Militant attacks, such as this one in Islamabad on Monday, are turning the Pakistani population against jihadists.

Peter Bergen
CNN

It hasn't been too often in the past couple of years that you could write about good news from Pakistan. But if there is a silver lining to the atrocities that have plagued the country in the past several years, it is the fact that the Pakistani public, government and military are increasingly seeing the jihadist militants on their territory in a hostile light.

The Taliban's assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the country's most popular politician; al Qaeda's bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad; the attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore; the widely circulated video images of the Taliban flogging a 17-year-old girl; and multiple large-scale attacks on Pakistani police and army installations by the Taliban have provoked real revulsion among the Pakistani public.

In fact, historians will likely record the Taliban's decision to move earlier this year from Pakistan's Swat Valley into Buner District, only 60 miles from Islamabad, as the tipping point that finally galvanized Pakistan to confront the fact that the jihadist monster it had helped to spawn was now trying to swallow its creator.

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Gen. Stanley McChrystal says the U.S. will fail in Afghanistan without more troops.

Gloria Borger
CNN Senior Political Analyst

Sometimes, even in Washington, there's no way around a central truth: that in governing, there are moments when real, tough decisions must be made. No waffling. None of the usual "on the one hand, on the other hand." No hiding behind the votes cast by others.

There is one vote, and it belongs to the president.

It was that way with George W. Bush in December 2006, when, after conferring for three months with his generals and his Cabinet - not to mention the advice offered by the pooh-bahs in the Iraq Study Group - he decided on a surge strategy in Iraq. It was not a plan highly touted by many of his advisers, but by January, Bush told the nation "America will change our strategy ... [and] this will require increasing American force levels."

As it turns out, the surge worked.

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The study concludes there's a greater chance of family problems upon a military parent's return.

Adam Levine
CNN Pentagon Supervising Producer

A third of military children surveyed who have a parent deployed in a war zone are at "high risk" for psychological problems, according to a new study by military doctors and researchers.

The study, published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, surveyed military spouses of deployed Army soldiers with school-age children, aged 5 to 12. The questionnaire appraised the strain on the family of dealing with a parent deployed to the war zone.

Results found that stress levels were high for children and spouses of deployed troops but also that support networks from military to religious helped mitigate the problems.

The number of children found to be high-risk is more than 2½ times the national level and higher than historical military samples.

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Torture Is a Breach Of International Law

Mark J. McKeon
The Washington Post

On Sept. 11, 2001, when the twin towers were hit, I was sitting in a meeting in The Hague discussing what should be included in an indictment against Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes in Bosnia. I was an American lawyer serving as a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and there was no doubt that Milosevic should be indicted for his responsibility for the torture and cruel treatment of prisoners. As the head of state at the time those crimes were committed, Milosevic bore ultimate responsibility for what happened under his watch.

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Reza Aslan
For the Los Angeles Times

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton let slip last week that the Obama administration has finally abandoned the phrase "war on terror." Its absence had been noted by commentators. There was no directive, Clinton said, "it's just not being used."

It may seem a trivial thing, but the change in rhetoric marks a significant turning point in the ideological contest with radical Islam. That is because the war on terror has always been a conflict more rhetorical than real. There is, of course, a very real, very bloody military component in the struggle against extremist forces in the Muslim world, though one can argue whether the U.S. and allied engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond are an integral part of that struggle, a distraction from it or, worse, evidence of its subversion and failure. But to the extent that the war on terror has been posited, from the start, as a war of ideology - a clash of civilizations - it is a rhetorical war, one fought more constructively with words and ideas than with guns and bombs.

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Much of the attention on Iran over the last few years has focused on its mysterious nuclear program. Another mystery that’s received far less attention is torture in Iran’s prisons. It’s a story the Iranian government doesn’t want you to hear; a story the man you’ll meet tonight, risked his life to tell. His name is Ahmad Batebi and quite by accident he became one of the most famous dissidents in Iran. He says he endured years of torture in an Iranian prison, after his picture appeared on the cover of The Economist magazine. He escaped from Iran last year. Tonight he’ll tell us how. We warn you that some of the pictures in this report are disturbing.

