Violence in Afghanistan has reached its worst level this year since U.S. soldiers and their Afghan allies toppled the Taliban in 2001, raising doubts about international efforts to bring stability despite an increasing number of foreign troops.

The suicide car-bomber blew himself up as military convoy was passing on a road about 150 meters (yards) from a traffic junction with access to the U.S. embassy and the Health Ministry.

The presidential palace said four civilians were killed. Twenty people, all civilians, were wounded, a Health Ministry doctor said.

No one from the U.S. embassy was hurt, an embassy spokesman said. Most staff were off work for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.

Later, wrapping up a three-day visit, a delegation of U.N. Security Council ambassadors and envoys said while Afghanistan was going through a sensitive period, there were new grounds for “cautious optimism.”

“Afghanistan is facing a difficult security situation, but not a security crisis. We should avoid any inclination to disillusionment and frustration,” said Ambassador Giulio Terzi of Italy.

Terzi listed improving ties between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a recent Afghan cabinet reshuffle and significant drop in opium cultivation as the grounds for optimism.

The delegation met President Hamid Karzai and military commanders of NATO and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.

It is expected to publish its findings in coming days.

“POSITION OF STRENGTH”

Terzi said the delegation’s discussions had included the military situation in Afghanistan, where the al Qaeda-backed Taliban have made a come back since 2005, civilian casualties caused by foreign troops hunting militants, and human rights.

Other issues discussed were regional cooperation and the government’s reconciliation efforts with the Taliban, he said.

With the spread of Taliban insurgency more than seven years since their overthrow and no sight of an end to the conflict, the possibility of talks with the insurgents is being considered by the government and its Western allies.

Source:http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSISL35197120081127

The officials cautioned that they had reached no firm conclusions about who was responsible for the attacks, or how they were planned and carried out. Nevertheless, they said that evidence gathered in the past two days pointed to a role for Lashkar-e-Taiba or possibly another group based in Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad, which also has a track record of attacks against India.

The officials requested anonymity in describing their current thinking and declined to discuss specifics of the intelligence that they said pointed to Kashmiri militants. In the past, the American and Indian intelligence services have used communications intercepts to tie Kashmiri militants to terrorist strikes. Indian officials may also be gleaning information from at least one captured gunman who participated in the Mumbai attacks.

According to one Indian intelligence official, during the siege the militants have been using non-Indian cellphones and receiving calls from outside the country, evidence that in part led Indian officials to speak publicly about the militants’ external ties.

Lashkar-e-Taiba denied any responsibility on Thursday for the terrorist strikes. American intelligence agencies have said that the group has received some training and logistical support in the past from Pakistan’s powerful spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., and that Pakistan’s government has long turned a blind eye to Lashkar-e-Taiba camps in the Kashmir region, a disputed territory over which India and Pakistan have fought two wars.

Officials in Washington said Friday that there was no evidence that the Pakistani government had any role in the attacks. But if evidence were to emerge that the operation had been planned and directed from within Pakistan, that would certainly further escalate tensions between India and Pakistan, bitter, nuclear-armed rivals. It could also provoke an Indian military response, even strikes against militants’ training camps.

American and Indian officials were pursuing the possibility that the attackers arrived off the coast of Mumbai in a large ship and then boarded smaller boats before initiating their attack.

An American counterterrorism official said there was strong evidence that Lashkar-e-Taiba had a “maritime capability” and would have been able to mount the sophisticated operation in Mumbai.

Senior Bush administration officials sought to keep the tensions from boiling over on Friday by maintaining steady contact with Indian officials. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke by phone with Pranab Mukherjee, India’s foreign minister, and one of Ms. Rice’s deputies spoke with the Indian foreign secretary.

In what was seen as a sign of Pakistan’s concern about a possible Indian response, Pakistani officials announced Friday that the head of the I.S.I. would go to India to help the Indian government with its investigation. On Friday evening, however, Pakistani officials indicated that a lower-level I.S.I. representative might make the trip.

American and Indian officials have for years blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a campaign of violence against high-profile targets throughout India, including the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi and an August 2007 strike at an amusement park in Hyderabad. At times, Indian officials have also said Jaish-e-Muhammad was responsible for the attack on Parliament.

That attack prompted the Bush administration to try to freeze Lashkar-e-Taiba’s assets and press Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president at the time, to crack down on the group’s training operations in Pakistan.

