LONDON, England – A few months ago I wrote a short item suggesting that radical Muslim preacher Anjem Choudary might usefully be compared with Johnny Rotten. Thinly argued - if widely slammed - as that post was, it's a comparison that retains value.

A protest against British soldiers in Luton, England.

The real argument, though, as I attempted to clarify in the comments to the original article, is not over the use of the acronym "UK," but rather over the media, and the symbiotic relationship Choudary enjoys with certain sections of it.

CNN itself has not stood entirely above the fray on this, and there's an argument, of course, that this post itself is just adding to the exposure. But I don't see a way round that given the point I wish to make here.

Like Rotten and the Sex Pistols, Choudary knows the media loves nothing more than the opportunity to express outrage. The trick is then to exploit that outrage and fold it back into the greater narrative: the core message aimed at the real audience.

Punk, in its early days, traded on its outlaw status, which gained greater and greater currency the ruder and more shocking the Pistols became. The media lapped it up because they could portray it as a simple story of moral decline and social decay. It sold newspapers, which in turn helped sell records. Which then sold more newspapers, which sold even more records. Everyone was happy.

Choudary and his group, known once as Al-Muhajiroun until it was banned, play a similar game. Last year I attended two of its meetings within the space of a couple of weeks. It's not hard to get in to these events and reporters who suggest otherwise are being disingenuous.

Most, if not all, will have received an SMS from Choudary inviting them to come. Even so, some prefer to come incognito. I've had a cameraman at one event telling me he worked for Hungarian television and a reporter at another purporting to write for the Irish Times newspaper. Both later turned out to be working for British tabloids.

At the first event, held to mark the anniversary of 9/11, the message from the platform was a familiar one. The 9/11 perpetrators were described as "disciplined role models" responsible for a "great day in history." The people of Britain would "one day live under the sharia – so get used to it!" More than enough material for the assembled journalists, perhaps half a dozen in number, to get their story in the paper.

At the next event, a week or so later, this time highlighting "Muslim Youth - Spark of the Fire," those very news stories arising from the first meeting were brandished from the platform like evidence planted on a dupe: "See how they twist our words! This is not a war on terror, this is a war on Muslims!"

Choudary's expertise in all of this has come to the fore yet again with the excessive coverage given to the protest in Luton last week during the parade by British soldiers returned from Afghanistan. A small, though provocative, demonstration, which solicited an angry response from some of those who turned out to salute the infantrymen, garnered acres of coverage in the press and on TV. The Evening Standard, London's main local newspaper, even devoted three pages to an interview with Choudary, including the front-page splash "I want to see flag of Allah flying over Downing Street."

There will be plenty of winners from this. The papers, presumably, were happy with their stories. Choudary and his followers must be absolutely delighted: they can mine this one for weeks, if not months. And the far-right British National Party, the BNP, are exploiting it heavily as well: the story is all over the front-page of its Web site.

The main losers are the vast majority of people - Muslims and non-Muslims alike - who are getting a highly-skewed picture of what constitutes Muslim opinion in the UK. Because no matter how sincerely Choudary and his acolytes may hold their views, their support within Muslim communities is paltry.

Indeed, it's been suggested to me by people intimately involved in de-radicalization that Al-Muhajiroun is losing ground, its followers' heightened public presence over the last six months or so actually born out of frustration over lost momentum.

If that is indeed the case then it's surely time for the media to move on and stop over-inflating the importance of these particular proponents of division and separatism.

KABUL, Afghanistan - You couldn't miss the irony. As we tried to contact Taliban commanders through an intermediary their mobile phone messages in Urdu made one thing clear: The insurgents were in Pakistan or very close to the Pakistani border.

For years now, many Western journalists have approached the Taliban for interviews and the Taliban has obliged.

The militants would sometimes cover their faces or not give their names, but face-to-face contact was possible, especially when it suited the Taliban and its message.

Not any more.

