The Wall Street Journal ran a short but thorough summary today on the ongoing situation in Somalia, with foreign insurgents apparently threatening to topple the remnants of the country’s already feeble government. The Journal’s Sarah Childress writes, from Nairobi:
“Somalia’s government requested immediate military assistance from regional powers over the weekend to help combat foreign fighters [...]

Last week in Cairo, the President of the United States gave one of the single-most important foreign policy speeches since President Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” speech in 1953.
In remarks lasting nearly one hour, Obama framed the foreign policy of his administration in terms of mutual respect and understanding while never ceding any ground on vital U.S. [...]

From today’s Washington Post: Strikes Have Disrupted Al-Qaeda:
Drone-launched U.S. missile attacks and Pakistan’s ongoing military offensive in and around the Swat Valley have unsettled al-Qaeda and undermined its relative invulnerability in Pakistani mountain sanctuaries, U.S. military and intelligence officials say.
This sounds promising.  But unfortunately, the article provides no evidence or details.  All we have are [...]

I’ve written about this before, but this is a good time to revisit the issue.  From today’s NYT: 1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Foun:
An unreleased Pentagon report provides new details concluding that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has [...]

In ASP’s recent “Are We Winning” interim report, Somalia was highlighted as a growing “hot spot” for Islamic terror, along with Russia, the Phillipines, and Pakistan.
Yesterday, CNN and other outlets reported that all Qaeda affiliated Islamic terrorist group Al-Shabab seized Jowhar, a city southeast of the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
From the article:
The town had been under [...]

The firing of General McKiernan in Afghanistan and his replacement with General McChrystal has prompted some interested debate and discussion. Three of the arguments that emerged are of particular interest and deserve further comment.
First, posting at Foreign Policy, analyst Kori Schake argues provocatively that “McKiernan may become the General Shinseki of Afghanistan.” She [...]

Today, the American Security Project released an interim update as part of its ongoing “Are We Winning?” study, which found several discouraging trends, including an increase in worldwide Islamic violence and a dampening of the so-called “Obama Effect” in the Muslim world, among other issues.
Click here to listen to audio of a conference call held [...]

Ali Soufan, a supervisory special agent in the FBI from 1997 to 2005, writes a compelling op-ed in today’s New York Times, in which he rebuts claims that the use of torture on Abu Zubaydah produced actionable intelligence where traditional methods had failed. 
He writes:
It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. [...]

The Senate Armed Services Committee today released the declassified version of its investigation into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody since the start of the so-called “War on Terror.”  You can read the whole report here.
What they found, in a bipartisan report, is striking and horrifying.  In essence, the United States government adopted techniques [...]

On Tuesday, April 14th, Dr. Bernard I. Finel, ASP Senior Fellow and frequent contributor to The Flash Point Blog, will be giving a presentation entitled “The War on Terrorism: Whether or Not We are Winning and How to Measure That” to an undergraduate class on terrorism at The University of Texas at Dallas.
The professor, Dr. [...]