Terrorism

A captured suspect in the Mumbai attacks has told police that he is Pakistani, Indian officials say. CNN's sister station, CNN-IBN, reports that the alleged terrorist said he was trained by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a Pakistan-based terror group that opposes India over the disputed Kashmir region.

Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, known by its initials LeT in the counter-terrorism community, should be the leading suspect in the attacks, according to a U.S. counterterrorism official who closely follows South Asia.

... run the operation," said Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at Washington think-tank The New America Foundation, who has written extensively on Al Qaeda. ...

In August of this year I flew in to Kabul, a bustling city undergoing a construction boom, with shopping malls, new banks, restaurants and traffic jams, where I stayed in a hotel catering to weary journalists and aid workers. I arranged to meet two Taliban commanders who agreed to take me to their province, Ghazni – about 100 miles south of the capital. They picked me up one day from a posh Kabul neighbourhood in an innocuous-looking car and we headed south. We drove past barren… more

PETER BERGEN, CNN SECURITY ANALYST: Well, of late, Anderson, both Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, obviously, they've got a lot of time on their hands, sitting around, trying to avoid being killed by a Hellfire missile strike. But in between those, they're doing a lot of reading.

And they're reading Noam Chomsky, and they're reading Malcolm X, because in recent statements from both of al Qaeda's leaders, they've mentioned these books. Probably because of the influence of an American member… more

Although Omar is the most senior Taliban leader, says Peter Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader, "he controls the faithful, but there hasn't been any evidence for years that he controls the battlefield." LINK

Last year, in the town of Dera Ismail Khan, near South Waziristan, a Pakistani friend of mine joined a gang--a "peace force," he called it, but it sounded like a gang to me. The Taliban, flushed from Afghanistan into Pakistan's tribal areas, had begun to spread out of the tribal areas, and to terrorize residents and attack police stations in places like Dera Ismail Khan. Until gangs (or lashkars) like my friend's formed, not even the police dared to stand against the Taliban. Now, just a… more

"There is no merit to the idea that this gentlemen's idea was stolen by Osama bin Laden," Peter Bergen, who interviewed bin Laden and wrote a book about the al-Qaida leader, said in an e-mail. He said the idea of flying planes into buildings first came up for al-Qaida in a 1995 plot to attack 11 airliners flying from Asia to the U.S. LINK

Whoever gets voted president will inherit a lot of foreign policy problems. Rachel Maddow talks about the latest in Iraq and Afghanistan with The New Yorker’s Steve Coll. LINK to video

As the U.S. engages in a simmering war as well as in continued attempts at building infrastructure, the conference will consider a wide-ranging set of questions in order to clarify policy choices regarding both military and civilian investment in the country. What is the current state of the Taliban? What might the reversion of Afghanistan into failed-state status mean? How prevalent -- and how effective -- has counterinsurgency been in the country? What are the possibilities for increasing the size… more

When journalist Nir Rosen traveled to Afghanistan last summer, his plan was to travel with a group of Taliban fighters for 10 days and report on their activity. Instead, he was detained by a rival Taliban commander and accused of being a spy. Rosen describes his experiences to Robert Zeliger of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. LINK to audio and transcript