Terrorism expert Peter Bergen reports on CNN International that the Egyptian Saif al-Adel has been appointed as a “caretaker” leader of al-Qaeda, following the death of its emir Osama bin Laden. A Pakistani newspaper article datelined from Rawalpindi, the bustling city near Islamabad that’s home to Pakistan’s army headquarters, …
Bin Laden
Global Briefing: Crimes and Misdemeanors
L’affaire DSK: The arrest of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual-assault charges in New York has plunged France into a bout of “soul searching” and probably removes the greatest threat to unpopular French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s rule in upcoming elections. TIME’s global business correspondent Michael …
India Makes a Move in the Afghanistan Endgame
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Afghanistan this week at a crucial time for both countries and the troubled state lying between them. India and Pakistan have been engaged in a regional power struggle for influence over Afghanistan, and events of the last two days seemed to underline their differences. A day after India …
Bin Laden’s Diary: War Plans, or Musings from the Landfill of History?
“Since the end of the last civil war, the colonel had done nothing else but wait. October was one of the few things which arrived.” At least, it arrived for the aging military commander whose life is described in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story “Nobody Writes to the Colonel Any More”. For Osama bin Laden, this year, the Navy SEALs …
Angry with the U.S., What Can Pakistan Get Out of China?
ABCNews reports that Pakistani authorities may be willing to share with their Chinese counterparts the charred wreckage of the detonated U.S. stealth helicopter used in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Anonymous Pakistani officials claimed the Chinese, whose military harbors a not-so-secret ambition to match American capabilities …
What Bin Laden’s Death Gives Us, And What It Doesn’t
The death of bin Laden is an opportunity for many things. A chance to reassess how we continue the war in Afghanistan, as reported in the New York Times today.
It offers the possibility of peeling the Taliban away from from al Qaeda, in the hopes that the earstwhile leaders of Afghanistan might eventually reconcile with the current …
Global Briefing, May 9, 2011: Socialists, Sellouts and Star Witnesses
Lessons Learned — On Battleland, Mark Thompson mulls the most important lessons of the OBL saga; TIME editors Nancy Gibbs and Bobby Ghosh and political columnist Joe Klein discuss the implications — short-term and long — of the killing.
Open Doors —In the Hindu, Nirupama Subramanian urges India to take advantage of the …
Arrested Suspects Increase Speculation Of Al Qaeda Involvement In Marrakech Bombing
A full week after a bomb devastated a popular tourist café in Marrakech killing 16 people and injuring 21 others, Moroccan authorities announced the arrest of three suspects in the attack. Yet despite the information released in the wake of those detentions, it’s still uncertain whether the strike was the work of local extremists …
Al-Qaeda After Bin-Laden: Can the ‘Brand’ Survive?
While most of the U.S. media this week rolled out “box set”-type compilations of the best of ten years of reporting on Osama bin-Laden, the magazine most al-Qaeda watches are waiting for is the next edition of Inspire. Dubbed by the LA Times as the “Vanity Fair of jihadi publications,” the next edition of the glossy produced by al-Qaeda …
Pakistan May Have Been Cheating on the U.S., but Don’t Expect the Marriage to End
That Pakistan has been an unreliable ally to the U.S. is hardly news: just as Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in Abbottabad, so has Pakistan’s security establishment scarcely bothered to conceal the fact that it pursues an agenda quite different from that of the U.S. While that establishment has helped the U.S. roll up hundreds …
Most Unwanted: William and Kate and the Specter of Bin Laden
“Of course it explains why the royal couple postponed their honeymoon to Abbottabad,” joked Jimmy Kimmel, one of the first U.S. television hosts to start mining Osama Bin Laden’s death for comedy. The funniest thing about Kimmel’s quip was that it appeared to contain a grain of truth. The announcement, the day after the wedding of the …
China Welcomes bin Laden’s Death, but Concerns About U.S. Focus Emerge
The online reactions in China to the death of Osama bin Laden have been diverse, with some celebrating the death of the terrorist, while a few mourned the passing of someone who challenged the global dominance of the U.S. Officially the Chinese government welcomed news that an American military team took out the Qaeda leader in Pakistan …
Why Pakistan is Bin Laden’s Lone Success Story
Which world leader has the biggest headache caused by the death of Osama bin-Laden? That would have to be General Ashfaq Kayani, commander of Pakistan’s military and, as such, the most powerful man in the country where al-Qaeda’s fugitive leader had been hiding in plain sight.
Kayani now faces an escalation of the already crisis-level …