Watch a clip from Anderson's interview here.

Abdullah Gül
The Wall Street Journal

International efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and improve the lives of the Afghan people have fallen short of their targets. There is daily violence in the country and expectations continue to outpace achieved results. It is time for a policy shift. It is time for increased involvement.

We must first accept that so far the international community has not achieved results that match the significant sum of funds it has spent. We must also realize that Afghanistan and its surrounding region cannot be a secondary source of concern. We need to understand that this region is the new "powder keg" of the world and that the stakes are as high as they can be.

Therefore, it is encouraging to know that President Barack Obama understands these facts and has reviewed the United States' Afghanistan policy.

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Elise Labott

CNN State Department Producer

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday the Obama administration has made a conscious choice to stop using the phrase "Global War on Terrorism."

The phrase, which has alienated the Muslim world, was coined by the Bush administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

"The Administration has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself, obviously," Clinton told reporters aboard her plane en route to a conference on Afghanistan at The Hague in the Netherlands.

The phrase is not forbidden, mind you. But Clinton suggested it was so last administration.

"I haven’t gotten any directive about using it or not using it.  It’s just not being used," she said.

John McCain and Joseph Lieberman
The Washington Post

Later this month, the Obama administration will unveil a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. This comes as most important indicators in Afghanistan are pointing in the wrong direction. President Obama's decision last month to deploy an additional 17,000 U.S. troops was an important step in the right direction, but a comprehensive overhaul of our war plan is needed, and quickly.

As the administration finalizes its policy review, we are troubled by calls in some quarters for the president to adopt a "minimalist" approach toward Afghanistan. Supporters of this course caution that the American people are tired of war and that an ambitious, long-term commitment to Afghanistan may be politically unfeasible. They warn that Afghanistan has always been a "graveyard of empires" and has never been governable. Instead, they suggest, we can protect our vital national interests in Afghanistan even while lowering our objectives and accepting more "realistic" goals there - for instance, by scaling back our long-term commitment to helping the Afghan people build a better future in favor of a short-term focus on fighting terrorists.

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Arthur Keller
The New York Times

As President Obama moves to ramp up the United States’ presence in Afghanistan, he might benefit from the lessons learned by one of the C.I.A.’s legends of covert operations, Bill Lair. Mr. Lair ran the C.I.A.’s covert action in the 1960s in Laos, which at its height included 30,000 Hmong tribesmen battling Communist insurgents.

I met Bill Lair when he came to the C.I.A.’s training center in Virginia in 2000 to speak at the graduation ceremony for my class of trainees. His agency career had started in the 1950s in Thailand, where he trained an elite force called the Police Aerial Reinforcement Unit. By the early ’60s, Mr. Lair was in neighboring Laos, trying to build an anti-Communist resistance. Corruption was endemic, poppy cultivation was widespread and the poorly educated Hmong tribesmen of northern Laos were barely out of the Stone Age. Yet Mr. Lair and his unit quickly taught the Hmong to resist the Communist tide using guerrilla tactics suited to their terrain and temperament.

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Andrew Sullivan
The Atlantic

Since my initial excessive enthusiasm for the Iraq war disintegrated on impact with reality, I've done my best to keep empirical facts at the center of assessing strategy – and to accept the limits of my own understanding more thoroughly. Of course, such an assessment includes reviewing domestic US politics – hence my support for Ron Paul and Barack Obama in the last campaign – and wider American aims and goals in the Middle East and beyond, a sense of the fiscal and diplomatic costs of any course of action, and a willingness to rethink and adjust in the face of new realities in what is a very dynamic and often opaque situation. This can lead to criticisms such as this:

Andrew Sullivan no longer is interested in winning in Iraq, in fact is probably quietly eager for a defeat there, doubtless out of a combination of a certain degree of conviction, a ravenous hunger for leftist Web traffic, and because having decided a few years ago he’d picked the wrong horse in supporting it, he finds it unbearable to imagine that the wrong horse may prove to be the right horse after all.

