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Nothing "New" Here
By Lt Col P
There are several very good points contained in "Al-Qaeda Has a New Strategy," but I'm not sure there's anything really new about Al-Qaeda.
"But for all the talk, two key dots have yet to be connected: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged Northwest Airlines Flight 253 attacker, and Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the trusted CIA informant turned assassin. Although a 23-year-old Nigerian engineering student and a 36-year-old Jordanian physician would seem to have little in common, they both exemplify a new grand strategy that al-Qaeda has been successfully pursuing for at least a year."
Hoffman goes on to list point by point what AQ is doing-- all correct, in my opinion-- but again, nothing new. If it's "new," then we haven't been paying attention; that of course is a distinct and sobering possibility.
No, it's a useful and timely reminder on the same old story: this war has been with us a long time, long before we recognized it as such, and it will be with us for a while longer. And we face a determined, ruthless and adaptive adversary. We need to be more so.
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It's not a new strategy and we still haven't learned, 8+ years after we invaded Afghanistan. All those years ago, Al-Qaida assasinated the Afghan war Lord by pretending to be a TV crew, only the camera had a bomb in it, or something like that. The tactics haven't changed, we just keep falling for the same old tricks. One symptom of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.