A State Department report released this year called Lashkar-e-Taiba “one of the largest and most proficient of the Kashmiri-focused militant groups.” The report said that the group drew financing in part from Pakistani expatriates in the Middle East, and that it used a front organization called Jamaat ud-Daawa to coordinate charitable activities, like relief for the victims of the October 2006 earthquake in Kashmir.

The report said the actual size of the group was unknown, but estimated it at “several thousand” members.

Recently, some of the group’s operations have shifted from Kashmir to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and even to Afghanistan to attack American troops. American officials and terrorism experts said the group had not sent large numbers of operatives into Afghanistan, but had embedded small teams with Taliban units to gain fighting experience.

“Afghanistan is an operating war zone, so they can get active training as the Kashmir front has slowed down a bit,” said Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation.

The group is believed by experts to have at least a loose affiliation with Al Qaeda. In March 2002, a Qaeda lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, was captured in a Lashkar-e-Taiba safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, according to the State Department report.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is not known to have singled out Westerners in past terrorist attacks, as the gunmen in Mumbai seem to have done. But one counterterrorism official said Friday that the group “has not pursued an exclusively Kashmiri agenda” and that it might certainly go after Westerners to advance broader goals.

Even as a Kashmiri connection to the attacks began to emerge on Friday, American officials said they were puzzled by some developments. For instance, they said they knew next to nothing about a group called the Deccan Mujahedeen, which issued a claim of responsibility for the attacks.

Terrorism experts have said there is no evidence of that group’s involvement in past strikes, and they speculated that another group fabricated the name to mask responsibility.

Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/world/asia/29intel.html?em

Intelligence officials looked urgently for clues about the identity of the attackers, a crucial unknown as Indian officials charged, without giving details, that “elements in Pakistan” were involved. A tentative rapprochement between the two nuclear-armed rivals could hang in the balance, and a U.S. counterintelligence official cautioned against rushing to judgment on the origins of the militants.

President George W. Bush pledged cooperation with Indian authorities and mourned the deaths of more than 150 people at the hands of gunmen who attacked targets across India’s financial capital starting Wednesday night.

Source:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27949652/

They also agreed to assess whether there is a need to amend existing legal instruments in order to make the application of this mechanism legally binding.

The ministers agreed that the early warning system would be based on the Schengen Information System, a secure database used by 27 European countries — 24 EU member states plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland — for the purpose of maintaining and distributing information related to border security and law enforcement.

The ministers also invited EU member states and the European Commission to determine a joint working strategy to fight cyber crime.

This strategy should be possible to cope even more effectively with the multiple crimes committed by means of electronic networks, such as child pornography, sexual violence, and terrorism. The strategy should also be able to combat the traditional forms of crime committed via the Internet, such as identity fraud, identity theft, fraudulent sales, financial offenses, illicit trading on the Internet, particularly narcotics and arms dealing.

The ministers also stressed the need to prevent and combat illegal trafficking of cultural goods through enhanced cooperation of member states. They asked the European Commission to come up with proposals on instruments relating to the handling of cultural goods stolen in the EU, with a view to preventing the resale of stolen cultural goods and to their traceability.

Source:http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-11/28/content_10423402.htm

The world largely deals with terror attacks as sporadic, sensationalistic, and singular events. The tragedy and pain involved in these events elicits a response of anger, fury, and sadness, but the terror attacks are not viewed as undercutting the authority and power of the state in which the terror attack takes place.

During the period in which Palestinian terror focused on airline attacks, a leader of one of the Palestinian terror organizations was asked in an interview, “What advantage does your organization gain from a shocking incident that results in the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians?” His answer was, “I receive attention. In the two minutes in which the entire world is giving me their attention, I can send a message about the injustice being done to me.”

Since this time, terrorism has gone through a series of changes. For a long period, terrorists attempted to harm the public, bringing attention to the message that they were trying to promote. The Vietnam War changed the terrorist organizations’ conception, and brought to the forefront the notion that a terrorist army is not meant only to “sting” the enemy, but that in the end, it has the ability to be victorious.

During the meeting that took place at the end of the Vietnam War between representatives of the PLO and of the commander of the North Vietnamese army General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the PLO representatives congratulated the commander on the North Vietnamese victory over the American superpower. They asked General Giáp when he predicted terror organizations would be victorious over Israel. General Giáp answered in one word: Never! When asked the reason for this response, he stated, “You will never be victorious due to lack of determination.”