As the war in Afghanistan has escalated, the Taliban has become off limits for any journalist who wants to come out alive. As Nir Rosen from Rolling Stone magazine found out when doing his investigative piece "How We Lost the War We Won," any old, tribal notions of Taliban insurgents keeping their word is out the window.

When a couple of insurgents promised to keep him safe, he became a pawn as the infighting between rival Taliban commanders wore on.

Rosen was lucky, his fate hung in the balance for little more than 24 hours. But it underscores the dangers of seeking the journalistic authenticity we all crave.

As journalists we talk to the Taliban to get a sense of the message they want to convey. It's then up to us to scrutinize that message as best we can. We don't feel that we're mouthpieces for the group, no more than we feel that we're mouthpieces for NATO every time we cover one of its press conferences. 

An interview can give us a new or sometimes a very cliched perspective of the Taliban. Either way, it still represents a valued piece of news that is instructive in terms of where the conflict is going and how the Taliban hopes to shape it.

So we made do with a phone call. There is no way to verify if the man we spoke to, Mohammed Ibrahim Hanafi, is in the ascendancy as a Taliban commander or on his way out. He did make a point of telling us that he would play a pivotal role in the Taliban expanding its reach in the north of Afghanistan.

Above all though, what we took from the interview is an overwhelming sense of confidence and control from the Taliban. Certainly Taliban commanders feel they have coalition troops on the run and perhaps more importantly, that they have the support of more and more Afghans.

Civilians may respect the Taliban or just fear it, but either way the result is the same: The Taliban now has renewed influence and reach in almost three quarters of the country.

KABUL, Afghanistan - I knew something was wrong the minute I took a look at the police sniffer-dogs tasked with protecting a key checkpoint just outside the walls of the presidential palace. They looked tired, they weren't interested in the cars, they had to be coaxed into sniffing around and they had sores on their hind legs. Great, I thought, that's all that's coming between me and a catastrophic explosion in Kabul: Work weary dogs and their underpaid masters.

Can you really blame the dogs or the cops though? Kabul is clogged with traffic and people and at the best of times there is no way to assure safety in this city. And it's alarming for this correspondent to hear the same line from both the Taliban and one of the city's top cops: Insurgents can hit the city anytime, anywhere.

That's not to say the Kabul Police force isn't trying. They are now talking about a double ring of security around the city and they've gotten better at enforcing it. Many cities around the world with many more resources, are having their own battle with terrorists and so in that context, the security forces here aren't doing a bad job.

Securing this capital is a crucial test not only for the city's police force, but for the whole country. They need to know they can stand on their own and sort out their own security without thousands of foreign troops turning their capital into a fortress.

Less than three years ago, foreigners could walk the streets of Kabul in relative safety and have the luxury and freedom to hail their own cabs and try out the local food. Some foreigners of course still do that, but the majority live in armed camps throughout the city, fearing both random attacks and targeted kidnappings.

I saw first hand the pictures from inside a recent attack on the Justice Ministry here. It was gruesome, stomach-churning stuff. The images of dead employees with bullets to the head and chest were bad enough, but the placid expressions of the dead Taliban fighters, some of whom had major body parts blow off, were chilling.

The Taliban claims it controls several of the main routes just outside the city and not many Afghans are willing to test that claim. Roadside bombs have tripled so far this year and then there are the "Taliban checkpoints" that are harrowing for Afghans, let alone foreigners.

The fact is, even if Kabul becomes more secure in the coming months it may remain virtually cut off from the rest of the country for some time. And then there's still the issue of how to secure the city itself with a police force of grossly underpaid officers who claim they are on the take just to survive?

When I stopped at police headquarters at District #2, the commander there showed equal amounts of hubris and humility. Of course he said, he and his officers are heroes. But how else would you describe men who willingly walk the city knowing they could be target practice for the Taliban? And all for less than $200 a month.

I would like to hear what you think of the mission in Afghanistan. Let me know.

