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Those at event thought to have had ties to police or anti-Taliban militia

KABUL, Afghanistan - At least 40 people were killed and 77 injured by a suicide bomb attack on a packed wedding party in insurgency-plagued southern Afghanistan, officials said Thursday.

“A suicide bomber went inside the party where hundreds of people were sitting and blew himself up,” a police official said of the blast at around 9:30 p.m. (1 p.m. ET) on Wednesday in Arghandab district, north of Kandahar, where foreign troops are focusing on a push in coming months to whittle out the Taliban.

A Kandahar policeman said many of the guests had links to local police officials or a local militia, which was why it was likely targeted, although the Taliban denied responsibility.

“We condemn such a brutal act,” Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi told Reuters from an undisclosed location. “The Taliban wage Jihad (holy war) in order to free the people from the hands of occupiers. How can we kill them?”

The Taliban have previously claimed responsibility for insurgent attacks, but recanted once civilian casualties have become clear.

Ahmadi laid blame at the feet of the the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for Afghanistan, which has killed hundreds of civilians in misdirected air strikes, but a U.S. military spokesman dismissed this as “misinformation.”

Earlier Wednesday, the four U.S. soldiers were killed when a helicopter they were riding in came under fire and crashed in Helmand, which is next to Kandahar. A total of 29 NATO troops have been killed this month, including 10 on Monday alone, seven of them Americans. It was the deadliest day for the military alliance in seven months.

‘End of the world’
Witnesses described scenes of chaos at the wedding, which had drawn around 400 celebrants including women and children from nearby villages.

“Some people were waiting for food, others were dancing inside a big tent, when I heard a deafening blast,” a wounded survivor named Aminullah said.

“The dust went up in the sky and I saw dead bodies everywhere. Women and children were screaming. I thought it was end of the world.”

Agha Mohammed, who survived the wedding blast, said the guests were all seated and having a meal when the explosion occurred, sending a huge fireball and smoke into the sky.

He told The Associated Press that the scale of the destruction caused by the blast was more than was common in a suicide attack. “We have experience with war and this does not look like a suicide bombing,” Mohammed said.

Rural wedding parties in Afghanistan can often be raucous affairs with large gatherings of people and frequently accompanied by celebratory gunfire. Several have mistakenly been attacked in the past by foreign forces. However Taliban attacks have claimed more civilian lives.

Citing hospital reports, Kandahar Governor Tooryalai Wisa said ball bearings had been used as shrapnel, a hallmark of suicide bombings. Children were among the dead, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

“The Taliban are doing two things at once,” Wisa said. “On one side they target people who are in favor of the government, then at the same time they don’t want people to know their real face.”

Cruel people

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose plan to seek engagement with the Taliban won support at a tribal peace conference last week, deplored the wedding bombing as a “terrorist attack.”

“This attack … is the work of those cruel people who act against Islamic and divine values,” Karzai’s office said in a statement.

U.S. military spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks said the deaths were not the result of an airstrike, and said any suggestion otherwise was “Taliban misinformation.”

“This ruthless violence brought to the Afghan people at what should have been a time for celebration demonstrates the Taliban’s sickening and indiscriminate tactics to try to intimidate the citizens of Afghanistan,” Lt. Gen. Nick Parker, Deputy Commander, International Security Assistance Force said in a prepared statement.

“It only proves they have no regard for human life,” he added.

Ahmadi did claim responsibility on behalf of the insurgents for killing the U.S. troops, saying militants shot down the helicopter with two rockets.

Helmand provincial government spokesman Daoud Ahmadi said the attack occurred about midday in Sangin district.

Both U.S. and British troops are operating in Helmand, part of a band of provinces across southern Afghanistan that are the Taliban’s heartland.

Also Wednesday, another NATO service member died in a homemade bomb attack. The Ministry of Defense in London said he was British.

By msnbc

A Afghan policeman talks to an injured man at a hospital following the explosion at a wedding party in Kandahar on Thursday. A suicide attack ripped through a wedding party in full swing in the Taliban's heartland late Wednesday.

Militants in Afghanistan have shot down a helicopter, killing four NATO troops.

NATO officials said the incident took place Wednesday in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.  The Taliban said they downed the helicopter with rocket-propelled grenades.

In a separate incident, NATO said a service member was killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan.

NATO has now lost 18 troops in a series of attacks since Monday.  U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday the coalition of nations with forces in Afghanistan needs to see progress by the end of this year.

