Styled after the anonymous British vandal-artist Banksy, Kabul’s streetwise stealth stencillers go by the moniker “Talibanksy”, a reference to the Islamist Taliban who have been waging war in Afghanistan for almost nine years.

The street art forms a commentary on the cost in blood and treasure of the war, which has brought 126,000 US and NATO troops to Afghanistan and kills about 2,000 Afghan civilians a year, according to the UN.

Black, spray-painted silhouettes of soldiers and dollar signs, poppies, helicopters and tanks, and children running hand-in-hand began appearing in downtown Kabul a few months ago.

Some show the shadow of a helmeted soldier holding an assault rifle, inside a red circle with a line through it. Others have a silhouetted gun-toting trooper and a dollar sign joined by an equals symbol.

Or simply the words: Cost Of War.

Financially the war is estimated to cost some 100 million dollars a day, according to US media reports.

The human cost to foreign forces so far this year is close to 170, according to the icasualties.org website which keeps tally and says that of the 1,737 who have died since the war began in 2001, 1,051 were Americans.

The people behind the anti-war graffiti call themselves Combat Communications, and claim to be “a small anonymous group of international artists founded last year with the sole aim of advocating/promoting free expression”.

According to a statement, they wish to remain anonymous and call their work “social and politically driven graphics”.

“This form of self-expression is open to anyone. The youth of Kabul have no real outlet for artistic expression,” it says, adding: “Do they want it?”

The Westerners behind Combat Communications declined to speak to AFP, saying they wanted to keep a low profile while they developed their strategy.

Their graffiti appear across the central residential and commercial districts of Kabul, alongside spray-painted advertisements for translation services, real estate agents, plumbers, septic tank cleaners and roofers.

Since the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan has begun moving towards democracy — with the second parliamentary election set for September — and freedom of expression is protected by the constitution.

Yet as the insurgency moves deep into its ninth year and the US-led counter-insurgency revs up with foreign troop numbers set to peak by August at 150,000, Kabul remains a city scarred by war and corruption.

Open drains run alongside the main roads, few sidestreets are paved, traffic control is derisory and public transport virtually non-existent.

Two-metre-high concrete blast walls surround most public buildings and embassies, and residential neighbourhoods feature the “narco-tecture” of garishly-tiled, multi-storey mansions most believe are built with the proceeds of the three-billion-dollar-a-year illicit drugs trade.

A cloud of filth from diesel-powered vehicles sits atop a city surrounded on three sides by the peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains, and piles of garbage are picked over by beggars and animals alike.

Consumer price inflation is said to be around 20 percent, helicopter gunships provide an almost constant overhead clatter, and Afghans desperate to leave their country for a new life form long queues at visa offices.

Into this harsh landscape, the sudden appearance of modern street art has added a touch of colour and controversy — and the blast walls provide the perfect canvas.

Talibanksy’s tags are not yet as ubiquitous as Banksy’s guerilla art became in London and other British cities over the last decade.

Nor is it as sophisticated, so far presenting little more than simple anti-war messages and slogans, in contrast to the infinitely more clever, caustic and creative Banksy murals.

And whereas Banksy branched out to the US, Australia and the Middle East, becoming an international phenomenon and wealthy in the process, Combat Communications appears to be starting out with more modest ambitions.

The statement contains an anti-capitalist message, hitting out at the massive billboards that dominate city intersections, advertising telecommunications firms or warning against involvement in the drugs trade.

“‘Selling the peace’ AKA (also known as) winning the war, has also become a big industry. Propaganda is everywhere from counter-narcotic campaigns to counter-terrorism to army recruitment. You can’t move without some form of visual purposeful persuasion burning a hole in your soul,” it says.

“Social and politically driven graphics, AKA street art, can evoke thought and stimulate discussion.

“Watch your public space,” the statement says.

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He will send an extra 50 people, which is about double the number already there.

Mr Rudd made the announcement on Saturday at Canberra’s Australian National University, where he spoke about the importance of Australia’s efforts in Afghanistan.

He used it as an opportunity to take a potshot at Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, who has pledged to send more troops given the withdrawal of Dutch soldiers later this year.

‘Such a decision would require the further deployment of an additional 1000 or more troops to Afghanistan,’ Mr Rudd told the gathering.

‘To be clear: such a deployment would cost the Australian taxpayer a further $1 billion per year.’

Mr Rudd said, on the other hand, Australian troops would not stay in the Middle East for ‘one day longer than’s necessary’.

The new diplomats and aid assistance staff will be based in Kabul, Kandahar and Tarin Kowt, working with locals to improve services.

