Al Qaeda training in Yemen.

Octavia Nasr
CNN Senior Middle East Affairs Editor
AC360° Contributor

Eight independent newspapers were shut down last week by orders of the Yemeni Ministry of Information. Hundreds of people took to the streets in Sanaa and other major cities to protest the move, according to media reports. Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh accused the newspapers of “harming Yemen’s national unity.” In a televised statement, he said, “Some newspapers use exaggerated slogans under the pretext of democracy and shamelessly promote divisiveness.”

The move comes on the heels of recent news coverage about clashes in the south between security forces and farmers who claim they have been marginalized by the government. The south has been demanding its own Democratic Republic of Yemen since 1994. The separatist rhetoric has escalated in the past few months with groups and tribal leaders calling on the southern region to unify against the government of Ali Abdallah Saleh.

Before the newspaper closure, the US Embassy in Sanaa issued a statement expressing its “concern” over reports of “increasing incidences of political violence in southern regions of Yemen.” It stressed US support for a “unified Yemen” and called on “the Yemeni Government, the political parties, civil society organizations and all concerned citizens of Yemen to engage in dialogue to identify and address legitimate grievances.” The statement concluded with a recommendation for a peaceful resolution, “violence will not resolve these issues.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) expressed its alarm over the situation. “We are concerned about the ongoing ban on independent newspapers and call on the authorities to immediately end this censorship,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “Covering the ongoing conflict in the south is an essential journalistic function, and for authorities to ban this coverage is to criminalize journalism itself.”

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Oren Gross
Special to CNN

Popular clichés notwithstanding, not all is fair in war. The idea that war is subject to legal rules is an ancient one.

Over time nations have come to accept that their decisions whether to go to war as well as how to conduct warfare once armed conflict has erupted are limited by legal norms.

But do such limitations hold when the enemy is not another nation that itself plays, more or less, by the rules, but rather a nonstate actor such as al Qaeda that flagrantly ignores them?

Does not following the rules in this context mean that we would be fighting with one hand tied behind our back? And if so, should not all be fair at least in war against such an enemy? Yes, yes, and an emphatic no.

Al Qaeda does not pose a threat to the United States’ (or any of its allies’) existence. Its real threat lies in provoking us to employ authoritarian measures that would weaken the fabric of our democracy, discredit the United States internationally, diminish our ability to utilize our soft power and undermine our claim to the moral higher ground in the fight against the terrorists.

In other words, the critical threat is not that the United States would fail to defend itself but that it would do so too well and in the process become less democratic and lose sight of its fundamental values. “Whoever fights monsters,” warned Friedrich Nietzsche, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

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Editor’s Note: The Taliban and their al Qaeda allies are moving in dangerously close to Islamabad, the capital of nuclear-armed Pakistan. Officials there say Taliban militants have set up checkpoints and taken control over the Buner District in the North West Frontier Province — just 60 miles away. That’s the closest they’ve ever been. This alone is dangrous, but coupled with increasing political conflict in Pakistan, the situation looks like it could become explosive.

On Monday Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari signed into law a peace deal for a Northwest region on the Aghan border called Swat Valley. The deal approved the strictest interpretation of Islamic law, known as Sharia Law.

Critics said the Pakistani president was caving to pressure from Taliban clerics who threatened to pull out of any peace deal on Swat Valley unless Sharia Law was approved. For anyone tracking the radicalization of Swat Valley since 9/11, the arrival of Sharia law is no surprise. The burning question now is, how safe is the US’ nuclear ally Pakistan from the threat of extremists and their military advancement?

Octavia Nasr
CNN Senior Editor
Middle East affairs

Is al Qaeda operating freely and enjoying support inside our nuclear ally Pakistan? A frightening notion. But the new US strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan seems to reinforce that view.