Gates, in London for meetings with his British counterpart, said the top U.S. military commander is confident American forces will make enough progress to justify a continued presence in Afghanistan.  He also said the U.S. could start giving the Afghan government increased control in areas where security has improved.

Taliban militants have increased their attacks as NATO prepares an effort to drive the group from its stronghold in southern Kandahar province.

NATO said Tuesday a bomb killed two of its soldiers in southern Afghanistan. Elsewhere in the region,  a British soldier was killed in a gunbattle with insurgents in the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand province.

On Monday, seven Americans, one French and two Australian soldiers were killed in attacks in the south and east of the country. It was the deadliest day so far this year for international forces in Afghanistan.

A medevac helicopter lifts off from Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar city, carrying an unidentified NATO soldier on 9 June 2010

Sahara region’s nomads face growing threats from militants, traffickers.

GAO, Mali - Dozens of Malian troops rush through the sweltering desert, yell war cries and open fire, spitting hundreds of bullets from rifles and machine guns. It’s all part of a training session — run by the United States.

The U.S. is trying to help nations bordering the Sahara and the arid Sahel region to contain a growing threat of terrorism. More than 200 U.S. Special Forces and 500 African troops trained together in May, in the latest of several large military maneuvers over the past few years.

Intelligence officers estimate there are some 400 Al-Qaida extremists based in the vast emptiness north of here, up from about 200 just a year ago. They worry that the militants are teaming up with smugglers carrying cocaine across the desert to Europe and with the restless nomad tribes of the Sahara.

As the extremists get stronger and wealthier, they are attracting more recruits among local youth and Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa. While Algeria’s large military has managed to contain most terror attacks to the hinterland, militants have spread southward through the porous borders of the Sahara to take advantage of weaker African governments like Mali and Niger.

Officials fear the militants could use their safe havens to mount jihadi operations against Europe and the United States.

“You can consider they’re only 400 in the desert, but they now dominate a zone half the size of Europe,” says a French official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his job is to monitor the zone. “It’s a threat everybody is taking very, very seriously.”

Gao
A dust bowl of adobe mud houses surrounded by sand dunes, the small town of Gao lies at the junction between al-Qaida and organized crime. The Tuareg nomads pitch tents on the town’s outskirts, along with Arab and Moorish Bedouins. The Peul, a black tribe of cattle herders, live in round, wooden huts right next to a gated hotel compound transformed into a U.S. military camp.

Gao, in northeastern Mali, marks the start of an area twice the size of Texas that has been declared a no-go zone, where al-Qaida is holding hostage two Spaniards and a Frenchman.

The northern halves of Mali and of neighboring Niger, the eastern part of Mauritania and the southern tip of Algeria are now “red zones” banned for travelers by the French Foreign Affairs Ministry, which maintains close ties to the region — a French colony until the 1960s. American and British authorities have also issued strong terrorism warnings.

Malian soldiers trying to patrol the area have lost several men during clashes with drug traffickers, arms smugglers, bandits and al-Qaida.

“The real problem is that it’s getting hard to know who’s an Islamist and who’s just a criminal,” said Col. Braihama Tagara, the military commander for Gao region. “They support each other more and more.”

The gunmen’s weaponry has improved hugely of late, Tagara said. They can open fire with automatic riffles, heavy machine guns and even R-Pgs, and they all have Thuraya satellite phones to share intelligence.

By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU

A nomad from the famed Tuareg tribe of the Sahara Desert brings his herd for vaccination to a team of U.S. Special Forces in the Sahara Desert in northeastern Mali.

Attacks Could Be Backlash After Iraq Touted Series Of Blows Against al Qaeda.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A series of bombs targeting Shi’ite areas rocked Baghdad Friday, killing at least 56 people in an apparent backlash after Iraq touted a series of blows against a weakened al Qaeda-led insurgency.

Eight people were also killed by bombs in the Sunni west of the country, less than a week after Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. troops killed al Qaeda’s top two leaders in Iraq.

Thirteen blasts hit different areas of the Iraqi capital around the time of Muslim prayers, mostly near Shi’ite mosques and at a marketplace, an Interior Ministry source said.

Three bombs targeted worshippers outside the main office of fiery anti-American Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the crowded Sadr City slum. Those blasts killed 39 people and wounded 56, generating denunciations of the security forces. Some youths threw stones at an Iraqi army vehicle.