The extra police officers are to be sent to Tarin Kowt, where they will help train and mentor colleagues in the Afghan forces.

The push is part of a wider civilian response effort the government is setting up in response to overseas disasters and conflict zones.

It has set up an civilian core office within AusAid, which will send skilled Australians abroad to share their knowledge.

The program is slated to begin by mid-this year, becoming fully operational by 2011.

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Janet Napolitano says the system worked. No, we were brave and lucky.

A U.S. government that has barred the phrase “war on terror” has nonetheless acknowledged that a failed Christmas day bomb attack on an airliner was a terrorist attempt. Can we all now drop the pretense that we stopped fighting a war once Dick Cheney and George W. Bush left the White House?

The attempt by 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab follows the alleged murders in Ft. Hood, Texas by Islamist-inspired Major Nidal Hasan in November. Brian Jenkins, who studies terrorism for the Rand Corporation, says there were more terror incidents (12), including thwarted plots, on U.S. soil in 2009 than in any year since 2001. The jihadists don’t seem to like Americans any better because we’re closing down Guantanamo. This increasing terror tempo makes the Obama Administration’s reflexive impulse to treat terrorists like routine criminal suspects all the more worrisome. It immediately indicted Mr. Abdulmutallab on criminal charges of trying to destroy an aircraft, despite reports that he told officials he had ties to al Qaeda and had picked up his PETN explosive in Yemen. The charges mean the Nigerian can only be interrogated like any other defendant in a criminal case, subject to having a lawyer present and his Miranda rights read.

Yet he is precisely the kind of illegal enemy combatant who should be interrogated first with the goal of preventing future attacks and learning more about terror networks rather than gaining a single conviction. We now have to hope he cooperates voluntarily.

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, told CNN yesterday that “one thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked.” Yet the terrorist screening system seems to have failed in at least two crucial ways: first, in failing to revoke a visa to the U.S. that Mr. Abdulmutallab had obtained last June despite a later warning to U.S. consular officials from his own father that he was becoming radicalized and might have terror network ties; and second, in not adding him to a no-fly list from a lower-level watch list.

The episode is a reminder that the fight against terrorism requires even more interagency cooperation, and Congress should investigate whether such communication was lacking in this case. No one should leap to conclusions about who is responsible for any mistakes, but Ms. Napolitano isn’t reassuring when she utters happy talk that it all “went very smoothly.” The day was saved not because of the antiterror “system” but because the explosive failed to ignite and because a Dutch passenger and flight attendants acted heroically to subdue the man, put out the fire and detach the explosive.

The lesson here is the same as Flight 93 on 9/11 and shoe-bomber Richard Reid, which is that civilians willing to act in their own self-defense are a crucial part of “homeland security.” The willingness of passengers and crew to identify potential threats seems more useful than more onerous airport screening, which only gives terrorists the satisfaction of knowing they have made air travel even more unbearable. The new rule to keep passengers in their seats in the final hour of some flights seems all too typical of arbitrary rules that inconvenience innocents but not terrorists.

On that score, the settlement reportedly won earlier this year by the so-called flying imams against a U.S. airline for knocking them off a flight in 2006 sends exactly the wrong message. The interests of nonradical Muslims will hardly be served if political correctness allows the next terror attack to succeed.

Mr. Abdulmutallab’s alleged links to Yemen also raise questions about why the Administration is now returning Guantanamo detainees to that unstable Middle East nation. Pentagon officials have raised alarms about Yemen as an emerging al Qaeda sanctuary for at least a year, and now we may have the first case of a terrorist trained there to strike at U.S. airline or domestic targets. The Yemen government says it is cooperating with the U.S., and the CIA is said to be providing intelligence for some of Aden’s anti-al Qaeda efforts. But at this point the repatriation of Gitmo detainees to Yemen seems dangerous, and recklessly so.

No doubt in the days ahead we’ll learn more about how the young Nigerian became radicalized. Like many of the 9/11 murderers, he came from an affluent family and was highly educated. We know by now that the poverty-causes-terrorism school is false, but this is one more reminder. Authorities will also want to know how he was recruited—whether in person during a trip to Yemen or other sanctuary, through al Qaeda agents elsewhere, or perhaps via the Internet like Major Hasan. The report that the Nigerian turned more radical only in the last 18 months shows that our antiterror vigilance will have to continue for years, if not decades, to come.

Such vigilance is easier to sustain, and likelier to succeed in deterring attacks, if we understand that we are still fighting a multifront war against the various elements of radical Islam. This time, thanks to luck and bravery, the 278 passengers and crew of Northwest Flight 253 avoided death. We’d rather take the luck out of it.