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Thomas E. Ricks
Washingtonpost.com

Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno was an unlikely dissident, with little in his past to suggest that he would buck his superiors and push the U.S. military in radically new directions.

A 1976 West Point graduate and veteran of the Persian Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign, Odierno had earned a reputation as the best of the Army's conventional thinkers - intelligent and ambitious, but focused on using the tools in front of him rather than discovering new and unexpected ones. That image was only reinforced during his first tour in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

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Editor's Note: The State Department confirmed that Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns arrived in Moscow on Wednesday and will discuss the use of the Manas military base in Central Asia with Russian officials.

AA U.S. troop guards the main access checkpoint to the Manas Air Base on December 18, 2008.

Alexandra Poolos
AC360° Editorial Producer

You might never have heard of it, but there's a tiny, impoverished Muslim country that's been playing a crucial role in America's "war on terror." And now it says it doesn't want to do that any more.

Kyrgyzstan, lodged between China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, says it will close a key U.S. airbase that supports operations in Afghanistan. The country’s president says the U.S. base will have to find a home elsewhere.

After the so-called 2005 Tulip Revolution, Kyrgyzstan became known as an islet of democracy in a region that is home to some of the world’s most entrenched dictatorships. The largely peaceful protests swept to power a new president who promised to liberalize the press, fight corruption and bring more democracy to Kyrgyzstan.

Leasing the Manas Air Base to the U.S. made the country a little-known but special American ally. The base was set to become even more important as the U.S. began preparing for a major troop gear-up in Afghanistan. President Obama has said the war there is one of his top foreign policy priorities. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, said last month that the base would be essential for the troop increase.

Now, with the imminent closure, there isn’t anywhere else in the region for the U.S. military to anchor its support operations in Afghanistan. Yes, there's the U.S. base in Bagram. But the Kyrgyz base has given the U.S. broader access to the region, and served as a vital station for refueling aircraft.

The U.S. air base in repressive Uzbekistan got booted in 2005 when the U.S. complained about human rights abuses, and the Kyrgyz base became the sole regional support for forward Afghan missions. And it’s no small operation. Run on the outskirts of the capital Bishkek, the base has close to 2,000 troops and contractors and runs around-the-clock air support missions.

Why did Kyrgyzstan decide to kick out the U.S.? Money, lots of money from Russia. The announcement came just after Russia agreed to give Kyrgyzstan over $2 billion in aid, a number that dwarfs the $150 million the U.S. had been giving.

During a visit to Moscow earlier this week, the Kyrgyz president said the issue comes down to the price the U.S. is willing to pay to keep the base open. But yesterday he sent a pretty definitive message that closure is imminent, forwarding a bill to the Kyrgyz Parliament to close the base.

The U.S. has been quick to say no final decision has been made. "It is a hugely important air base for us," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters. "We are hopeful that we can continue our good relationship with the Kyrgyz government, and can continue to use Manas in support of our operations in Afghanistan.”

It remains to be seen whether the U.S. can salvage the relationship with Kyrgyzstan - or the base, anyway. But Russia is certainly counting the closure announcement as a victory in its struggle for regional influence over governments, the military, and oil pipelines. As one U.S. embassy official told me during a visit to Kyrgyzstan in 2007, "Russia is a clearly a player."

Anderson talks to his panel about former Vice President Cheney criticizing President Obama and his administration.

John F. Harris, Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei
Politico.com

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

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Ayman al-Zawahiri criticized President Obama for failing to mention the Gaza conflict at his inauguration.