There are those who believe that this meeting represented a turning point in the development of Islamic terrorism, which began to educate its society of the sanctity of suicide and initiated the era of suicide terrorism. The initial implementation defined determination as self-sacrifice, believing that the more people willing to prove their readiness to die for a cause, the greater the determination and the closer the victory. The heads of terror organizations quickly understood that suicide terrorism caused great demoralization, damage, and shock to the governing authority. For example, the subway terror attack in Madrid in March, 2004 brought about an immediate change of government in Spain.

Since the period of suicide terror, terror organizations have upgraded to include paramilitary fighting units, as opposed to singular acts of terror. Hizbllah, a full-fledged terror organization, is not constructed on the notion of individual terror attacks, but upon a complete military arsenal: Today it has amassed 42,000 rockets to enable continuous military terror, causing victims on a large scale, and thus presenting a serious threat to the state of Israel. Hamas has long ago abandoned the use of suicide terror exclusively, but has built a military capability comprised of rockets (that are being slowly upgraded) and fighting units that operate wholly differently than terror cells. Hamas’s army of terror combines terror activities with military activities. This concept is also applied by the Iranian army, which, alongside fighting units includes the Revolutionary Guard, which cultivates a combination of paramilitary activities, terror activities, and propaganda campaigns, the secret weapon of fundamentalism’s ability to gain power in the West.

Al-Qaida has also undergone the transformation from sporadic terror attacks to a prolonged war of terror. This organization’s activities are more complex and integrated, exemplifying the future of terrorism that combines local attacks with broader strategies that include fighting units that operate in a completely different manner than the perpetrators of sporadic terror attacks, biological and chemical weapons, and a goal of achieving nuclear terror.

Mumbai, India does not constitute the ultimate battlefield, but serves as a site for broad strategic maneuvers, in which terror units have taken control of a major city through a war of terror. Unfortunately, this example will likely serve as a conceptual test case for future activities.

Without question, the approach towards fighting terrorism must undergo major rethinking. Times have changed since the main focus was the suicide bombers operating independently or in small groups, whose purpose was to injure the enemy and to draw attention to their cause.

Today, a new, different terror army, with several branches is being developed. This army includes all the elements of a military, but exploits the approach of the terrorist. The terror army enjoys the advantages of feeling exempt from any international law or convention, and of being exempt from international pressure or accountability. In addition, they handicap the power of their opponent through exploitation of the claims of internationally accepted values of human rights, correct treatment of prisoners of war, and prevention of harm to civilian populations – though none of these values apply to them, but only to their opponent.

Unfortunately, the world is slow to prepare for this growing threat. Every new terror attack illustrates that the danger to the stability of a range of governments and societies is much greater than we could have imagined.

The events taking place in Mumbai must act as a warning and turning point in the world’s treatment of the local terror armies that base themselves in various parts of the world, and threaten the world’s stability as a whole.

Source:http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1227702352531&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

“I think it’s probably that the video was made before the Mumbai attacks,” said ABC News Consultant and former CIA officer John Kiriakou. “They have a courier system to release these videos so sometimes it takes as long as a week to get to its outlet.”

The tape, presented as an interview conducted by al Qaeda’s media team, as-Sahab, shows Zawahiri touching on many issues, including the state of jihad and criticisms of the U.S. and its activity in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the SITE Intelligence Group Monitoring Service.

Source:http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6353907&page=1

Federal authorities have received a “plausible but unsubstantiated” report that al Qaeda may have discussed targeting transit systems in or around New York, the Department of Homeland Security said.

“These discussions reportedly involved the use of suicide bombers or explosives” on subway or passenger rail trains, according to a joint Homeland Security and FBI statement issued Tuesday.

“We have no specific details to confirm that this plot has developed beyond aspirational planning, but we are issuing this warning out of concern that such an attack could possibly be conducted during the forthcoming holiday season,” the statement said.

…

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security said they had no further information on the threat.

“We are working closely with the U.S. intelligence community, state and local law enforcement and homeland security officials to vet and corroborate this reporting, and will continue to investigate every possible lead. We’ll provide updates as we obtain further information,” the statement said.

The public should remain vigilant and report suspicious activity to authorities, it said.

Al Qaeda has the means to launch such an attack, said CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson, who has covered al Qaeda extensively since before the September 11 attacks.

“The al Qaeda-affiliated groups are still willing to make these attacks,” Robertson said. “What we’ve seen in the past is, they’ve become capable of making these homemade bomb devices with detonators and exploding them by cell phones or by suicide bombings.”

However, he said, it also would be possible for al Qaeda to plant false information.

Source:http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/11/26/al.qaeda.transit.plot/index.html