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Instead of body scanners and ethnic profiling we need patience and resilience to tackle terrorism

Not long after the attacks of 11 September 2001, I went to hear the Arab-American stand-up comedian Ahmed Ahmed riff on the perils of airport security. “All you white people have it easy,” he joked with the crowd. “You guys get to the airport like an hour, two hours before your flight. It takes me a month and a half.”

He added: “Security has gotten so bad, I just turn up to the airport in a G-string.” Perhaps Ahmed can now leave the G-string at home. In the wake of the foiled Christmas Day terror attack on a US airliner bound for Detroit, in which the Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab concealed a package containing the highly explosive chemical powder PETN in his underwear, hi-tech body scanners are being rolled out in airports – a policy that will cost millions. It may seem the stuff of science fiction but these full-body, millimetre-wave scanners produce “naked” images of passengers and remove the need for “pat-down” searches.

Hooray! So will we, finally, be safe and secure in the skies? Er, not necessarily. Experts say that the explosive device smuggled on to the plane underneath Abdulmutallab’s clothes would not have been detected by body scanners. Ben Wallace, the Conservative MP and former employee of the defence firm QinetiQ, one of the companies developing the scanners for airport use, said trials had shown that they picked up shrapnel and metal but that liquids and some plastics would be missed. “Gordon Brown is grasping at headlines if he thinks buying a couple of scanners will make us safer,” he said.
Terrorism toolbox

So what does he suggest? “We must now start to ask if national security demands the use of profiling.” But does profiling work, either? Is there a readily available racial or ethnic profile of a “terrorist”? Perhaps. But al-Qaeda is nothing if not multicultural, employing a racial diversity policy that would make Harriet Harman proud. Arabs? Mohamed Atta et al. Check. British Pakistanis? Mohammad Sidique Khan et al. Check. Hispanics? José Padilla, the so-called Dirty Bomber. Check. Black people? Richard Reid, the so-called Shoe Bomber and, now, Abdulmutallab, the Underwear Bomber. Check. Caucasians? Adam Gadahn (né Pearlman), the white Californian convert and media spokesman for al-Qaeda. Check. In fact, here’s a thought: if a blond, blue-eyed member of al-Qaeda and I both arrived at a US airport to board the same flight, whom do you think the profiler would stop? Him or me?

Terrorism plays on our fears. Fear of the next attack. Fear of being killed. Fear of an unseen enemy. To succumb so easily to such fears and the attendant hysteria and paranoia is to grant an easy victory to the terrorists.

Why not stay calm and not panic? Not overreact? Would this not make more sense? Why do we urge our leaders to promise us absolute or perfect security? Why do we encourage our securocrats as they reach into the terrorism toolbox for ever more intrusive and draconian measures? (Ninety-day detention, anyone? Forty-two days?)

Our manipulated fears can overwhelm us. It matters not a jot that our fears are largely unfounded. Take flying. Air travel remains the safest mode of transportation known to man. Studies show that, each year in the United States, one in 6,800 drivers dies in a car accident. The rate for airline passengers is one in 1.6 million. But as the satirist Bill Maher says: “We don’t declare a war on cars.”

Let me be clear: terrorism is a clear and present danger. But it is not all-pervading, nor is it all-conquering and nor should the minuscule risk of being killed by terrorists keep any of us awake at night. “Outside of 2001, fewer people have died in America from international terrorism than have drowned in toilets,” says John Mueller, a professor at Ohio State University. “Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, however, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism over the period is not a great deal more than the number killed by lightning.”

But our deep-seated fears and anxieties seem to have trumped calm and rational analysis. Terrorism remains a growth industry. In 2003, the US department of homeland security compiled a list of 160 potential terrorist targets across the nation. By the following year, the figure had mushroomed to 28,000; in 2005 it reached 77,000 and, by 2006, the list contained approximately 300,000 targets – including fire hydrants, which were ludicrously labelled a “top vulnerability”.

Such threat inflation has crossed the Atlantic. Last year, Lord West, the UK security minister, unveiled plans to protect every public building in Britain against suicide car bombers. Every single public building? This is madness.
Hawks and doves

So, too, is irresponsible talk of yet another war against yet another Muslim country – this time, the Middle East‘s poorest state, Yemen, where the Underwear Bomber is believed to have been radicalised. On Fox News, Senator Joe Lieberman, an arch-hawk, proclaimed: “Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act pre-emptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.” Lieberman has never come across a Muslim nation he didn’t want to bomb or occupy – but what is President Obama’s excuse? Or Gordon Brown’s? In recent days, both have talked up the threat of Yemen, as well as the threat of international terrorism. They seem to feel compelled to prove that they are not “weak” on national security.

