfowitz told one group. "What can you put into it?"

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

Monday: The IED Blitz

Suicide Bombing Kills 27 Afghans

By KIRK SEMPLE

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 29 — A suicide bomber wearing an Afghan military uniform approached a bus full of Afghan soldiers on their way to work early today and detonated a belt of explosives concealed beneath his clothes, officials said. The explosion transformed the vehicle into a smoldering husk of twisted steel and killed at least 27 people, including civilians, making it one of the deadliest suicide bombings in Afghanistan this year, officials said.

The early-morning blast was so powerful that it peeled the sides off the bus, catapulted a huge piece of the vehicle into a park across the street and shattered windows in shops and homes around the neighborhood.

Numerous people were wounded in the attack, including day laborers who had gathered nearby in the hope of finding work, according to a statement issued by the Interior Ministry. Some of the laborers were also among the dead, the statement said, though the exact number was not yet known.

Neighborhood residents and shop owners described a deafening blast followed by bedlam as bloody survivors stumbled around screaming for help. Ghulam Jelani, 48, the owner of a bakery no more than 100 yards from the attack, said he was toiling in his kitchen when the explosion occurred.

“I went outside and there was a lot of dust and I couldn’t see anything,” he recalled. “After five minutes I could finally see the bus.”

Initially there were conflicting accounts from officials on the scene about whether the bomber had made it onto the bus. But the Interior Ministry clarified later in the morning that the bomber had detonated himself on the street.

“It’s a very painful incident,” Gen. Muhammad Razzaq Yaqubi, the deputy police chief of Kabul, said at the scene as Afghan and French forensic investigators sifted through the wreckage and two Afghan police officials wandered down the street picking up body parts and dropping them into a blue plastic bag.

While suicide bombings in Iraq have been employed by the Sunni Arab insurgency to target the Shiite civilian population in an apparent effort to incite sectarian tensions, suicide bombers in Afghanistan have mostly attacked Afghan and foreign security forces.

Early this month, the United Nations said that in the first eight months of the year, Afghanistan had suffered a 69 percent increase in suicide bombings over the same period last year.

There have already been 100 bombings this year, killing at least 290 people, according to Afghan and international officials. A record 123 were carried out in 2006, inflicting some 305 deaths.

In the last large-scale suicide bombing in Afghanistan, at least one bomber blew himself up on Sept. 10 in a crowded market in the south, killing at least 26 Afghans, half of them civilians. The last large suicide bombing in the capital occurred in June when a suicide attacker boarded a bus carrying Afghan police trainers and detonated himself, killing 24 people and wounding 35 others.

A former Taliban commander told United Nations investigators that half of all suicide bombers had been foreigners and that “almost all undergo some form of training and preparation in madrasas based in Pakistan,” according to a United Nations report released earlier this month.

“Over 80 percent of suicide attackers pass through recruitment, training facilities or safe houses in North or South Waziristan en route to their targets inside Afghanistan,” the report added.

Many of the bombers appear to be young, poorly educated Afghans who had attended religious schools in Pakistan, investigators found. Suicide bombers also receive support from networks inside Afghanistan.

The New Al-Qaeda Central

Far From Declining, the Network Has Rebuilt, With Fresh Faces and a Vigorous Media Arm

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 9, 2007; A01

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- When Osama bin Laden resurfaced Friday in a 26-minute videotaped speech, his most important message was one left unsaid: We have survived.

The last time bin Laden showed his face to the world was three years ago, in October 2004. Since then, al-Qaeda's core leadership -- dubbed al-Qaeda Central by intelligence analysts -- has grown stronger, rebuilding the organizational framework that was badly damaged after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, according to counterterrorism officials in Pakistan, the United States and Europe.

It has accomplished this revival, the officials said in interviews, by drawing on lessons learned during 15 years of failed campaigns to destroy it. In that period, bin Laden and his followers have outfoxed powerful enemies from the Soviet army to the Saudi royal family to the CIA.

Dodging the U.S. military in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, al-Qaeda Central reconstituted itself across the Pakistani border, returning to the rugged tribal areas surrounding the organization's birthplace, the dusty frontier city of Peshawar. In the first few years, Pakistani and U.S. authorities captured many senior leaders; in the past 18 months, no major figure has been killed or caught in Pakistan.

