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Afghan guerrilla fighters trained and backed by the United States to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

mujahedeen

30,000 local police officers within six months, providing a critical element to help the government and coalition forces hold on to areas newly cleared of Taliban insurgents

The police, meanwhile, have a reputation for poor discipline, drug abuse and corruption, and have proved easy prey for the Taliban.

“Then you partner it up effectively with I.S.A.F. and with the Afghan National Police, then you have got a very real possibility of keeping the Taliban out,” said Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, the departing British commander of coalition forces in the southern region,

General Petraeus had agreed with President Karzai to a pilot program of 10,000 such local Afghan policemen

Recruitment has already begun in some places to expand that plan

The plan has clear echoes of the Sons of Iraq, the neighborhood militias that helped turn around violence there.

American Marines holding Marja have been plagued by the reinfiltration of insurgents since the operation

Local police officers, trained and supervised by American Special Forces, are already operating in a number of places, including part of Marja and an area in Arghandab, and Special Forces units are already looking to recruit men in the newly cleared horn of Panjwai in Kandahar Province

The conventional story about Pakistan has been that it is an unstable nuclear power, with distant tribal areas in terrorist hands. What is new, and more frightening, is the extent to which Taliban and Qaeda elements have now turned much of the country, including some cities, into a base that gives jihadists more room to maneuver, both in Pakistan and beyond.

homegrown militants who have hidden Al Qaeda's leaders since the end of 2001 are no longer restricted to untamed mountain villages along the border. These Islamist fighters now operate relatively freely in cities like Karachi--a process the U.S. and Pakistani governments call "Talibanization."

Dozens of Taliban commanders have moved their wives and children to Pakistan, where they live in the suburbs of cities like Peshawar and Islamabad. This keeps them out of the reach of Afghan authorities, who have been known to arrest relatives in order to track down guerrilla fighters.

Those forces, all working together, have brought the Afghan jihad home to Pakistan. Within the tribes' ancient mud-walled fortresses they run training courses for insurgent recruits and suicide bombers. Some graduates travel to Afghanistan to fight beside the Taliban. Others will stay in the tribal area to fight the Pakistani Army, while others are sent out to hit targets in places like Karachi. Several terrorist plots in Britain have been traced back to the tribal areas.

''When America Was Struck by Al Qaeda's Lightning'' attributes the recent East Coast power outage to Mr. bin Laden.

“For all of us in this world to be safer, we must remove the need for groups, organizations, or state entities [to rely] on religious radicalism as instruments of policy,” he said. “Military action in Afghanistan alone is not going to free us of terrorism. Going to the sources of terrorism, where they get trained, where they get motivated, where they get financed, where they get deployed, is necessary.”