Perhaps they should follow John Kerry, their mutual friend. In an interview during the 2004 election, the senator and former Democrat presidential candidate displayed a much less apocalyptic world-view than our present political leaders. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance . . . It’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

Indeed. There is no scanner, no technology, no security measure that will give us absolute security from terrorism. Nor does terrorism have a military solution. What is required on our part is patience, resilience and a sense of historical perspective. In meetings with ministers and officials across Whitehall, I often see the Second World War poster “Keep Calm and Carry On” on the backs of doors. Our leaders would be wise to heed the advice. Perhaps even adopt it as their New Year resolution. Keep calm. Carry on.

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3. Detroit terror attack: delay over airport X-ray scanners ‘risking lives’

CNN) — A man described as “one of al Qaeda‘s most dangerous members” was arrested in Yemen, the Yemeni military, an embassy official and state-run news agency Saba said.

Mohammed Abdu Saleh al-Haudali, 35, is “one of the most dangerous terrorists wanted by the security forces,” according to a Yemeni military Web site, citing a security source.

Al-Haudali was arrested Wednesday in the village of Deer Jaber in the Bajel district, northeast of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, said Mohammed Albasha, spokesman for the Yemen Embassy in Washington.

Al-Haudali exchanged fire with security forces before his arrest, Saba reported, citing Hodeidah province security officer Abdul-Wahab al-Radhi. However, the Yemeni military site quoted the security source as saying al-Haudali was caught when he attempted to open fire on authorities.

In addition, Albasha told CNN, Mohammed Ali Al-Henk, “a wanted al Qaeda operative,” was captured in the Arhab district north of Sanaa.

Yemeni air forces have raided al Qaeda hideouts in Sanaa along with Abyan and Shabwa governorates, killing dozens of al Qaeda suspects, Saba reported. It did not say when the raids took place.

Following the raids, the Interior Ministry told its offices to raise security alerts and tighten defense procedures nationwide in anticipation of operations, Saba said.

The arrests come after a Nigerian man allegedly attempted to detonate an explosive device on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan, December 25. Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the attack.

Suspect Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab spent time in Yemen, sources have said. His father, Umaru AbdulMutallab, contacted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria several weeks ago to report his son had “become radicalized,” and had gone to Yemen to participate in “some kind of jihad,” a family source said.

A federal security bulletin obtained by CNN says the explosives used in the incident were obtained in Yemen.

A U.S. government official said that between August and October, extremists in Yemen were discussing operations and mentioned a person called “the Nigerian.” The source said that U.S. intelligence officials also had a partial name for the person: Umar Farouk.

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The senior Administration official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that nowhere in this document was there any mention of Yemen, whose Al-Qaeda affiliate is now believed to have been behind the unsuccessful Christmas Day attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a transatlantic airliner with a bomb hidden in his underpants. However, the official declined to disclose any other information about the substance of the briefing, including what kind of specific warnings, if any, the President was given about possibly holiday attacks and whether Yemen came up during oral discussions.

According to the senior official, the holiday threat briefing, one in a series of regularly-scheduled sessions with top counter-terrorism officials, was held in the White House Situation Room on December 22. Present were representatives of agencies involved in counter-terrorism policy and operations, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and FBI Director Robert Mueller. The CIA and National Intelligence Directors Office were represented by deputy agency heads: CIA deputy director Steven Kappes, and David Gompert, the principal deputy to National Intelligence Czar Dennis Blair. Also present was Michael Leiter, director of the National Counter-terrorism Center, a unit of the Intelligence Czar’s office which was created after 9/11 to ensure that intelligence reporting about possible terrorist plots was shared quickly among all US agencies who might have some capability to do something about it.

The senior official said that beginning in early December, based on reports coming in from intelligence agencies, policy-makers had begun tracking a stream of information which alluded to a possible holiday-period plot against the US orchestrated from somewhere in Pakistan. However, the official said, this reporting later turned out to be “garbled” and it was determined that the threat probably was a washout. The official denied that the White House received any report, representing the concensus of US intelligence agencies, warning that a Holiday-period plot originating in Yemen and targeting the US homeland could be in the works.

In a background briefing for reporters on December 29, also attributed in an official White House transcript to a “senior administration official”, that official asserted that in the wake of the attempted underpants attack, it had become clear to the President and top advisors that before Christmas, the US government was in posession of “bits and pieces” of information, which, if they had been properly knitted together, “could have…allowed us to disrupt the attack or certainly to know much more about the alleged attacker in such a way as to ensure that he was on, as the President suggested in his statement, a no-fly list.” In the briefing, the official identified three rough categories of information that the government had which could have been relevant to foiling the attack: information about Abdulmutallab and his plans, info about Al-Qaeda and their plans, and info “about potential attacks during the holiday period.”