Al-Qaeda Central moved quickly to overcome extensive leadership losses by promoting loyalists who had served alongside bin Laden for years. It restarted fundraising, recruiting and training. And it expanded its media arm into perhaps the most effective propaganda machine ever assembled by a terrorist or insurgent network.

Today, al-Qaeda operates much the way it did before 2001. The network is governed by a shura, or leadership council, that meets regularly and reports to bin Laden, who continues to approve some major decisions, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official. About 200 people belong to the core group and many receive regular salaries, another senior U.S. intelligence official said.

"They do appear to meet with a frequency that enables them to act as an organization and not just as a loose bunch of guys," the second official said.

Operatives are organized into cells with separate missions, such as fundraising or logistics, and may know the identities of only a few individuals in their circle to prevent infiltration, Pakistani officials said. Most leaders are based in Pakistan, although many travel to Afghanistan and occasionally farther afield, to Iraq, Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus region and North Africa.

Counterterrorism officials were slow to grasp the resurrection of al-Qaeda Central. For years, many U.S. and European intelligence officials characterized it as a spent force, limited to providing inspiration for loosely affiliated regional networks. Bombings in Europe and the Middle East were blamed on homegrown cells of militants, operating independently of bin Laden.

On June 24, 2003, President Bush declared al-Qaeda's leadership largely defunct. At a Camp David summit, Bush praised Pakistan's Gen. Pervez Musharraf, crediting his country with apprehending more than 500 members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

"Thanks to President Musharraf's leadership, on the al-Qaeda front we've dismantled the chief operators," Bush said. Although bin Laden was still at large, his lieutenants were "no longer a threat to the United States or Pakistan," Bush added.

Six months later, Musharraf was nearly killed in an assassination attempt by al-Qaeda operatives. Shortly afterward, a group of al-Qaeda leaders held a summit of their own in the Pakistani region of Waziristan, where they plotted fresh attacks thousands of miles away in Britain, including targets in London and financial institutions in the United States, according to Pakistani officials.

Many U.S., Pakistani and European intelligence officials now agree that al-Qaeda's ability to launch operations around the globe didn't diminish after the invasion of Afghanistan as much as previously thought. Further investigation has shown, for example, that al-Qaeda's leadership, with bin Laden's direct blessing, made the decision to activate sleeper cells in Saudi Arabia in 2003, prompting a wave of car bombings and assassination attempts that the Saudi government has only recently brought under control.

From hideouts in Pakistan, according to court testimony and interviews, bin Laden's deputies ordered attacks on a Tunisian synagogue in 2002, a British consulate and bank in Istanbul in 2003, and the London transit system in 2005.

U.S intelligence officials also blame the al-Qaeda brain trust for orchestrating dozens of other failed plots, including a plan to blow up transatlantic flights from Britain in August 2006.

"All this business about them being isolated or cut off is whistling past the graveyard," said Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst who led the agency's unit assigned to track bin Laden. "We're looking at an organization that is extraordinarily adept at succession planning. They were built to survive, like the Afghans were against the Russians."
A Failed Strike

After nightfall on Jan. 13, 2006, an unmanned Predator aircraft guided by the CIA fired missiles at two houses in the northwestern Pakistani village of Damadola, a few miles from the Afghan border.

The target was a dinner celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. CIA officials had received intelligence that Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's deputy leader, had been invited to attend.

The missiles destroyed the houses and killed more than a dozen people. Zawahiri was not among them, but Pakistani officials soon said the fatalities included several other high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders.

Musharraf identified one of the dead as Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, an Egyptian who had overseen al-Qaeda's research into chemical weapons and carried a $5 million U.S. government bounty on his head.

Musharraf and other Pakistani officials said those buried in the rubble also included Abu Obaidah al-Masri, the Egyptian chief of the al-Qaeda military wing that plots attacks in the West; Khalid Habib, a field commander for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; and Zawahiri's son-in-law, Abdul Rahman al-Maghribi.

U.S. and Pakistani officials now say that none of those al-Qaeda leaders perished in the strike and that only local villagers were killed. The $5 million reward for Umar's capture remains on offer. Masri has continued to rise in the al-Qaeda structure, U.S. officials say, and six months after his supposed death was helping in the failed effort to put bombs aboard airliners flying from Britain.