Octavia Nasr
AC360° Contributor
CNN Arab Affairs Editor

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number 2 man of al Qaeda, allegedly released an audio message today titled, “Gaza Sacrifices and The Conspiracies.” The voice on the audio sounds very much like Zawahiri; the intonation and accent are consistent with earlier messages by the Egyptian doctor. Two references indicate that the message was recorded on or after January 20th. This is significant as it gives an idea of how quickly these messages are turned around and released online. Zawahiri references Israeli forces pulling out of Gaza and he indicates his knowledge that President Obama didn't mention Gaza in his inauguration speech.

The audio message is part of a production by As-Sahab the video production and mouthpiece of al Qaeda. As-Sahab (The Clouds in Arabic) has been producing propaganda videos for al Qaeda since 2001, shortly after the terror attacks on New York and DC. Today’s release plays over a graphic showing a photo collage which compliment the message in their symbolism. Mirroring Zawahiri’s opinion that some Arab leaders are involved in a conspiracy against the Palestinian people, the collage shows King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia drinking coffee with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak; and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas posing with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The rest of the collage shows three dead Palestinian children on one side and Zawahiri’s photo on the other.

A graphic video plays before and after the message showing images of various militant attacks in various regions of the world with jihadist songs playing in the background.

The subject today is very much the same his message of January 6, 2009 - Gaza. He calls for jihad – holy war. He asks people to donate money, weapons or themselves to “support your brethren in Gaza.” He claims that peaceful demonstrations are not enough and calls for everyone to help “in any way they can.”

Half way through his message he says, “Even [President] Obama declared that he was very concerned about the civilians who are being killed in Gaza.” He then mocks the US president by saying “concerned.” Then he continues, ”We are very grateful for your concern Mr. Obama. We received your ‘concern’ along with thousands of bombs and tons of the white phosphorus mixed with the scattered bodies, blood and tears of the Muslims in Gaza.” Then he concludes, “But apparently, [President] Obama’s “concern” didn’t last too long because in his inauguration speech, he didn’t mention one word about what took place in Gaza as if nothing happened there.”

While Zawahiri tells his listeners not to wait for permission to perform jihad and assist Gaza, one must note that his messages don’t seem to ring true with the people of Gaza. Despite the multitude of messages aimed at Gaza and in support of Gaza, we have yet to hear a serious Palestinian response to or acknowledgement of these messages from the Palestinian side - Hamas, Fatah or ordinary Palestinians.

Program Note: Tune in to hear more from CNN National Security Expert Peter Bergen tonight on AC360° at 10pm ET.

Ken Ballen, Terror Free Tomorrow
Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Expert

Controversy over the Bush Administration’s policy to detain “enemy combatants” at the military’s Guantanamo Bay prison has raged since the facility first opened in 2002. The controversy has been fueled primarily by the lack of legal protections afforded the detainees and allegations of their mistreatment, much of which was subsequently confirmed by the FBI.

Now that President Obama has ordered the prison camp to be closed, additional new controversy swirls around the claim made earlier this month by the Pentagon that 61 Guantanamo detainees are believed to have returned to terrorism.

But that number became a little less alarming when the Pentagon clarified that only 18 of the 61 have been confirmed to be engaging in terrorism, while 43 are “suspected of returning to the fight.”

In other words, according to the Pentagon’s own assessment, of the 520 detainees who have been released, less than 4% have engaged in terrorism. That percentage is quite low, especially contrasted to the more than two-thirds of American prisoners who return to crime within three years of their release from prison.

The Department of Defense has supplied no substantiation for any of its recent assertions about the numbers of detainees engaging in terrorism, and in the past has rather broadly defined what “returning to the fight means” to include acts such as former detainees criticizing the United States after their release from Guantanamo; a not unnatural reaction to years of confinement in a prison camp without charge.