“Why do they always target us? We are peaceful people. We come to pray and then go on our way,” one survivor told Reuters Television in an angry tirade, without identifying himself.

The attacks, one of Iraq’s deadliest in recent weeks, also wounded around 120 people and signaled the possibility of a rise in violence after a March national election produced no clear winner and left a power vacuum for insurgents to exploit.

“Targeting prayers in areas with a certain majority,” Baghdad security spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said, referring to Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim majority, “is a revenge for the losses suffered by al Qaeda.

“We expect such terrorist acts to continue.”

Last Sunday, al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the purported head of its affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq, were killed in a raid in a rural area northwest of Baghdad by Iraqi and U.S. forces.

The strike against al Qaeda’s Iraq leadership has been accompanied by a string of smaller battlefield victories in which more than 300 suspected al Qaeda operatives have been arrested and 19 killed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

By Muhanad Mohammed

Men carry a victim injured in one of a series of parked car bombs in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, April 23, 2010. Triple bombings hit a Sadrist office Friday as worshippers were finishing their prayers, killing 14 and wounding an estimated 75 in a rash of attacks on Shiites across Iraq's capital.Explosions outside three other Shiite mosques in Baghdad, all timed around the end of Friday's prayers, appeared to be the work of insurgents looking anew to inflame sectarian tensions.

BAGHDAD — A series of bombings on Friday struck mosques, a market and a shop in Baghdad, as well as the homes of a prosecutor and police officers in western Iraq, killing dozens, only five days after a joint Iraqi-American raid killed the top two leaders of the insurgency.

Iraq’s leaders had hailed the killings and arrests of insurgent leaders this week as a devastating blow to the group known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but warned that retaliation was almost certain to come. It was not clear that the group, also known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, was behind the latest jolt of violence.

The attacks were the worst of an intermittent wave of bombings since the parliamentary election on March 7, providing a violent backdrop to stalled efforts to finalize the results of the vote and form a new government.

According to preliminary accounts by the Ministry of the Interior, 12 bombs — including car bombs and improvised explosive devices, but not suicide bombers, an insurgent hallmark — killed at least 50 people in Baghdad and wounded more than 100. In Anbar, the sprawling mostly Sunni province to the west, seven people died when a series of explosions struck houses in a small village.

The deadliest attacks struck near three mosques in Sadr City, the Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, just as worshipers departed Friday afternoon prayers. Those attacks, involving car bombs, occurred near the headquarters of the political movement led by the cleric Moktada al-Sadr. The movement’s candidates did well in last month’s election, giving them increased leverage in forming a government its leaders say should not include the incumbent prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

The attacks came a day after senior Iraqi officials said that the previously undisclosed arrest of a senior insurgent leader in Baghdad last month had provided a breakthrough that has allowed Iraqi and American security forces to kill or arrests dozens of the group’s leaders and fighters.

The deaths of the two leaders and the killings and arrests that followed — with 12 more suspects seized in raids in Baghdad and Mosul, in the north, on Thursday — may be the most significant blow yet to a deadly movement that only a few months ago appeared to be regrouping, the officials said.

The officials asserted that the series of raids, and the apparent cooperation of the leader arrested last month, had devastated the group’s leadership ranks, its financing and possibly its links to Al Qaeda’s international leaders on the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“The map of the entire insurgency in Iraq is now clear to us,” Sharwan al-Waili, the minister of national security affairs, said Thursday.

The lasting impact on Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia remains to be seen, given the group’s resilience and previous overstatements by American and Iraqi officials of its imminent demise. Many details of the recent raids remain secret, and thus impossible to verify. Mr. Maliki’s government is also eager to portray itself as strong on security as negotiations continue to form a coalition after the March 7 election. Any significant weakening of the group could help smooth the Obama administration’s primary goal in Iraq: the steady withdrawal of combat forces by the end of the summer. The withdrawal has appeared increasingly uncertain because of the political impasse over the election.

Mr. Waili and the senior Iraqi military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said that the intelligence trove resulted from the arrest on March 11 of a man who was called Al Qaeda’s “governor” of Baghdad, Manaf Abdul Rahim al-Rawi.

His arrest had not been previously announced, as Iraqi security officials quietly gathered what General Atta called “a huge quantity of important documents and information that were and are useful for the security agencies.”

Mr. Waili said Mr. Rawi’s arrest had led to the “dismantling of the entire network” over the month that followed, culminating in Sunday’s raid and another in Mosul on Tuesday that killed Ahmed al-Obeidi, said to be the group’s leader in three provinces in northern Iraq.