Mahmood Shah, who at the time of the strike was Pakistan's security chief for the region, said intelligence for the Predator mission stemmed in part from the interrogation of another al-Qaeda leader, Abu Faraj al-Libi, who had been captured eight months earlier in the city of Mardan, also in Pakistan's northwest.

At the time, Shah said, U.S. and Pakistani officials thought merely that the timing of the strike was slightly off and that they had barely missed Zawahiri. Now, he said, he thinks Zawahiri and the others were never there. "I just think the information was not correct," he said.

The only publicized success in the nearly 20 months since the Damadola attack came on April 12, 2006, when Muhsin Musa Matwalli Atwah, an Egyptian al-Qaeda operative indicted for involvement in the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa, was killed in North Waziristan.

Otherwise, the search for al-Qaeda's leaders in Pakistan has hit a wall. Shah said information concerning their whereabouts has grown scarcer and less reliable. By his account, Pakistani security officials haven't come across a single trace of bin Laden in the tribal areas. Occasionally, they have received tips regarding Zawahiri and others, he said, but only several weeks after the trail has run cold.

"We'd hear about their presence two months after the fact. It's just not actionable intelligence," Shah said. "This inner core has absolutely stopped using electronic technology to communicate with each other. That is why the Americans have such trouble finding them."

On Jan. 30, 2006, two weeks after the Damadola missile strike, al-Qaeda released a videotape on the Internet in which Zawahiri taunted his pursuers. "Bush, do you know where I am?" the Egyptian radical said. "I am among the Muslim masses!"
Al-Qaeda's 'Deep Bench'

A major factor in al-Qaeda's resurgence has been its ability to swiftly replace fallen or captured commanders.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden told Congress in November that the core leadership had benefited from a "deep bench of lower-ranking personnel capable of stepping up to assume leadership responsibilities." Many are veteran jihadists who have fought in Afghanistan and conflicts elsewhere for decades.

Intelligence officials and analysts said al-Qaeda's central command remains dominated by Egyptians, primarily associates of Zawahiri, who formally merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization with al-Qaeda in 1998.

One Egyptian who has taken on a bigger role is Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, an accountant by training who served as bin Laden's financial manager during his exile in Sudan in the 1990s. In May, al-Qaeda announced that Yazid had been appointed its overall leader in Afghanistan and liaison with the Taliban.

Yazid, 51, was an original member of al-Qaeda's Shura Council and served time in an Egyptian prison with Zawahiri in the early 1980s after both were convicted of participating in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Although he disagreed with bin Laden over the Sept. 11 attacks -- calling them a tactical mistake that resulted in the Taliban's fall from power -- Yazid remains close to the Saudi emir and is trusted by other jihad groups, said Yasser al-Sirri, an Egyptian political exile and director of the London-based Islamic Observation Center.

"Bin Laden appointed him as a conciliatory figure," Sirri said in an interview. "It's because of his credibility. He gets along well with the Pashtuns, with the Taliban -- he gets along well with everybody."

Several other fresh faces in the leadership are former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a now-defunct network that used to operate at arm's length from al-Qaeda.

Among them is Abu Laith al-Libi, the nom de guerre of a longtime jihadist who fought Soviet troops in Afghanistan, spent two years in prison in Saudi Arabia for covert activities there and organized a failed plot to overthrow Libyan ruler Moammar Gaddafi in the mid-1990s.

He began to work closely with bin Laden in 1999 and impressed al-Qaeda's command by leading the retreat from Kabul in 2001 after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, said Noman Benotman, a former member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

"The Saudis and others said, 'Who the hell is this guy?' They were impressed," Benotman said in an interview in London. "He can create operations. He can lead on the front lines. He knows when to attack, when to withdraw."

Abu Laith al-Libi has run training camps in Afghanistan in recent years for al-Qaeda and orchestrated a suicide attack on the U.S. air base in Bagram, killing 23 people, during a visit by Vice President Cheney in February, according to U.S. military officials.

Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan believed to be in his late 30s, has meanwhile acted as a liaison between al-Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan and al-Qaeda in Iraq, a predominantly Sunni insurgent movement that is believed responsible for some of the deadliest bomb attacks on Shiite civilians in Iraq and is one of the U.S. military's fiercest foes. The group professes loyalty to bin Laden; intelligence analysts are divided as to whether he exercises real control over it.