Asked about what kind of intelligence reporting was circulated to senior officials about possibly holiday period attacks before the failed underpants attack, a US intelligence official, who also asked for anonymity, explained: “As everybody knows, terrorists often speak in coded language, especially when they think their communications might be intercepted. There was no clear discussion of an attack, on Christmas or any other time, in the Middle East or anywhere else. But as veiled as the message was, it was spotted, processed, analyzed, and presented to senior policymakers as a warning sign-however vague-of a holiday attack. While this was handled properly, there were, to put it mildly, virtually no details at all. That happens.” When Newsweek asked a senior Administration official about this characterization of a warning which was passed to White House policymakers, and whether it tracked what was presented at the December 22 Presidential briefing, the official would not comment.

Presidential aides are concerned that Obama will somehow be unfairly accused of dropping the ball on the fight against terrorist in Yemen — a country where, in fact, the evidence suggests Obama, as early as last summer, ordered a significant increase in US intelligence activity. In the weeks before the Christmas attacks, several US officials have told Newsweek, Obama authorized a major expansion in US intelligence, military and material support to Yemen’s government — an escalation which some officials acknowledge could be characterized as a new covert war. But Obama’s public and private actions in expanding counter-terrorism operations in Yemen may not help him avoid answering further questions about what intelligence agencies told him — and didn’t tell him — about possible threats to the US homeland in the days and weeks before the alleged underpants bomber boarded his Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

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Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name was not unknown to American authorities. His father, a prominent Nigerian banker, recently told officials at the United States Embassy in Nigeria that he was concerned about his son’s increasingly extremist religious views.

As a result of his father’s warning, federal authorities in Washington opened an investigative file and Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name ended up in the American intelligence community’s central repository of information on known or suspected international terrorists.

Members of Congress who were briefed Saturday by governmental officials also pointed to a Yemeni connection.

“The facts are still emerging, but there are strong suggestions of a Yemen-Al Qaeda connection and an intent to blow up the plane over U.S. airspace,” Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat who leads the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, said in a statement.

The attempt prompted significant changes to airline security around the world during the busy holiday season.

In an affidavit filed in support of the criminal charges, the authorities said that Mr. Abdulmutallab had tried to ignite a device, which was attached to his body, resulting “in a fire and what appears to have been an explosion.”

The affidavit said the device contained PETN, also known as pentaerythritol, a highly explosive substance that was used in 2001 by Richard C. Reid, the so-called shoe bomber whose attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight was also thwarted. Officials said analysis of the remnants of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s device was being carried out by the F.B.I. laboratory, but it was possible that had the chemical mixture detonated, it might have brought down the aircraft.

The suspect’s name was inserted last month into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or Tide. About 550,000 individuals are registered in the database. A subset of that is the Terrorist Screening Data Base, or T.S.D.B., which has about 400,000.

By contrast, fewer than 4,000 names from the T.S.D.B. are on the “no-fly” list, and an additional 14,000 on a “selectee” list that calls for mandatory secondary screening, an Obama administration official said. At the time Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name was recorded in the Tide database in November, the official said, “there was insufficient derogatory information available” to warrant putting him in the T.S.D.B., no-fly or selectee lists, and so he was not on any watch list when he boarded the plane bound for Detroit.

President Obama ordered a full review of the law enforcement and intelligence databases related to the no-fly list to make sure the procedures and practices still make sense, a senior administration official said Saturday.

Mr. Abdulmutallab was issued a regular visitor’s visa by the United States Embassy in London in June 2008, the administration official said. There was no “derogatory information available” on him at the time he applied, and he was granted a two-year visa, which is still valid, the official said. He had traveled to the United States once before, to Houston in August 2008.

Representative Bennie G. Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who leads the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a telephone interview that he would hold hearings next month when Congress returns from its recess to determine whether airport screening processes were at fault, scanning equipment was inadequate, information was not shared among federal agencies, or human error was to blame.

Mr. Abdulmutallab told F.B.I. agents he was connected to the Qaeda affiliate, which operates largely in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, by a radical Yemeni cleric whom he contacted online. The cleric is not believed to be Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born imam who has spoken in favor of anti-American violence and who corresponded with Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged in the killings of 13 people in a shooting spree last month at Fort Hood, Tex.