The US had already stepped up its attacks on the tribal regions of Pakistan since 2007 against what it called al Qaeda targets, and has reportedly launched at least five drone attacks since President Obama took office. And the newest information is even more sobering. In a background briefing with reporters last week, one official said, al Qaeda has relocated itself to Pakistan and “succeeded in regenerating itself.” He said, “they’re plotting against the United States. They are working with their friends and partners, the Taliban, against American interests” and they operate “within a very sophisticated syndicate of terrorist organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

A grim picture for the West, but it seems to match the rhetoric from al Qaeda’s leadership. In a March 19 audio message, Osama bin Laden mentioned the Swat valley of Pakistan as a place where Muslims are “successfully resisting America.” He said, “All intelligent people are aware of America’s combating of Islam, and its past rejection of its establishment in Somalia, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan; and here they are protesting its establishment in the Swat region of Pakistan.” This quote might suggest that bin Laden recorded his message while somewhere in the Swat region.
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talks with CNN’s Jill Dougherty about U.S.-Iranian relations and al Qaeda.

Eboo Patel
The Washington Post

In 150 lucid pages, Bruce Riedel gets inside the heart of Al Qaeda and shows us how to kill it. The Search for Al Qaeda understands Al Qaeda for what it is: a set of highly effective leaders who have created a compelling narrative (based partly on American missteps in the Muslim world) and a remarkably resilient organizational structure that seduces a small group of young Muslims to destroy in a highly strategic manner.

Effective leaders, compelling narrative, resilient structure, willing youth and strategic destruction – a killer combination.

But one which – with the right vision, message and strategy – can be defeated.

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Ali al-Shiri was released in 2007 from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A Saudi national released from U.S. detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2007 is believed to be a key leader in al Qaeda’s operations in Yemen, according to a U.S. counterterrorism official.

The Defense Department recently estimated that more than 60 terrorists released from Guantanamo may have returned to the battlefield.

According to the counterterrorism official, freed detainee Ali al-Shiri traveled to Yemen after being released to Saudi Arabia and may have been involved in recent al Qaeda attacks in Yemen, including a car bombing outside the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa last year that killed nearly a dozen people.

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A U.S. soldier patrols in a village north of Kabul, Afghanistan, last month.

Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst

In the war against al Qaeda and its allies, Barack Obama should adopt five key principles when he takes office.

First, the United States must lower the temperature in the Muslim world to help win back the “swing voters” in the Islamic world who turned against America and provide passive support to al Qaeda.

The Obama administration can do this by working as an honest broker to resolve conflicts such as those in Kashmir and Israel/Palestine that serve as grievances for Muslims and sometimes training grounds for militants.

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A suicide bomber attacked a crowded restaurant during holiday celebrations in Kirkuk, Iraq. CNN’s Michael Ware reports.

Sebastian Rotella
Los Angeles Times

The Pakistani extremist group suspected in the Mumbai rampage remains a distant shadow for most Americans. But the threat is much nearer than it seems.

For years, Lashkar-e-Taiba has actively recruited Westerners, especially Britons and Americans, serving as a kind of farm team for Islamic militants who have gone on to execute attacks for Al Qaeda, a close ally. The Pakistani network makes its training camps accessible to English speakers, providing crucial skills to an increasingly young and Western-born generation of extremists.

Briton Aabid Khan was one of them. When British police arrested him at Manchester International Airport on his return from Pakistan in June 2006, they found a trove of terrorist propaganda and manuals on his laptop that the trial judge later described as “amongst the largest and most extensive ever discovered.” The haul included maps and videos of potential targets in New York City and Washington.

One video, shot deep in Pakistani extremist turf, shows the then-21-year-old Khan with a grinning young man who says he’s from Los Angeles — a mysterious figure in a case that apparently illustrates Lashkar’s dangerous reach.

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Police watch over travelers at New York's Grand Central Terminal before Thanksgiving.

Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst. His most recent book is “The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader.”

Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst

The congressionally authorized Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism issued a report this week that concluded: “It is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.”

The findings of this report received considerable ink in The New York Times and The Washington Post and plenty of airtime on networks around the world, including on CNN. And the day the report was released Vice President-elect Joseph Biden was briefed on its contents.

So is the sky falling?

Not really. Terrorists have already used weapons of mass destruction in the past decade in attacks around the world, and they have proven to be something of a dud.

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