Rahman has also operated as a bin Laden emissary to militant groups in North Africa that joined forces in January to form al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Words From 'the Clouds'

Much remains unknown about the internal workings of al-Qaeda Central. As with the old Soviet leadership in the Kremlin, U.S. analysts scrutinize public statements issued by the network for clues on who wields influence.

One figure attracting interest is a Libyan known as Abu Yahya al-Libi, who gained notoriety after he and three other al-Qaeda prisoners escaped from a high-security U.S. military prison in Bagram in July 2005.

Since then, he has appeared on more than a dozen videos produced by al-Qaeda's media arm. His speeches and treatises are so numerous that some analysts speculate he is being groomed to join bin Laden's inner circle. "Abu Yahya al-Libi is now the most visible face of al-Qaeda, surpassing al-Zawahiri, and in fact all of the jihadists," said Ben Venzke, chief executive of IntelCenter, a private terrorism research group that does work for the U.S. government.

In his videos, Abu Yahya al-Libi dresses the part of a gun-toting holy warrior but has made his reputation as a religious hard-liner. He frequently criticizes other Muslims as heretics; favorite targets include Shiites, Hamas and the Saudi royal family.

"He's young, but he's very smart," Benotman said. "For his career, the sky's the limit."

Since 2000, al-Qaeda has run its own media production company, al-Sahab, which means "the clouds" in Arabic, an allusion to the misty mountain peaks of Afghanistan.

Until two years ago, al-Sahab was dependent on broadcasters such as the al-Jazeera satellite television network to air its videos and could distribute only short clips on the Internet. But then it achieved a spectacular breakthrough. Taking advantage of technological advances and bandwidth expansion, it began posting videos directly on the Internet, relying on an anonymous global network of webmasters to shield their electronic tracks.

In 2005, al-Sahab released 16 videos. This year, it has produced four times that number. Quality has improved markedly, with most videos now including subtitles in several languages and sometimes 3-D animation.

"If you want to stop al-Qaeda on the communications front, you should concentrate on their IT manager instead of Osama," said Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, a research group in Lahore, Pakistan, that studies militant groups.

Al-Sahab can now record and release videos with astonishing speed. When Pakistani forces stormed Islamabad's Red Mosque on July 10, resulting in more than 80 deaths, Zawahiri responded the next day with an audiotaped speech, calling the raid "an act of criminal aggression."

Al-Sahab mixes low-tech and high-tech tricks to prevent spy agencies from blocking its releases or tracing videos back to their source, said Evan F. Kohlmann, a New York-based counterterrorism analyst.

The videos are routed through a chain of couriers who hand-deliver them to computer gurus, probably in Pakistan, he said.

They, in turn, electronically send the files to others around the world who upload them to free or hijacked Web sites.

"The process of tracing this stuff back is not that easy," Kohlmann said. "They've created breaks in the distribution chain, both electronic breaks and human breaks."
A Protective Network

In July, U.S. intelligence agencies published a report concluding that al-Qaeda Central had regrouped in remote northwestern Pakistan, aided by a 2005 decision by the Pakistani government to declare a truce with Taliban forces and withdraw troops from the tribal area of Waziristan.

Latif Afridi, a Pashtun tribal elder, said that many places along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan have been effectively taken over by foreign militants, mostly Uzbeks, Tajiks, Chechens and Arabs. Although they are not all associated with al-Qaeda, bin Laden's network has been able to rely on them for protection, he said.

"We have al-Qaeda, we have Taliban, we have foreigners, and we have Pakistani-trained militant groups that have been banned," Afridi said in an interview in Peshawar. "They're running the show."

Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officials said the number of militant training camps has surged along the border. But unlike al-Qaeda's fixed camps in Afghanistan before 2001, they consist of small groups that gather for a few days for firearms or bombmaking practice before disbanding, making them hard to detect.

The truce between the Taliban and the Pakistani military collapsed in North Waziristan in July and in South Waziristan a month later. Since then, Pakistani forces have reentered the tribal areas and resumed clashes with the Taliban and other militants.

But Asad Durrani, a retired chief of Pakistan's powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence bureau, said it would take more than military intervention to capture al-Qaeda leaders.

Durrani said U.S. bombing campaigns along the Afghan-Pakistani border had thoroughly alienated civilians who otherwise might help root out al-Qaeda commanders. "The first instinct you Americans have is military power -- dropping bombs," he said. "This was absolutely 100 percent guaranteed not to succeed, and it's continued that way for the past six years."