In a statement, the Yemeni Embassy in Washington said: “We have yet to receive official information on the incident. If and when the would-be bomber’s alleged link to Yemen is officially identified, authorities will take immediate action.”

If corroborated, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s travel to Yemen for terrorist instruction and explosives underscores the emergence of that country as a major hub for Al Qaeda, perhaps beginning to rival the terror network’s base in Pakistan.

For years, American counterterrorism officials have watched Yemen with trepidation as an unstable state with multiple security challenges and an uncertain commitment to battling extremists who see their main enemies in the West.

But this month has seen an unprecedented assault by the Yemeni government on Qaeda strongholds, with major airstrikes on Dec. 17 and Dec. 24, which may have killed as many as 60 militants.

The Yemeni government initially said it believed the second strike had killed the top two officials of Al Qaeda in Yemen as well as Mr. Awlaki, the American-born cleric, whose popular Web site and radical sermons have turned up as an influence in a dozen recent terror cases in the West.

But American officials said they had no confirmation of the cleric’s death, and Mr. Awlaki’s relatives told The Associated Press on Saturday that he was still alive.

Mr. Abdulmutallab grew up in a rarefied slice of Nigeria, the son of an affluent banker. He attended one of the West Africa’s best schools, the British School of Lomé in Togo. After high school, he went to Britain and enrolled at University College London to study mechanical engineering.

While still in high school, Mr. Abdulmutallab began preaching to fellow students about Islam, according to a report in ThisDay, a Nigerian newspaper. The newspaper reported that more recently, Mr. Abdulmutallab had moved to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and told his family that he no longer wanted to associate with them.

His father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, until recently served as chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria, and his mother’s family is originally from Yemen, according to news accounts in Nigerian newspapers.

Charles Anaman, 26, who now lives in Ghana, said that he was close friends with Mr. Abdulmutallab in high school — they would listen to music, watch videos, play basketball.

Mr. Abdulmutallab was like most other students at the school, Mr. Anaman said, with a particular interest in studying history, and a preference for hip-hop music.

Mr. Anaman said that his involvement in the Detroit incident was hard to imagine: “He was a very calm person.”

Reporting was contributed by Micheline Maynard from Ann Arbor, Mich., Scott Shane from Washington, Peter Baker from Hawaii, Robert F. Worth from Beirut and Ravi Somaiya from London.

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Decades of war have ravaged the zoo in Afghanistan‘s capital. As it tries to rebuild with help from foreign groups, it still provides a crucial public space for women and children.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan – At the Kabul Zoo, even the empty enclosures are a draw: They’re quiet.

Off a busy street leading to the city’s commercial center, the zoo is no longer the city’s pride, but it does provide a refuge from the traffic, noise and chaos of the Afghan capital.

Parents bring children here to walk amid the tall trees and gaze at the animals — even the empty enclosures. Women in pale blue burkas stroll the grounds.

“In the Muslim world especially, a place where women and children can gather safely as a family with or without their menfolk is important,” said David Jones, director of the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, which is offering support to the zoo, on the banks of the winding Kabul River.

Built in 1967, the zoo, with research facilities and tourist attractions, was part of a push by Afghanistan to emerge as a modern state. But decades of war have ravaged the zoo.

The stories of neglect are legend: Soviet soldiers shooting the animals for sport. Taliban fighters using the zoo as a bivouac and killing some of the deer and rabbits for food. The Taliban command trying to close the zoo, saying nothing in the Koran sanctions the keeping of animals.

Two elephants and a zebra were reportedly killed in a gun fight between mujahedin factions. A mortar round destroyed the parrot exhibit.

Marjan, an aging lion who was the zoo’s top attraction, was blinded in one eye by a grenade attack. He died in 2002. (The official cause was kidney and liver ailments, but people say his heart was broken by the zoo’s sad decline.)

China donated two lions to replace Marjan. They spend their listless days in a weed-choked grotto with a dry moat. On a recent chilly day, the lions were largely ignored as the few visitors preferred to regard the ibex, the gazelle and chattering macaques.

The zoo’s director, Aziz Gul Saqeb, said war and the harshness of life for all but the wealthy and powerful have sapped the population’s normal affinity for animals.

“The conflict destroyed the feeling of the Afghan people for the survival of the animals,” he said.

Since the U.S. invasion in late 2001, the zoo has begun the road to recovery, but it is a long one, hampered by Afghan bureaucracy and a lack of money.

The U.N.-sponsored World Society for the Protection of Animals, the U.S.-based Assn. of Zoos and Aquariums, and the North Carolina Zoo have raised money and provided food, medicine and veterinary care.

