War Is Boring

Lethal strikes by armed drones are America’s best and less obtrusive method of killing Islamic militants and dismantling their terror networks while minimizing civilian casualties. Or they’re a misguided and counter-productive attempt at sterilizing the dirty work of counter-terrorism — one that serves as a rallying cry for terrorist recruiters and ends up creating more militants than it eliminates.

by ROBERT BECKHUSEN Twitter is where you hang out with friends and meet new people. Now you can hang out with brutal pro-Kremlin warlord Ramzan Kadyrov. According to Russian news wire RIA Novosti, the Chechen president created a Twitter accountWednesday after meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister and former president. (Medvedev is an advocate of social media.) Kadyrov [...]

The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan has pinned its hopes on a new local-militia program to help shore up street-level security ahead of the coalition’s planned 2014 departure after more than a decade of war.

PAKTIKA, Afghanistan — The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan has an unusual new strategy for defeating the Taliban in one key eastern town: join them.

The Pentagon’s shadow war in Africa could have a new front, if reports coming out of Nigeria are accurate. U.S. troops are headed to Nigeria to help local forces do battle with Boko Haram, an Islamic terror group that has killed up to 400 people this year in an escalating campaign of bombings and shootings. At least that’s what Nigerian military sources tell Scott Morgan, a journalist based in Washington, D.C. who writes under the pseudonym “Confused Eagle.” The Guardian also has the story.

A campaign of kidnapping that began at sea with Somali pirates has expanded onto land and across Somalia’s borders. Pirates and their allies in the Somali terror group al-Shabab have begun targeting tourists and aid workers in Kenya and Puntland, a mostly self-governing region in northern Somalia.

Five years after the U.S. backed a disastrous Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, Washington is considering supporting another ill-conceived incursion into the war-torn East African nation — this one by neighboring Kenya. Meanwhile, the U.S. has escalated its drone campaign against Somali insurgents, apparently coordinating the aerial strikes to take advantage of the Kenyan advance.

A Matt Bors classic from 2006.

It began with a wrong turn on Mogadishu’s maze-like city streets. Now a top al-Qaida terrorist is dead, the victim of an internationally-backed government campaign that could help bring order to one of the world’s worst failed states, and provide a model for U.S. intervention in the post-Afghanistan era.

U.S.-backed government troops are on the move in Mogadishu, bolstered by an expanded African Union peacekeeping force. Insurgent terror group Al Shabab is losing ground. With Somalia’s 20-year-long civil war entering a new phase, I spoke to former Al Shabab commander Khalif Ibrahim Noor for his perspective on the fighting and the resurgent Transitional Federal Government.