Afghanistan was too weak to prevent the terrorism within its borders.

“They began to kill Afghans,” Karzai said. “They began to destroy our mosques. They began to close schools. They began to insert war.”

Democracy arrived, he said, millions of refugees returned, and the country has embarked on rebuilding.

NATO summit meeting

Mr. Obama was able to pull out two-thirds of United States forces from Iraq and declare America’s combat mission there over

“They have been involved in the area for a long time and they know how to intimidate people. They threaten them with beheadings, cutting off hands and feet, all the things they did when they were the government.”

Journalists have still not been allowed to visit Marja independently, however; they must be embedded with the American military

Marja is meant to be a template for a similar campaign aimed for spring in neighboring Kandahar Province, the Taliban’s heartland

“They will find people have returned, security is stronger, and they will not be able to come back,”

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan — Gen. David H. Petraeus, the overall commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, is moving to sharply increase Afghan police forces drawn from villages in southern provinces, and is employing the help of former mujahedeen commanders to recruit them

NATO officials

The mujahedeen

American and Iraqi successes targeting the leadership and financing of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other terrorist networks.

He noted a series of bank robberies and attacks in recent months targeting gold markets — as well as a series of bloody attacks, especially in Baghdad.

General Austin, a veteran of two previous tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, took over command from Gen. Ray Odierno on Sept. 1, coinciding with the declared end of the American combat mission here.

Bin Laden and fellow al-Qaeda leaders are believed to be hiding near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Beliefs and ideology

"Allah knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed – when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women." – Osama bin Laden, 2004[

Reported beliefs include that a Christian-Jewish alliance is conspiring to destroy Islam,[12] which is largely embodied in the U.S.-Israel alliance, and that the killing of bystanders and civilians is religiously justified in jihad.

Al-Qaeda's management philosophy has been described as "centralization of decision and decentralization of execution."

"emergence of decentralized leadership"

September 23. Bin Laden was believed by Pakistani officials to be on the Afghan-Pakistani border. He is said to have been keeping a low profile, with as little as ten men guarding him.

June. Taliban leader Mullah Bakht Mohammed claimed "The latest proof that he is alive is that he sent me a letter of condolences after the martyrdom of my brother. He advised me to follow my brother's path."

July 12, Pakistan's Interior Minister states bin Laden is not in Pakistan. The TimesOnline reports that he is still hiding in Afghanistan; Kunar Province being not far from Tora Bora

humiliation resulting from the Islamic world falling behind the Western world - this discrepancy made especially visible due to recent globalisation.

Top Muslim organizations in the United States were swift to condemn the attacks on 9/11 and called "upon Muslim Americans to come forward with their skills and resources to help alleviate the sufferings of the affected people and their families".

The second-biggest operation of the U.S. Global War on Terrorism outside of the United States, and the largest directly connected to terrorism, was the overthrow of the Taliban rule of Afghanistan by a U.S.-led coalition.

In Quetta, a city in southwestern Pakistan, Afghan refugees said teachers in madrassas and members of hardline religious parties urge young men to join the new Taliban insurgency.

That depth of feeling, some Pakistanis note, is what makes Osama bin Laden so difficult to catch.

As dusk arrived in the city last Saturday and the call to prayer sounded from local mosques, a young Afghan madrassa student in a turban demanded that a visiting American leave the area. As the foreigner drove away, a young boy spat in his face.

He said the reason the Arabs have not been caught is simple: the local populace reveres them.

''Everybody knows them,'' the official said. ''Everybody supports them.''