LONDON, England (CNN) - When Northern Ireland's police chief, Hugh Orde, warned a week ago of a heightened threat from dissident Republicans he did not mince his words.

"We are very clear," he said, "they are determined to kill police officers going about their normal duty of keeping people safe."
It now appears those fears have been confirmed.

The fatal shooting of a police officer in the town of Craigavon, not far from the capital, Belfast, comes just 48 hours after gunmen shot dead two British servicemen at a barracks in the province.

The Republican splinter group, the Real IRA, claimed responsibility for that attack. And no one in Northern Ireland will be surprised if they claim responsibility for this latest one as well.

Membership of the Real IRA, a rump of Republican activists who refused to go along with the main Provisional IRA, and its political partner Sinn Fein, after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that set Northern Ireland on the road to peace, is put in the low hundreds. But as so often with violent extremists, they have a power to shape events out of all proportion to their size. Or so at least they will wish to believe.

These targets are not randomly chosen. By targeting the police, and particularly the British army, they are hitting Republican weak spots. Sinn Fein, fully signed up to the peace process and a key partner in the power-sharing government, makes no bones about the fact it wants to see all British troops out of Northern Ireland. Like it or not, Gerry Adams finds himself in a difficult position being forced to condemn an attack on the British army. Calling on Republicans to grass on those who carried it out is another, even more problematic, step to take.

What the Real IRA wants to see happen is an over-reaction from Unionists and a move by the British government to put soldiers back on the streets. Political Republicans are highly sensitive to these possibilities. Hence the sharp criticism from Sinn Fein before these attacks to news that the intelligence arm of British special forces had been called into the province to meet the rising dissident threat.

The response to the attack over the weekend suggested the consensus that governs Northern Ireland - that all sides keep dancing together in the name of devolved government and the peace process - was holding. If that changes then the dissidents will hope their shocking show of strength can win new support.

What's worrying is where that support might come from. Paul Dixon of Kingston University points out the apparent anomaly that support for those political parties that have most readily embraced the peace process has tended to come not from the young - those, on the face of it, with the most to gain from peace - but from the older generations, those who've grown weary of decades of violence. The fear is that the readiness of many younger voters to support those parties who've taken a tougher line on the peace process might translate into a new generation ready to abandon peace altogether.

One Northern Ireland politician said after the latest killing that the province is "staring into the abyss." It's a frightening thought that the foundations of peace in Northern Ireland might really be so shallow.

But amid the pessimism, it's worth recalling that previous attacks in the province have sometimes succeeded in actually embedding the peace process further, through a shared revulsion to the violence from across the communities. The challenge to Northern Ireland's politicians, its police force, and the British government, is that they collectively hold their nerve and bring their people with them.

BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN - I.E.D. or Improvised Explosive Device: The U.S. military calls it the Taliban's weapon of choice and one look at the statistics and you know why.

Components for the construction of improvised explosive devices found by Afghan Border Police and Coalition Forces in Khowst Province.

The crude but lethal weapon is responsible for more than three quarters of all casualties in Afghanistan, says the U.S. Army, and I.E.D. attacks have tripled so far this year compared to last.

"It is a fact of modern warfare, this is the type of asymmetric attack they will use against us ... and we have to be prepared to deal with that and this is a fight that's worth fighting," says Colonel Jeffrey Jarkowsky, Task Force Commander of JTF Paladin, a multi-disciplinary team trying to combat the most likely killer of coalition forces in Afghanistan.

And while armoured vehicles and constant training does save lives, intelligence plays a key role.

"It is critical, intelligence drives the fight overall in every aspect and for us it's critical to use intelligence to determine who are the cells and the networks who are implacing the I.E.D.s," says Colonel Jarkowsky.

With I.E.D. attacks literally everyday in Afghanistan now, the Taliban is adapting and learning. Like a virus mutating, the Taliban is learning from mistakes and adapting with new techniques.