With the arrest of the Baghdad governor, it appeared that the group’s principal leadership had been sundered. “We have reliable information indicating that there is a state of confusion among Al Qaeda now,” General Atta said at a news conference.

In the past, however, new leaders have sprung up to replace those killed. General Atta also warned that retaliatory attacks were possible.

General Atta said that Mr. Rawi had planned and supervised a series of catastrophic attacks in Baghdad that began last August on government buildings, universities, hotels and, before the election, polling stations.

Those bombings killed hundreds, disrupted government functions and heightened anxiety across the capital.

The successes in striking Al Qaeda’s leadership appeared to reflect improved coordination between the American military and Iraqi forces.

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

People rushed to extinguish a burning car moments after a bomb exploded in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad on Friday.

Police in northwestern Pakistan say two separate bomb explosions in the city of Peshawar have killed at least 23 people and wounded many others.  The violence-hit city is the gateway to Afghanistan.

Police say that most of the deaths occurred when a suicide bomber attacked a rally in Peshawar’s busy Qissa Khawani market.  Activists of the right-wing religious party, Jamaat-i-Islami, had organized the rally to protest against frequent power cuts in the city.

Those killed in the attack include a senior police officer, his security guard and several rally leaders.  The city police chief says the slain police officer and his colleagues were apparently the target of the deadly attack.

An eyewitness told reporters on the scene the bomber was a teenage boy who detonated the device as the rally was about to disperse.  

The man says the blast instantly killed and wounded many people, but fears of a second explosion kept people away from helping the victims for a while.  

Police say they have found the head of the suicide bomber and an investigation is underway.  

The attack occurred hours after a bomb exploded outside a school run by a police welfare foundation.  A six-year-old boy was killed and at least eight others were wounded in the blast.

Provincial Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain tells VOA the violence is the work of Taliban extremists, in retaliation for security forces dismantling their bases.

The minister says these terrorists are like beasts and they are killing innocent people.  But he says the violence will not deter the government’s campaign aimed at eliminating the militants.  

The attacks in Peshawar follow three bomb blasts over the weekend in the nearby town of Kohat that killed around 50 people.

Pakistani security forces have conducted frequent raids against al-Qaida and Taliban militants in the country’s northwestern tribal areas, which border Afghanistan.  Officials believe the security operations have provoked the militants to carry out attacks on security forces, mosques, schools, public places and markets, leaving thousand of people dead in recent years.

by Ayaz Gul

Pakistani rescue workers collect the remains of victims at the site of bomb explosion at a market in Peshawar.

Pakistani troops killed at least 34 militants after about 150 Taliban attacked a military checkpost in the northwest on Friday, challenging government assertions crackdowns have weakened the group.

Homegrown Taliban rebels are seeking to topple the U.S.-backed government of unpopular President Asif Ali Zardari, who has been pressured to hand over some of his key powers, such as dissolving parliament and appointing military chiefs.

A senior military officer and four paramilitary soldiers were also killed in the attack in Orakzai, a day after Pakistani jets killed nearly 50 people, mostly militants, in strikes on a school and a seminary in the same region, a government official said.

Fourteen soldiers were wounded in the Taliban assault.

Orakzai, one of seven Pakistani tribal regions near the Afghan border, also known as agencies, has seen a surge in military attacks in recent months, targeting militants who were driven out of their bastion of South Waziristan.

Pakistan mounted two offensives last year in the northwestern Swat Valley and in South Waziristan on the Afghan border, which it says threw al Qaeda-linked militants into disarray.

But despite losing ground, the Taliban hit back with bombings that killed hundreds, prompting troops to step up attacks in other northwestern regions where militants are believed to have taken refuge after offensives.

In the latest attack, about 150 Taliban launched a pre-dawn assault on a checkpoint in Orakzai, triggering fierce fighting.

“They attacked from three sides which continued for nearly three hours in which a lieutenant colonel and four other security officials were killed,” said government official Khaista Rehman.

“Security forces launched the counter-attack in which 24 militants have been killed,” he said. A paramilitary official, said as many as 30 militants may have been killed.

Army jets and helicopter gunships later targeted suspected militant hideouts in various parts of Orakzai and killed another 10 militants, said government official Mohammad Asghar Khan.

Orakzai is considered a militant stronghold of Pakistan Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud, who is widely believed to have been killed in a U.S. drone aircraft attack in January.

