Pakistan

There's nothing like finally getting the top job after a decade of faithfully playing second fiddle to a high-profile boss. But for al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri, the dour Egyptian surgeon and longtime deputy to Osama bin Laden, succeeding his old leader comes with an unexpected challenge: His predecessor, it turns out, has gifted him a bit of a lemon. In recent years, al-Qaeda has become the Blockbuster Video of global jihad.

The organization and brand are in deep trouble, and Zawahiri is quite unlikely to become the leader who can turn things around.

The White House debate over how many troops to withdraw from Afghanistan next month is really a surrogate for a larger, more fractious debate over the wisdom and strategy of the war itself.

Late last month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said there was no evidence that Pakistani officials had known that Osama bin Laden lived undetected blocks from the country's equivalent to West Point. But after the al-Qaeda leader was killed in Abbottabad on May 1, others were skeptical. "How could they not know?" said Sen. John Kerry (D. - Mass.). "Did nobody have some questions about who the hell was living behind those walls?"

A unity agreement signed this week in Cairo between Palestinian political factions marks the first time in 4 years that a Palestinian government will be unified across the West Bank and Gaza (hitherto the territories were split between governments led by Fatah in the former and Hamas in the latter).

ABSTRACT: A REPORTER AT LARGE about the life and death of Osama bin Laden and bin Laden’s use of the media to expand his influence. Writer recalls travelling to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2005, where he saw the house in which bin Laden had come of age and also visited the offices of an advertising agency run by bin Laden’s eldest son, Abdullah. Comments on the similarities between the house in Jeddah and the house in Pakistan where bin Laden was killed.

During the tough-fought Democratic presidential primary between then-senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, at a wry moment during a televised debate, Clinton called Obama "very likeable" and he responded with the sterile retort, "you're likeable enough".

Today an expert study group co-sponsored by the New America Foundation and the National War College released their findings on U.S-Pakistan relations. The group, comprised of both American and Pakistani policy specialists, came together to devise practical ways to advance the U.S.-Pakistan relationship at a time when relations between the two countries are arguably at their most strained.

Peter Bergen, Michael J. Mazarr and additional members of the study group will discuss the findings at an 11 a.m briefing today at the New America Foundation.

The report states:

There is not one war in Afghanistan. There are three.

First, there is the fight against al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups. Second is the war to protect and support the fledgling Afghan government against the Taliban insurgency. The third war is the least understood but the most enduring: the internal social and cultural battle between the urban modernizers of Afghanistan, mostly based in Kabul, and the rural, tribal, anti-modern peoples who live in the country's inaccessible mountain regions.

An Egyptian who was once a Special Forces officer has been appointed "caretaker" leader of al Qaeda in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, according to a source with detailed knowledge of the group's inner workings.

Al Qaeda's interim leader is Saif al-Adel, who has long played a prominent role in the group, according to Noman Benotman. Benotman has known the al Qaeda leadership for more than two decades. He was once a leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a militant organization that used to be aligned with al Qaeda, but in recent years renounced al Qaeda's ideology.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama made two shocking breaches of foreign-policy-establishment etiquette. The first was to suggest if the U.S. had actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, Obama, as President, would commit U.S. force to kill bin Laden. This statement of utter common sense was denounced by Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. "He basically threatened to bomb Pakistan, which I don't think was a particularly wise position to take," she said. And it was similarly ridiculed by John McCain.