Without international help, the zoo cannot meet even the minimal standards for the upkeep of animals, Saqeb said. But money is tight these days for international wildlife groups, and security problems make it difficult to get volunteers to come to Kabul.

The zoo once had more than 500 animals, and in 1972 attendance was 150,000. Now the zoo has about 280 animals, including 45 birds, Saqeb said, although a visit to the zoo suggests that number is exaggerated. Attendance has plummeted even though the city’s population has increased.

Jones, former director of the London Zoological Society, said his zoo is still involved in trying to bring the Kabul facility back to respectability. His zoo is helping to send Kabul Zoo staff to India for training, using the last of the $500,000 that the zoo raised.

Even in its woeful state, the Kabul Zoo serves a kind of purpose, one in common with other zoos in Asia and the Middle East, Jones said in an e-mail: providing a bit of public open space in an increasingly crowded city.

Mohammad Jan, taking two of his sons and three other children from his extended family to the zoo recently, agreed.

“The zoo is a place of calm,” he said.

tony.perry@latimes.com

Special correspondent Karim Sharifi contributed to this report.

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Immediately after 9/11, a combined U.S.-Yemeni effort to decapitate the Islamist group’s leadership in the country and dismantle its infrastructure met with considerable success, Johnsen says. But since 2006, al-Qaeda has managed to regroup and grow stronger as Yemen’s government struggles to hold on to its territory amid multiple rebellions and rising poverty. Now, Johnsen adds: “You can’t just kill a few individuals and the al-Qaeda problem will go away.”
At least 34 people died last week, when Yemeni forces hit suspected al-Qaeda targets in the southern governorate of Abyan and in Ahrab, a district northeast of the Yemeni capital Sana’a. Western and Yemeni media outlets reported that the United States provided Yemen with key intelligence and firepower to carry out the strikes, but to what extent is unclear. Yemeni state media reported that President Obama phoned Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to congratulate him on a job well done, and ABC News said that U.S. cruise missiles had been used.

But regardless of who did what, a primary target in the attacks — Qasim al-Raymi, the al-Qaeda leader who is believed to be behind a 2007 bombing in central Yemen that killed seven Spanish tourists and two Yemenis — is still at large. And reports of a U.S. role, and mass civilian casualties at the sites of the attacks, have sparked a public outcry and added to anti-American sentiments across the country. “They missed that individual,” says Johnsen of the targeted al-Qaeda chief. “And at the same time, they ended up killing a number of women and children in the strike on Abyan. So now you have something where there are all these pictures of dead infants and mangled children that are underlined with the caption ‘Made in the USA’ on all the jihadi forums. Something like this does much more to extend al-Qaeda.”

Indeed through the backlash that followed, the attacks have started to look like more of a boon than a bust for Yemen’s al-Qaeda revival, as well as for other opponents of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime. Iran — which Yemen accuses of backing the Shi’ite Houthi rebellion in the north — headlined the attacks on its state-sponsored Press TV with: “Obama ordered deadly blitz on Yemen.”

“The al-Qaeda threat in Yemen is real, but now after this operation, it will be greater,” says Mohammed Quhtan, a member of Yemen’s opposition Islamist al-Islah party. “Al-Qaeda will be able to recruit a lot more young people, at least from the tribes that were hit. And it will have reasonable grounds to attract more people from Abyan governorate, and from the Yemeni population in general.”

That’s a frightening prospect for a country on the brink of collapse. Yemen’s economy is in tatters; its population complains of neglect and development woes; and Yemeni children suffer from a 50% malnutrition rate. Observers warn that poverty and unemployment are prime recruitment factors for al-Qaeda, something they say the U.S. government and other foreign powers should have done more to address. “If you’re going to carry out [an attack] like this, you have to have done a great deal of field work, where you’ve sort of undermined al-Qaeda through development and aid so that when something like this happens, al-Qaeda can’t easily replace the individuals that it has lost,” says Johnsen. “But if you don’t take those steps then the pool of recruits just starts to multiply exponentially.”

More troubling still is that last week’s assault doesn’t necessarily indicate a renewed Yemeni commitment to fighting al-Qaeda. Analysts say Yemen has been slow to confront the al-Qaeda threat with the gusto that the U.S. has been pushing for, in large part because going after the Islamist group hasn’t always been in the government’s best interests. “If the government wants to fight [al-Qaeda] seriously, they can do it,” says Ali Saif Hassan, the director of Yemen’s Political Development Forum. But, he adds: “It’s a matter of political decision — how much they will win, and how much they will lose.” Sana’a has recently focused more of its attention on the rebel separatist movement in the south and on the recent Houthi uprising in the north than it has on al-Qaeda.