Pakistani action against militants along its Afghan border is seen as crucial to the U.S. efforts to bring stability to Afghanistan, particularly as Washington sends more troops there to fight a raging Taliban insurgency before a gradual withdrawal starts in 2011.

The two allies pledged increased cooperation in tackling militants during two days of talks in Washington that ended on Thursday, with Washington promising to speed up overdue military payments.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates praised Pakistan for increased coordination over stabilizing Afghanistan, including the recent arrest of a key Afghan Taliban commander in what has been described as a joint American-Pakistani raid in Karachi. Hard money training.

A U.S. envoy’s postponement of his Mideast trip appeared Tuesday to deepen one of the worst U.S.-Israeli feuds in memory — even as Israel’s foreign minister signaled his government had no intention of curtailing the contentious construction at the heart of the row.

Hundreds of Palestinians hurled rocks at police and set tires and garbage bins ablaze across the holy city’s volatile eastern sector, where the construction is planned. Plumes of black smoke billowed and the air reeked of tear gas in the heaviest clashes in the city in months.

Youths in one east Jerusalem neighborhood hoisted a giant Palestinian flag and shouted, “We’ll die in Palestine, Palestine will live.”

Thousands of police, including anti-riot units armed with assault rifles, stun grenades and batons, were deployed across east Jerusalem to stifle the unrest. No serious injuries were reported.

The diplomatic crisis erupted last week after Israel announced during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden that it would build 1,600 apartments for Jews in disputed east Jerusalem, the sector of the holy city that the Palestinians claim for a future capital.

The announcement enraged Palestinians, who have threatened to bow out of U.S.-brokered peace talks that were supposed to begin in the coming days. The Obama administration, fuming over what it called the “insulting” Israeli conduct, has demanded that Israel call off the project.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Israel Radio that demands to halt Israeli construction there “are unreasonable” and predicted the row with the U.S. would blow over, saying neither side had an interest in escalation.

But Washington notified Israel early Tuesday that envoy George Mitchell had put off his trip indefinitely. Mitchell had planned on coming to wrap up preparations for relaunching Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But now it’s not clear when the indirect talks, to be mediated by Mitchell, will begin.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized for the timing of the project’s approval, but he has not said it would be canceled. On Monday, he defended four decades of Jewish construction in east Jerusalem and said it “in no way” hurts Palestinians.

The feud is feeding already high tensions in east Jerusalem, where Jews and Palestinians live together uneasily.

The violence also threatened to spread to the West Bank. At the main checkpoint between the West Bank and Jerusalem, dozens of Palestinian teens threw rocks and a few firebombs at Israeli troops, who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

In east Jerusalem, security forces, some on horseback, charged a group of more than 100 youths, who had set garbage bins afire and lobbed rocks at police. Palestinian merchants shuttered their stores, and Palestinian schools in the city were closed.

The Palestinian rescue service said six people were lightly injured. Israeli police said 39 people were arrested, including eight minors.

Palestinian officials called on the public to defend Muslim religious interests in Jerusalem following the rededication Monday of a historic synagogue in the Jewish quarter of the Old City.

The rededication has stoked recurring but unsubstantiated rumors that Jewish extremists are planning to take over the hilltop shrine at the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The site, known to Jews as Temple Mount, was home to the biblical Jewish temples and is Judaism’s holiest site. Muslims call it the Noble Sanctuary and it hosts the Al-Aqsa mosque complex, Islam’s third-holiest shrine.

But the outbreak of violence also appeared to reflect deeper frustration amid a yearlong standstill in peace efforts.

Palestinians, who number about 250,000 in east Jerusalem, see the building of new settlements and the presence of some 180,000 Jews there as a grave challenge to their claims to the territory.

Israel annexed east Jerusalem after capturing it from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war. Most Israelis accept the Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem as part of Israel, and previous peace proposals have allowed them to remain in Israeli hands. Hard money training.

A pair of suicide bombers targeting army vehicles detonated explosives within seconds of each other Friday, killing at least 39 people in this eastern city and wounding nearly 100, police said. It was the fourth major attack in Pakistan this week, indicating Islamist militants are stepping up violence after a period of relative calm.

About ten of those killed were soldiers, said Lahore police chief Parvaiz Rathore.

