A court in London has been hearing evidence from Mohammed Asha, one of two doctors accused of conspiring to detonate car bombs in London and Glasgow in June 2007.

Taking the stand for a second day, Jordanian-born Asha described his relationship with his co-accused, Bilal Abdulla.

Asha said he and Abdulla were two entirely different characters. Asha described himself as serious and obsessed with his career in neurology. Abdulla, he said was not like that. Indeed, Abdulla regularly criticized him, he said, for being too materialistic and insufficiently concerned with the suffering of fellow-Muslims.

Asha told the jury how he had pleaded with Abdulla not to return to his native Iraq in the middle of 2006 after Abdulla had failed an important medical exam in Britain. "I made him swear on the Quran not to do anything foolish," he told Woolwich Crown Court.

Asha said Abdulla had become increasingly emotional and angry about the situation in his home country and he feared his friend was going back there to fight with the insurgency. "I will come back to Britain if you get me a job," Asha described Abdulla as telling him.

The court heard how in Abdulla's absence Asha succeeded in getting him an interview for a position at a Scottish hospital. Abdulla then returned to Britain almost immediately and, after being prepped by Asha, successfully landed the job.

Asha's lawyer, Stephen Kamlish QC, then proceeded to ask Asha about a series of phone conversations and meetings he had had with Abdulla in the months leading up to the attacks. The prosecution asserts these communications played an integral part in the alleged conspiracy.

Asha told the court he had handed over a mobile phone to Abdulla, at a meeting in Preston in February, because he had more than he needed. He described how he had bought four phones from a shop in Birmingham that offered cashback and free international calls so long as multiple phone contracts were purchased. Addressing the jury directly he asked: "Why would I give a mobile phone in my name to a person I know is about to commit a crime?"

The prosecution has argued that Abdulla and another man, Kafeel Ahmed, an engineer from India, drove down from Scotland to London in two Mercedes cars and tried to detonate them in the city's West End entertainment district. The jury was told the bombs' mobile phone detonators had failed to go off properly. The next day, the prosecution has said, the pair drove a third car into Glasgow airport and tried to blow it up in the terminal building but it too failed to explode. Ahmed later died of injuries sustained in the incident.

Asha and Abdulla both deny charges of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. The trial continues.

LONDON, England - For months on the campaign trail, the tough talk about Osama bin Laden never let him down. Repeatedly, President-elect Barack Obama said Bin Laden should be ‘chased out of the cave where he lives' and that Al Qaeda leaders need to be ‘snuffed out', killed or captured. And every time, there were cheers in the crowd. But those trite, simple statements now need to mean something in the "war on terror."

File image of Osama bin Laden from 1997.

As Obama embraced his new status as America's commander-in-chief, you could sense he knows there is little time to savour success. The extremists waging their war of terror are still on the hunt for their own victory.

U.S. General David Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command and the point man in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has a sobering assessment. "It is not possible to kill or capture your way out of an industrial-size insurgency," he told CNN earlier this week as he met officials in Pakistan.

Does that contradict the approach that Obama seems to want to take in combating terror? One thing is clear, no matter what strategy Obama adopts, the Bush administration has said that strategy must be devised and set in motion well before Obama is sworn in on January 20.

So it's no surprise in the closing days of the campaign, Obama was reading up on Afghanistan, picking up a book entitled ‘Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 ' by Steve Coll. The book's author told CNN his historical assessment has changed little in the last few years. Pakistan can no longer be a safe haven for Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

"I do think that it will be an important priority for the Obama presidency but I don't think you'll see him gun-slinging around the tribal areas of Pakistan simply trying to bring bin Laden to justice on his own." says Coll.

But what about that cave? Presumably the one in Pakistan where U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden  is still hiding. Pakistani officials told CNN this week the U.S. has it all wrong and they will try to convince Obama that bin Laden is not in Pakistan.

"Mr. Osama is not in our part of the world, had we known that he was in our part of the world, had there been any credible evidence for it we would have gone after him ourselves instead of waiting for the Americans to do it," says Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's High Commissioner to Britain.

And so the plot thickens, as it always has in trying to navigate a road to peace on either side of the Pakistan, Afghan border. It is a point not lost on Obama, even as domestic issues crowd his agenda.

"We have to snuff out Al Qaeda, we have to capture and/or kill bin Laden. And in order for us to do that, we're going to have to have cooperation from Afghans and Pakistanis. But, you know, it may get murky in terms of who are our potential allies, who are enemies in that situation," Obama told CNN's Wolf Blitzer last Friday.

There are clear signs President-elect Barack Obama is already tackling the frustrating complexity of the "war on terror" he will inherit, but that doesn't mean he will have any more success at winning it.