He said it would take a concentrated, methodical approach to find bin Laden and his deputies, relying on human intelligence and simple detective work.

"If they are there, sit back, be patient," Durrani advised. "The good hunter hunts on foot."

Special correspondent Munir Ladaa in Berlin and researchers Alice Crites and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

The Insurgency's Psychological Component

By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, September 3, 2007; A03

At the core of this fall's debate over Iraq lies one simple question: Can an increased number of U.S. troops subdue the Iraqi insurgency?

The question turns out to have complex answers, and not just because the political stakes are so high. Washington is already buzzing with arguments over Gen. David H. Petraeus's upcoming report about the effect of the U.S. "surge," but beyond the politics, social scientists have come up with some empirical answers.

Their analyses show that the outcome of the troop increase hinges on whether the insurgency is primarily a mathematical phenomenon or a psychological phenomenon.

If the insurgency follows the rules of conventional mathematics, increasing the number of U.S. troops should produce a greater counterinsurgency effort and a more peaceful Iraq. That is what one analysis found. Alex Braithwaite of Colorado State University tracked insurgent attacks across Iraq's provinces over a six-month period from January to June 2005. On average, there were 16 attempted attacks in each province each week. Braithwaite found an inverse relationship between insurgent attacks and the presence of U.S. troops.

"The insurgency is most severe where U.S. troop presence is low," Braithwaite said, as he presented his findings last week at the American Political Science Association meeting in Chicago. "U.S. troops dampen the effects of the insurgency."

But if Braithwaite's finding is good news for the Bush administration and other proponents of the war, there is also troubling evidence that the insurgency simultaneously has a psychological component. Increased levels of U.S. troops might produce tactical victories against insurgents -- but might also paradoxically provide the strategic fuel that grows the insurgency.

One of the most prominent advocates of this position is the political scientist Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. Increasing troops in Iraq, Pape argues, will win the United States a lot of battles with insurgents but also make it more likely that Americans will lose the war.

Pape's conclusions are based on a detailed examination of suicide attacks over the past 25 years. His central finding is that, contrary to conventional explanations, suicide attacks follow a certain strategic logic. From 1980 to 2006, Pape has counted 870 completed suicide attacks -- with the Iraqi insurgency accounting for the majority of such attacks in recent years.

Of the total, Pape has found that 824 of the attacks, or 95 percent, have come from groups that are fighting against military occupations of their homeland. Pape found that 85 percent of all the suicide attacks in the last quarter-century have come about in response to U.S. combat operations. There were eight times as many suicide attacks in Iraq in 2006 as there were in 2003.

While suicide attacks account for only a part of the overall Iraqi insurgency, Pape argues that these attacks provide the most reliable measure of the state of the insurgency. Furthermore, they are among the deadliest sources of mayhem in Iraq today. Every case that Pape counts has been corroborated by at least two independent sources. Pape's figures are considered so rigorous that U.S. government officials now use his database, and he gets funding from the Department of Defense.

"If you look at the chart [of suicide attacks] from 2004 to 2006, you see Iraq and Afghanistan exploding," Pape said. "American combat operations are directly associated with suicide terrorism. There was no suicide terrorism, and we go in and now there is suicide terrorism."

Pape believes his findings offer empirical proof that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not lowered the risk of suicide attacks. Contrary to President Bush's argument that those wars provided the best way to lower the risk of suicide terrorism, Pape says the data show that launching overseas wars appears to be a way to increase the risk of suicide attacks. Improved homeland security, rather than foreign military occupations, the political scientist argues, is the way to lower the risk of suicide terrorism.

Unlike many of the other theories circulating in Washington, his theory can be put to a simple test, Pape said. For the first time, Pape said in an interview at the political science convention in Chicago, the troop buildup in Iraq has aggressively targeted Shiite groups, such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Until now, suicide attackers have been largely limited to Iraq's minority Sunni population. Pape believes that U.S. operations against Shiite groups will cause increasing numbers of Shiites to see the Americans the way many Iraqi Sunnis do -- as occupiers, rather than liberators.

If foreign occupations do indeed provide the strategic fuel for insurgencies, Pape said, Americans should expect to see a spate of Shiite suicide attacks. He said he could not predict when the insurgency would take that disturbing turn but said it would be soon: "We're heading toward the cocktail of conditions that favor suicide terrorism from the Shia."