"And so you've got this constant, constant, battle for wits really, it's a battle for wits, it's not a battle about armies or mass or weapons, it's a battle about clever-nous" says Paul Cornish, a military analyst with London-based Chatham House. He adds that coalition forces know they must be smarter and more agile than the Taliban.

"The coalition are using more and more advanced technology, equipment and assets and so on and we're beginning to see unmanned aerial vehicles being used in missiles attacks on very very local targets" says Cornish.

But I.E.D.s of all types kill more Afghan civilians than soldiers. In a security camera video released to the media by the Coalition forces, a 4×4 truck is seen navigating a check-point in Khost province. To the left of the truck, there is a steady stream of school children returning home from their last day of school. The video shows the 4×4 explode into a ball of fire. Fourteen children died in the explosion and scores were injured.

Back on base at Bagram, the trainer is yelling out orders: "Don't pick anything up!" "Get on your knees to check the vehicle!" "Anything obvious could be a decoy!". The soldiers know the drill already but the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25Th Infantry Division from Alaska, is getting a refresher course. They are retracing the grim monotony of how to find I.E.D.s and dodge them, a task that has gone from Iraq to the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Here too now, as in Iraq, the hunt is on to find that that crude but effective weapon of war soldiers know all too well.

Click here to watch my report in video

LONDON, England - Wednesday saw no dramatic developments in the investigation but instead witnessed a steady drip of reports and information about what happened and how.

Up to twenty people were arrested but none of the gunmen responsible for the attack were apparently among them. 

Many have commented on the apparent ease with which the gunmen melted away into the city after the attack, and suggested this points to them receiving assistance from rogue elements within the military or the intelligence structure. While there may or may not have been collaboration of this kind, it's a mistake to make this assumption on this piece of evidence alone.

It's easy, for instance, to forget that the men who tried to bomb London on July 21st, 2005 were also able to make good their escape and hide undetected for days. Some of those men, remember, were escaping, unarmed, from busy underground railway stations. It was six days before the Met police had the first would-be bomber under arrest, and detectives in London had all the benefits of the city's massive CCTV infrastructure at their disposal. Lahore, it seems safe to suggest, and notwithstanding the new video out Wednesday evening, is not quite so well endowed with surveillance cameras.

What's more interesting is the number of reports now suggesting that the gunmen were carrying far more arms and ammunition than would be needed to execute an ambush only. Add to that the multiple reports they were also carrying dried fruit, nuts and water bottles in their rucksacks, and it does seem to point towards the possibility they had intended taking the Sri Lankan cricket team hostage. This possible scenario, of course, provides further similarities with the Mumbai attack three months ago.

Perhaps predictably, there have been growing voices blaming India for Tuesday's attack. Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan's military intelligence agency, has described it as "all too obviously the handiwork of Indian intelligence." Meanwhile, Pakistan's serving Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, has said he does not "rule out a foreign hand." Foreign hand is code for India, of course.

It's not surprising that Pakistan's government might wish to point the finger abroad. At home and around the world, it has been slammed over this security failure. Whether or not individual police officers did their duty on the day – and one can understand why suggestions they did not have hurt when six police were killed in the attack – it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that the ruling party's squabble with its political rivals might also have played a part in the failure. 

Last month saw the dismissal of the provincial government in Punjab – of which Lahore is the capital – run by the party of Nawaz Sharif, the main nationwide opposition figure to President Asif Ali Zardari. Along with the outgoing administration, the most senior figures in the province's police force were also removed from their jobs. Faced, then, with a major security challenge – policing an international cricket match – it seems some of the main men responsible were still getting their feet under their new desks.

LONDON, England - It's just hours since the attack in Lahore but on one thing most observers seem clear. The real target of the attack was not the Sri Lankan cricket team, but the Pakistani government. Terror operations like this are aimed at creating maximum international impact, and sport finds itself increasingly in the crosshairs of global terrorism. No sport is more popular in Pakistan than cricket.