Some detainees released from Guantanamo have undoubtedly engaged in terrorist activists such as Said Ali Al Shiri, a Saudi who was released in September 2007. Like all other Guantanamo detainees released to Saudi custody, he entered a comprehensive reeducation program managed by the Saudi Ministry of the Interior. Of the 75 or so Guantanamo detainees that have gone through this program and have subsequently been released, al Shiri is the first one known to have returned to terrorism. After al Shiri was released last year, he left Saudi Arabia for Yemen and is now allegedly a leader of al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate.

Similarly, Abdulalh Salih al Ajimi, a Kuwaiti held in Guantanamo for three years, conducted a suicide attack on April 26 2008 in the Iraqi city of Mosul killing six, including two Iraqi police officers.

And Abdulalh Mehsud, a Pashtun from Pakistan’s tribal areas spent two years in Guantanamo. He was released in March 2004 and promptly kidnapped two Chinese engineers working in the tribal region. Mehsud subsequently rose to become a leader of the Pakistani Taliban and was eventually killed by Pakistani forces on July 24 2007.

But these are exceptional cases because the overwhelming majority of Guantanamo detainees were never really “enemy combatants” in the first place.

Given the fog of propaganda surrounding the Guantanamo prisoners –who Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously described as “the worst of the worst"– it may be surprising to learn that, according to the Pentagon itself, only 5 percent of all detainees at Guantanamo were ever apprehended by U.S. forces to begin with.

Why is that? Almost all of the detainees were turned over to American forces by foreigners, either with an ax to grind, or more often for a hefty bounty or reward. After U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, a reward of $5,000 or more was given to Pakistanis and Afghans for each detainee turned over.

While rewards can be a valuable law enforcement tool, they have never in the past absolved law enforcement authorities of the necessity of corroborating the information that motivated the reward. But the U.S. military accepted the uncorroborated allegations of the award claimants with little independent investigation.

At a very minimum, the Pentagon’s reward policy should have led to heightened scrutiny by the U.S. military of those turned over and not instead to years of confinement.

Now, under much pressure, the Pentagon has released more than 500 detainees over the past three years, while 245 remain. Based on statistics about the fate of other released prisoners around the world, it would not have been surprising if many of the released detainees had resumed their lives of terrorist crimes and illegal warfare.

After all it is a sad fact of our justice system that once a criminal is released from prison, they usually commit additional crimes relatively soon. The latest numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics show that more than two-thirds of all state prisoners are re-arrested for serious new crimes within three years.

Terrorists are criminals too—indeed ideologically committed ones. Every reasonable expectation would lead to the conclusion that following release from prison, the rate of recidivism for terrorists should be as high, if not higher, as other criminals.

But only a handful of released Guantanamo detainees have gone back to terrorism or the battlefield.

For years Pentagon officials have claimed that the recidivism rate for Guantanamo releases is around seven percent, yet information released by the Pentagon in May 2008 undercuts that claim. The Department of Defense published a list of named released detainees who had subsequently engaged in militant or terrorist activities anywhere in the world that showed that thirteen had done so, a recidivism rate of just 2 percent.

In fact, based on the Pentagon’s own May 2008 account of the released detainees who had “returned to terrorism” there are only six instances where an inmate released from Guantanamo actually took up arms against the United States, a recidivism rate of around 1%.

When recidivism rates for criminals typically run in the more than 60 percent range, and at Guantanamo you have a rate of only 1-2 percent, that means you don’t have much of a criminal (or in this case terrorist) population to begin with.

We are not saying that there are no terrorists being detained at Guantanamo. Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the operational commander of the 9/11 attacks, and others who were transferred to Guantanamo from secret overseas CIA prisons in 2006 are certainly members of al Qaeda’s hard core.

What we are saying is that for the vast majority of individuals detained at Guantanamo not only were they not terrorists, but they were likely innocent of any crime.

Editor's note: Ken Ballen is a former federal prosecutor and president of the non-profit organization Terror Free Tomorrow. Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, and author, Holy War Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know.

Pervez Musharraf gives his thoughts on U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan.

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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