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U.S. Drone Strike Kills Al-Aulaqi

On September 30, a United States drone strike in northern Yemen killed Anwar al-Aulaqi, an influential and American-born member of al-Qaeda. Al-Aulaqi is believed to have inspired several successful and attempted terrorist attacks, including the Fort Hood shooting in 2009 and the Times Square bomb attempt in 2010. There is a great deal of debate about the legal and policy implications of the strike. Some have argued that killing al-Aulaqi significantly increased American security, while others argue that it will have little long-term effect because it does nothing to address the growing radicalization in Yemen. Similarly, while some argue that […]

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Libyan Triumphalism

The happy outcome of Kaddafi’s removal does not make the Libyan project a sensible enterprise for the United States and its allies to have undertaken―let alone a model for future interventions.

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The New NYPD: Pushing Civil Liberty Bounds to Keep the City Safe

After a months-long investigation involving dozens of interviews with local and federal officials, the Associated Press has found that, since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has transformed into one of the “most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies” in the United States, through its covert operations in Muslim neighborhoods designed to root out terrorist plots.

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Think Like a Guerilla: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Sri Lanka

By Malik Ahmad Jalal* Click here to read the full text as a PDF The Roman Empire in Germania, the French in Algeria, the United States in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan all conjure up the myth that insurgencies cannot be defeated. In recent years, this notion has only been reinforced by NATO’s slow progress against the Taliban. Yet counterinsurgency strategies can, in fact, succeed. One of the most instructive examples is that of the Sri Lankan Army’s defeat of the Tamil Tigers, one of the most violent and persistent insurgent groups of the twentieth century. The Sri

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Juan Zarate Asks, “Whither the Arab Spring?”

By James Moxness– Former Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism and the newest member of the NSJ Advisory Board, Juan Zarate, gave a lecture last week at Harvard Law School entitled “Whither the Arab Spring?” concerning the recent political upheaval in the Middle East, what it means for U.S. counter-terrorism policy, and the future of Al Qaeda. The unrest that has spread throughout the Middle East, originating in Tunisia and in short order emerging in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and now Syria (with perhaps other states to come), presents a serious messaging problem for Al Qaeda. As shown by

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