While some western analysts say that al-Qaeda seeks to overthrow Yemen’s government, Hassan disagrees, saying that al-Qaeda only seeks to establish a base there — a link between the Horn of Africa and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula — and that so long as Saleh leaves al-Qaeda alone, they’ll do the same for him. “The government still sometimes thinks it is too costly for it to fight al-Qaeda. If you ask them to go and fight al-Qaeda, they say ‘Why? And what do I get back?’” says Hassan. Fighting al-Qaeda would mean losing key fundamentalist support in the country, support that is already falling away. What would compel Saleh to turn it around? “It is business,” says Hassan. “If the government gets more support from the Americans, they will change.” The Obama administration has requested $65 million to help Yemen battle its resurgent terrorist threat.

Last week’s attacks may mean that change is indeed on the horizon. But if the Yemeni backlash to the attacks are any indication, cruise missiles and firepower may not be the support Yemen needs.

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“More than 15,000 protestors, including members of al-Qaeda, gathered in Al-Majanah village, which had been attacked by the Yemeni Air Force … Al-Qaeda members announced at the public protest that their war is against the United States, and not the Yemeni Army.”

By Mohammed bin Sallam
December 24, 2009

Human rights activists and members of parliament have gathered in front of the cabinet building to protest what they call, “unfair government behavior” and condemning the government’s military attack on Abyan last week.

They demanded that an official committee of parliament members and activists be appointed to investigate. At the same time, they rejected the notion that al-Qaeda existed in Abyan, which was the reason given for the government’s assault.

Lawyer and president of the National Organization for Defending Human Rights and Freedom, Mohammad Allaw, told the gathering crowd: “We suffer living in a country ruled by a government that doesn’t respect the lives of its citizens and that exists to destroy their lives with American aircraft, as occurred in Abyan. I hereby call on all free people to condemn this policy and to organize events and sit-ins to protest the killing of innocent people in the name of fighting terrorism.”

“Abducting free journalists and activists and closing down newspapers that criticize government actions will never stop us from speaking the truth on behalf of the people. Those who allowed the Al-Mahfad district in Abyan to be attacked are the ones who oppose national unity,” he continued.

Fu’ad Dahaba, an MP of the opposition conservative Islah Party, said a state that doesn’t abide by its own constitution doesn’t deserve to exist. “Massacring citizens is a crime that history will never forget. Therefore, I call on all politicians, scholars and educated people, as well as all segments of society to stand against injustice and rid us of the current government, because it does not deserve to rule us.”

At the same time yesterday, more than 15,000 protesters, including members of al-Qaeda, gathered in the Al-Mahfad district’s Al-Majanah village, which was attacked by the Yemeni Air Force last Thursday. Al-Qaeda members announced at the public protest that their war is against the United States, and not the Yemeni Army. Abdullah Ahmad Al-Raimi, an al-Qaeda leader who is on the government’s Most Wanted List, was recognized in the crowd. Al-Raimi was extradited by Qatar. After serving three years of a four-year sentence, he escaped.

Just a few days ago, the government published his photo in several publications, calling him a “criminal at large.” In the video he is seen standing with a bodyguard.

Among the protestors were also several leaders of the Southern Movement, who have been aggressively demanding an independent state in South Yemen since last year.

[Editor's Note: South Yemen, also known as Aden, was an independent state until 1990, when it united with North Yemen.]

At the weekly press conference on Tuesday, Minister of Information Hassan Al-Lawzi denied there were any civilian victims of the air raid on Abyan and emphasized that the raid was only against elements al-Qaeda.

“President Saleh has ordered that a committee be established to investigate the Abyan raid, which will be headed by the governor of Abyan and other senior officials,” Al-Lawzi said. He added that the minister of state for defense and security, Rashad Al-Alimi, will present a report to parliament the following day, detailing the al-Qaeda plans that were foiled by the attack. The Yemen Times will work to obtain a copy of the report as soon as its available.

Al-Lawzi also discussed the 62 operations conducted by al-Qaeda since 1992, noting that by virtue of these activities, al-Qaeda had taken many innocent lives and severely damaged the national economy.

Also yesterday, the Interior Ministry confirmed that it has information that al-Qaeda in Lawder, a city in the Abyan Governorate, is planning to take revenge for the attack. The ministry has therefore directed security forces in Abyan, Shabwa and Al-Baida’a to intensify their operations against al-Qaeda. So far, strikes have been carried out against sites in Abyan, Arhab and the Capital Secretariat. About 17 al-Qaeda members have been arrested in the operations.

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