The bombers, who were on foot, struck RA Bazaar, a residential and commercial neighborhood where several security agencies have facilities. Security forces swarmed the area as thick black smoke rose into the sky and bystanders rushed the injured into ambulances. Video being shot with a mobile phone just after the first explosion showed a large burst of orange flame suddenly erupting in the street, according to GEO TV, which broadcast a short clip of the footage shot by Tabraiz Bukhari.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Who are these beasts? Oh my God!” Bukhari can be heard shouting after the blast in a mixture of English and Urdu.

Senior police official Tariq Saleem Dogar said 39 people were killed, and another 95 were hurt. Some of the wounded were missing limbs, lying in pools of blood after the explosions, eyewitness Afzal Awan said.

“I saw smoke rising everywhere,” Awan told reporters. “A lot of people were crying.”

No group immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicion quickly fell on the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida.

The militants are believed to have been behind scores of attacks in U.S.-allied Pakistan over the last several years, including a series of strikes that began in October and lasted around three months, killing some 600 people in apparent retaliation for an army offensive along the Afghan border.

In more recent months, the attacks were smaller, fewer and confined to remote regions near Afghanistan.

But on Monday, a suicide car bomber struck a building in Lahore where police interrogated high-value suspects — including militants — killing at least 13 people and wounding dozens. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility.

Also this week, suspected militants attacked the offices of World Vision, a U.S.-based Christian aid group, in the northwest district of Mansehra, killing six Pakistani employees, while a bombing at a small, makeshift movie theater in the northwest city of Peshawar killed four people.

Rana Sanaullah Khan, the law minister for Punjab state, where Lahore is located, said the renewed attacks are a “sign of desperation” by the militants.

“We broke their networks. That’s why they have not been able to strike for a considerable time,” he said.

But the attacks show that the loose network of insurgents angry with Islamabad for its alliance with the U.S. retain the ability to strike throughout Pakistan despite pressure from army offensives and American missile strikes against militant targets.

The violence also comes amid signs of a Pakistani crackdown on Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida operatives using its soil. Among the militants known to have been arrested is the Afghan Taliban’s No. 2 commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

The Pakistani Taliban, meanwhile, are believed to have lost their top commander, Hakimullah Mehsud, in a U.S. missile strike in January. The group has denied Mehsud is dead but has failed to prove he’s still alive.

Militant attacks in Pakistan frequently target security forces, though civilian targets have not escaped.

During the bloody wave of attacks that began in October — coinciding with the army’s ground offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in the South Waziristan tribal area — Lahore was hit several times.

In mid-October, three groups of gunmen attacked three security facilities in the eastern city, a rampage that left 28 dead. Twin suicide bombings at a market there in December killed around 50 people. Hard money training.

On Christmas Day, a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit tried to blow up the plane with plastic explosives in his underwear. He failed, yet the very attempt shook the U.S. government, set federal agencies against each other and triggered months of political second-guessing.

In fact, short of mass casualties, the attack allegedly attempted by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had exactly the kind of reaction that al-Qaida is after. And, it appears, that lesson is resonating with the terror network’s leadership.

For the first time, the group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and has prided itself on its ideological purism seems to be eyeing a more pragmatic and arguably more dangerous shift in tactics. The emerging message appears to be: Big successes are great, but sometimes simply trying can be just as good.

U.S. officials and counterterrorism experts say the airline attack and last November’s shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, prove that simple, well-played smaller attacks against the United States can be just as devastating to the democratic giant as complex and riskier ones.

In a recent Internet posting, U.S.-born al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn made a public pitch for such smaller, single acts of jihad.

“Even apparently unsuccessful attacks on Western mass transportation systems can bring major cities to a halt, cost the enemy billions and send his corporations into bankruptcy,” Gadahn said in a video released and translated by U.S.-based Site Intelligence Group, which monitors Islamic militant message traffic.

It’s a message that officials believe has been evolving for the last year and has turned upside down the prevailing wisdom that the next al-Qaida attack against the U.S. must be bigger and bolder than the one on Sept. 11, 2001.

“It’s pretty clear that while al-Qaida would still love to have home runs, they will take singles and doubles if they can get them,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Saban Center and a former CIA officer. “And that makes the job of counterterrorism much, much harder.”

Counterterror officials note that al-Qaida leaders monitor the U.S. closely and watched the reverberations of the Abdulmutallab attack. They saw the scramble to boost security, the members of Congress blasting federal agencies for intelligence and screening failures, the political drumbeat against the Obama administration’s national security efforts and the agency leaders who rushed to blame each other. Hard money training.