A video grab shows a suspected gunman near Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, Pakistan, Tuesday.

The only reason Sri Lanka were touring Pakistan at all was because the Indian team had pulled out of its planned tour, citing security reasons. After receiving assurances over the team's safety, Sri Lanka stepped in at the last minute. It will surely be the last team to visit the country for the foreseeable future.

That means a loss of prestige and income for Pakistani cricket, and further reinforcement overseas of the idea that Pakistan is not a safe place to visit or to do business. That's just the sort of outcome the attackers will have wanted, and just what the Pakistani government is so desperate to avoid.

The operation certainly appears to have been very well planned, if not, perhaps, entirely well executed, if reports about some of the attackers' weapons failing turn out to be correct.

It seems as though about a dozen gunmen were involved - a large number of people to coordinate in a single operation. The convoy carrying the cricketers was ambushed at a roundabout on its route from the team hotel to the stadium. It was not the opening day of the Test match, but day three - suggesting reconnaissance might have been carried out over the past two days about the route taken by the team bus.

The attackers carried an impressive arsenal of assault rifles, grenades and rocket launchers. "These people were highly trained and highly armed," said the province's governor. "The way they were holding their guns, the way they were taking aim and shooting at the police, it shows they were not ordinary people," he added.

While it appears that that some grenades failed and the rocket launcher failed to hit a target, all of the attackers appear to have escaped successfully after a gunfight with police and security lasting 15 minutes.

So who did it? It seems reasonably safe to rule out the Sri Lankan separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in this attack. The Tamil Tigers have been engaged in a bloody civil war in the north of Sri Lanka for decades. But it's suffered a series of defeats in recent months at the hands of the Sri Lankan army, and most commentators believe the group just does not have the capability to mount such a complex, well-coordinated attack like this on foreign soil.

Instead, the focus surely falls on one, or perhaps several, of the jihadist-terrorist groups based on Pakistani soil. One such group is the Tehrik-e-Taleban, the Pakistani Taliban movement led by Baitullah Mehsud from the tribal areas in the west of Pakistan. It was blamed for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. And it's been linked with the truck bomb attack on the Marriot hotel in September last year, which killed more than 50 people.

Some initial accounts lend possible support to this being the work of the same group. Lahore's police chief said the men who took part looked like Pashtuns, the ethnic group that hails from the tribal regions close to the Afghan border, the stronghold of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But some commentators question this. Sajjan Gohel, of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, points out that the Pakistani Taliban, or groups allied to it, have never struck this far from their base in the tribal areas. Taliban-linked attacks also tend to be more rudimentary in nature, and not as sophisticated as Tuesday's ambush, Gohel says.

Certainly, it's striking that this operation was not a suicide bomb attack but one instead carried out by what appear to be highly trained gunmen. It's also perhaps worth noting that they were casually dressed in jeans and jackets. Both these point to similarities with last year's attack in Mumbai, when 10 gunmen laid siege to two hotels and other locations over a period of three days.

That operation has been widely blamed on another jihadist-terrorist organisation, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT), a group with links to al Qaeda. Unlike the Taliban groups, LeT has its roots not in Afghanistan but in the conflict with India over the disputed region of Kashmir. Even though it would be unusual for LeT to stage an attack within Pakistan, there are good reasons why it may wish to do so now.

Under intense international pressure after the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani officials arrested a series of LeT leaders. Interior Minister Rehman Malik then made the unprecedented move of publicly acknowledging that the Mumbai operation had been in part staged from Pakistan.

Never before had Pakistan made such an admission over an attack in neighboring India, and there are some within Pakistan's military and security apparatus who will not have been pleased to hear it. Many security analysts say those are the people who believe destabilizing India is a strategic objective. They're also the people who in the past helped set up groups like LeT to fight in Kashmir.

Whoever carried out the attack, it certainly represents the most significant challenge to date from within Pakistan to the survival of the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari.