Is it time for a quick exit from Afghanistan? AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. commander in the front of the vehicle turned to me and said: “I hold on pretty tightly to my firearm whether we see a crowd of civilians or Afghan police or the Afghan National Army or whatever.  You never know who’s going to turn on you.”

 It was a shrewd analysis and the officer meant every word.  His opinions were formed after a few tours of duty in Iraq and a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

His comments came to mind as Britain’s Ministry of Defence announced the deaths of five soldiers at the hands of an Afghan policeman who turned his gun on the allied forces trying to train him.  You could hear the skepticism about this war building on radio morning shows in Britain this morning.

Many quoted from the unsolicited remarks of Kim Howells, the government’s current intelligence and security watchdog but more importantly, the British minister responsible for Afghanistan until just last year.

Howells’ assessment in an editorial published in The Guardian newspaper was unequivocal: Britain should begin pulling out of Afghanistan now.

Howells writes: “Bring home the great majority of our fighting men and women and concentrate on using the money saved to secure our own borders, gather intelligence on terrorist activities inside Britain, expand our intelligence operations abroad, co-operate with foreign intelligence services, and counter the propaganda of those who encourage terrorism.”

His comments could not have been more at odds with his former and current boss, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Embedded in Brown’s statement of condolences to the families of the five killed was a pointed statement often repeated: British soldiers are not just trying to make Afghanistan safer; this war is about keeping Britain safe.

“They fought to make Afghanistan more secure, but above all to make Britain safer from the terrorism and extremism which continues to threaten us from the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Fewer and fewer people seem willing to believe that statement. A handful of polls this year confirm a majority of British citizens want their troops withdrawn from Afghanistan. And now an influential government voice is adding to the chorus.

“Such a shift in focus would have the benefit of exposing far fewer British servicemen and women to the deadly threats of Taliban snipers and roadside bombs, but would also have momentous implications for UK foreign and defence policy. We would need to reinvent ourselves diplomatically and militarily.” wrote Howells.

His analysis is at odds with that of General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan who Pentagon insiders say is publicly urging U.S. President Barack Obama to beef up the mission with at least 40,000 additional troops.

On British soil to deliver a lecture, General McChrystal last month set out his arguments to a London audience.

 “We need to reverse the current trends and time does matter, waiting does not prolong a favourable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely public support will not last indefinitely but the cruel irony is to succeed we need patience, discipline, resolve and time.”

 He added: “The situation is serious and I chose that word very carefully. I also say that neither success or failure for our endeavour there in support of the Afghan people in the government can be taken for granted.”

But Howells directly refutes those arguments in his editorial.

“I doubt whether the presence, even of another 40,000 American troops – brave and efficient though they are – will guarantee that the Taliban and their allies will no longer be able to terrorize and control significant stretches of countryside, rural communities and key roads.

"Recent attacks in Kabul and other centers suggest that the present balance of territorial control is at best likely to remain – or, more likely, to shift in favor of the Taliban.”

There is a good reason that finding a middle-ground on Afghanistan isn’t that easy: There doesn’t seem to be one.

Tell us what you think. Do you think it’s time to rethink the Afghan strategy and pull troops out?

After dozens of internal investigations, public statements and now two high-profile inquiries the conclusion hasn’t changed much: The July 7th terror attack in London could not have been prevented. 

For years now this has been a difficult theory to accept for victims and victims’ families. 

“It’s a matter of public safety and we can’t in all conscience walk away” says Rachel North who was injured on an underground train near Kings Cross station. 

Since late 2005,  North and dozens of other victims and their families have lobbied for a full judicial inquiry because they say they believe security authorities have not owned up to their mistakes.

“That’s not to blame people that’s to say I think now in 2009 if we don’t apply the thinking that we should have learned after 7/7, we’ll have another one” says North.

But according to the authors of the latest inquiry, the uncomfortable truth not just for victims and families but for the wider public, is that there is no guarantee another attack won’t happen, no matter what is done to improve the security architecture.

It is sobering to hear the government and others stress that the threat of attack is still severe.

Still, pulling apart the anatomy of this attack and the ensuing investigation is a useful exercise for any country. One of the key mistakes was British intelligence seemingly believing ‘it can’t happen here’.

Chris Driver Williams, a military explosives expert who was called in within minutes of the attack, says he was one of the first to suggest it was inspired by Al Qaeda and says when he voiced that during an emergency cabinet meeting, the notion was literally laughed off.

“I came out with a very early assessment that it was an Al Qaeda attack and was met with actually from one very senior intelligence figure at the time who couldn’t understand how I could come up with that assessment” says Driver-Williams.

Authorities not just in Britain, but around the world, have learned from that experience and are taking home grown terror very seriously. In particular, the security structure, how intelligence is gathered and analyzed, has been changed in Britain to ensure a more comprehensive approach to potential threats.

Driver-Williams believes that’s important because far from the ‘spectacular’ attack of 9/11, we are more likely to see future attacks model 7/7 and more recently, the Mumbai attacks in late 2008.

The investigations and inquiries post 7/7, as imperfect as they may seem to victims, have been valuable in dissecting the possible foundations for a home grown terror attack. And as that threat evolves, the British experience may prove more and more relevant in other countries.

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.

LONDON, England – The orange jumpsuits, the barbed wire, the "redacted" files. President Obama may be able to make it all history by closing Guantanamo Bay, but their effect on American justice will be profound.

Former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg

Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate who was released in 2005, has always stressed to me that during torture and detention he would have confessed to anything.  And that is the heart of the legal problem now facing the administration.

"Guantanamo Bay is the most notorious prison on earth," says Begg. He believes Guantanamo is a radicalizing force for militants around the world.

Former inmates like Begg have joined a chorus of U.S. officials saying the prison - which is in effect "above the law" - could now cripple the chances of bringing those who are truly dangerous to justice.

"What procedure can you use on people who have been systematically tortured including water-boarding, including being stripped naked and beaten?" asks Begg.  "What sort of evidence can be admitted into a court of law that has been extracted under that process?"

President Obama ordered the U.S. government to suspend prosecutions of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay for 120 days, military officials said Tuesday.

As if to punctuate his actions, Obama stressed during his inaugural speech that he would cling to the moral high ground.

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," he said. "Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake."

But the fact remains that even when closed, the enduring legacy of Guantanamo may be that a place designed to keep us safe from terror may actually make us less so.

Legal issues complicate the cases against even the most important terror suspects like Mohammed Al-Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker. Earlier this month, a Guantanamo judge admitted that Al-Qahtani was tortured and could not therefore be put forward for prosecution. But can the United States really set him free?

And beyond high profile suspects, human rights campaigners say there is little evidence to prosecute dozens of Guantanamo inmates still being held. They argue keeping those detainees locked up will not help keep al Qaeda at bay.

"I think it's actually one of the most harmful myths about it, that we can't let people go because we've got the tiger by the tail," says Cori Crider of the human rights organization Reprieve. "I've met over 20 people and in my experience it's just not true."

For the new administration, closing Guantanamo could just be the beginning of a real headache: How do you prosecute terror suspects within the American legal system? And if you can't, how do you create a whole new legal framework to keep them locked up without a conviction?

LONDON,  England – I was not lucky enough to be in the room as Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic spy agency, gave his historic interview. It has only been about 15 years since the government has even officially acknowledged the existence of the agency. So MI5's first newspaper interview in a century of existence is a big deal, even if the news Evans divulged was less than ground breaking. Still for those of us covering security, it is reassuring to be able to hang all those intelligence tips and accumulated research on cold, hard facts uttered by Britain's chief spook. 

What is the single most important thing he said? His intelligence tells him the threat level can stay right where it is, at situation ‘severe' but not crucially, a notch above at ‘critical.'

Why? Al Qaeda has not given birth to a British franchise. And, significantly, Evans says they have monitored fewer and fewer plots in "late-stage" attack mode.

The rest is all a bit academic, but let's go through it anyway.

Evans describes the financial crisis as a "watershed moment" for security reasons, not economic ones. He points out that the power paradigm is shifting in meaningful ways; Western nations will lose financial leverage and that will have security implications. Bankrolling the bust will affect more than our financial wellbeing, you can count on it.

Evans also catalogues the latest chapter in what is known as ‘blowback'. The theory contends that violence in Muslim countries will eventually ‘blowback' to countries like Britain, motivating attackers to seek revenge. Evans says there is no doubt the latest crisis in Gaza will be used as a new selling point to radicalize and recruit future attackers.

In terms of future attacks, Evans has shared some concrete insights. In terms of the likelihood of another al Qaeda inspired terror attack on Britain he says: "There is enough intelligence to show they have the intention to mount an attack here."

Secondly he confirms what other authorities in Britain have asserted for years, far too many British young men are leaving for Pakistan, Afghanistan and even Somalia in search of terrorist training and indoctrination.

There is still plenty in what Evans said that you can lose sleep over, including the fact that MI5 will double its staff in the decade after 9/11. Still, although Britain's spook-in-chief can't and won't say so bluntly, reading between his lines you can arguably conclude we are safer today than were the day after 9/11.

Am I wrong? We want to hear from you.

Two UK terror trials came to an end this week.

Al Qaeda operatives used invisible ink to write down key phone numbers. This pen was found by police during a house search

On Tuesday, a jury in London convicted Bilal Abdulla of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. Abdulla was one of two people who tried to detonate car bombs in London and then, on a suicide mission, drove a jeep filled with gas canisters into Glasgow airport. His partner, Kafeel Ahmed, died in the second attack.

The trial rightly received plenty of coverage. But the case itself failed to open up much, if anything, in the way of links to Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organisation. It was, it appears, a stand-alone operation.

Far more interesting, I think, was the result from Manchester this afternoon. For the first time in the UK, a jury convicted a man, Rangzieb Ahmed,  of directing terrorism. Not only that, they also convicted him, and his co-defendant, Habib Ahmed, no relation, of belonging to Al Qaeda.

We talk a great deal about people or plots being AQ-linked or AQ-inspired. Well here's a case, according to Greater Manchester Police head of counterterrorism, Tony Porter, that's indisputably AQ-core.

In many ways, the Manchester case was the polar opposite of the London one. It didn't have any plot or planned attack per se, but it had links to all manner of interesting people and plots. 

Here's a few:

Phone links between Rangzieb Ahmed and Yassin Omar, one of the failed London bombers.

Habib Ahmed named as a fellow traveller by Mohammed Junaid Babar, the supergrass whose testimony helped convict the fertiliser bomb plotters in May 2007.

Phone links with Abdul Rahman, who pled guilty last year to recruiting people in the UK to go and fight coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Habib Ahmed married by Omar Bakri Mohammad, founder of Al Muhajiroun, the UK's highest profile organisation supporting bin Laden ideology.

Finally, there are the links with a man at one time credited with being bin Laden's number three, Hamza Rabia.

The investigation itself included bugged conversations in Dubai, a luggage intercept at Amsterdam Schipol, and phone numbers written in invisible ink.

For a taster of the story, click here.

With Barack Obama preparing to assume the Presidency, it's a good time to cast around for neat descriptions of a changed world.

Gilles Kepel, author of 'Beyond Terror and Martyrdom'

Gilles Kepel, a noted French scholar of Islam, has a succinct delineation of how things have changed in the seven years since 9/11, in a new book, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom.

Both of the grand narratives at work since the attacks on New York and Washington have run into the ground, he argues.

Those narratives were the Global War on Terror, the project of George W. Bush and the neocons, and the Global Jihad, as authored by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Both these narratives were intended to swing public opinion behind them – creating mass support within their respective constituencies for a highly aggressive, combative posture. Violence first; politics, maybe, later.

Both narratives, Kepel argues, foundered on the same issue: the occupation of Iraq. The United States succeeded in creating a new army of jihadists able to cripple all efforts at rebuilding the country, at least until the twin developments of the military surge and the Sunni Awakening, by which time the U.S. had long since lost the argument anyway.

And for Al Qaeda, the bloodshed unleashed by its leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was such that jihad became fitna. Put crudely, holy war became civil war. The horrendous violence between Sunni and Shi'a had a profoundly alienating effect across the Muslim world and support for bin Laden declined sharply.

The great irony resulting from this mutual ideological knockout is the rise of a foe shared equally by AQ and the US: Iran.

Kepel's not the first to put forward this line of argument but it is, among other things, a very tidy encapsulation of the law of unintended consequences. Otherwise known as the cock-up theory of history.

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.

LONDON, England - Paula Newton writes below on the British Government shelving plans to extend pre-charge detention limits for terrorism suspects from 28 to 42 days.

UK Security Minister Alan West.

As a follow-up, it's worth noting comments today from the the country's security minister, Alan West, about the nature of the threat facing Britain.

Now, West has "misspoken" in the past. He had to be rapped on the knuckles last year after he appeared to express a certain ambivalence towards the very counterterrorism legislation he was about to pilot through the House of Lords. (Something he clearly failed to do with the loss of the vote in the upper chamber yesterday.) But his latest comments are stark and give pause for thought.

"The threat is huge," he said.

Yes, we've heard that sort of thing before. But it's the next bit, albeit awkwardly worded, that's more interesting.

"The threat dipped slightly and is now rising again with the context of severe, large complex plots, because we unraveled one the damage it caused to Al Qaeda actually faded slightly.

"They are now building up again. There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this."

It's the last bit that grabs my attention. Rather than the numbers game that MI5 has played in recent years, we have a reference, it seems, to one, great, specific plot.

The analysis about the ebb and flow of the threat is interesting as well and it tallies with something I heard from a senior figure in the UK counterterrorism firmament earlier this year.

His analysis at that time (May) was that there had been a pause in centrally directed Al Qaeda operations in the UK. There was still a huge amount of activity being monitored by police and the intelligence agencies, he said, but no big plots.

His assessment was that Al Qaeda had taken a bit of a beating in the UK with more than sixty terrorism convictions. He characterized it thus: "Somewhere someone [in Al Qaeda] has been saying, ‘we've taken losses in the UK, what do we do now?'"

That was then, this is now. And things really do appear to have changed.

Lord West's comments follow hot on the heels of a security briefing from a "senior Whitehall source" that the current threat level is almost as high as it was immediately after 7/7. It's not critical yet (the highest level), according to the "source," but it is at "the severe end of severe."

A significant terror trial opened in Manchester this week. Significant because it is the first time anyone in Britain has been brought to trial accused of directing terrorism.

Rangzieb Ahmed (above, left) is the man charged with the offence. He also faces a charge of belonging to Al Qaeda, as does another of his co-accused, Habib Ahmed (above, right).

The court has heard how the two men – who are not related – met up in December 2005 in Dubai, where Rangzieb Ahmed handed over what prosecutors described as a "contacts book for terrorists."

Written in invisible ink in an ordinary diary, the court heard, was a series of phone numbers, including one for Hamza Rabia, described in court as the then number three in Al Qaeda.

The contacts book was uncovered in Habib Ahmed's luggage at Amsterdam's Schipol airport. Agents searched through his bags during a layover on his journey back from Dubai to Manchester.

Neither of the two men has been accused of any particular plot. However it's alleged the Dubai meeting was called after Rangzieb Ahmed was forced to abort some sort of mission.

The court heard he was part of an active three-person cell involved in what was described as "major activity." He had been due to fly on to South Africa when his alleged Al Qaeda commander in Pakistan, Hamza Rabia, was killed and the mission was called off.

Also on trial is Mehreen Haji, the wife of Habib Ahmed. She's charged with funding terrorism by transferring money to her husband while he was on a trip to Pakistan, where he was allegedly attending a training camp.

The jury was told the married couple had connections to radical Islamism and the now-banned group Al Muhajiroun. The group's leader, Omar Bakri Mohammed, officiated at their wedding in June 2001.

All three deny all the charges against them. The trial is expected to last about twelve weeks.