(The blog formerly known as) All Things Counter Terrorism

Am thinking outloud here more as a reminder to myself to come back to this (and the blog is sooooo much better a system for reminders than my earlier stacks of post it notes everywhere!) ok yeah my point

It strikes me that the series of AQ related arrests and plots foiled of late or apparently in the works ( ie from numpties Bryant Vinas, the Belgians, Najibullah Zazi, and Talha the German) all stemmed from them being in Afghanistan at around the same period of time. I’m not saying they are all related, but what this does give us a window into is the op-tempo for AQ attacks and the time frame it takes to get into the organisation, train, be operationalised and re-deployed and or utilised in support of another operation. We saw a similar thing with the London plots, Op Crevice and then the Subway plots (mark one and two) and the transatlantic airline plots. Which brings me full circle back to remind myself to do my post on edge of network connections and how useful they are on soooo many levels for understanding how AQ core operates as well as how cells operate and operationalise. whew. ok back to the thesis.

UPDATE:  ooh one more thing.  on the surface of it (and I’m going to have to do that post and do some more research before hand) it seems that op-tempo hasn’t actually changed that much since KSM got taken out and the external ops re-constituted circa late 03. By external ops I mean AQ core external ops, not those done under the regional supervision of AQAP.

one more comment. the last we heard about training size for AQ classes in PAK was 10-20. that’s not too much smaller than the size of classes at Farouq you know.  more on this later.