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the reconstituted Afghan National army in restoring some modicum of stability to twenty-nine of the country’s thirty-four provinces. Al Qaeda’s restoration of a base in Pakistan was facilitated by Pervez Musharraf’s August 2006 Waziristan Accords, which the current government of Pakistan is bent on perpetuating. In return for non-interference by the Pakistani army and Frontier Corps, the tribal leaders agreed to keep a lid on jihadism within their areas. The result was a rapid extension of extremist activity into the peaceful Swat Valley, which is peaceful no more. Informed commentators like Steve Coll think bin Laden himself is ensconced in or around Miram Shah, a Taliban stronghold in North Waziristan. Whether the political culture of the FATA approves of Al Qaeda simply recreating the conditions it enjoyed under the Afghan Taliban is a moot point. Al Qaeda may have to invest so much effort in squaring its endemically fractious hosts, notably the Haqqani clan, that it has little energy left to conduct international terrorism. Moreover, ethnic Chechens, Tajiks and Uzbeks captured by coalition forces have revealed the disdain in which they are held by Al Qaeda’s Arab core, within which individual risks are not fairly run by Egyptians, Libyans, Lebanese, Moroccans, Algerians and Yemenis.25

Stemming the flow of fresh recruits is equally important. Approximately two thousand entry-level jihadists have passed through the Saudi Arabian prison re-education scheme. As a psychologist involved in the programme has said: ‘we have to deal with the minds and the emotional passions of the extremists. Fixing minds is like fixing a building with sixty floors. It’s not easy.’ According to researchers from Princeton University, of the 700 people released from the scheme, only nine have gone on to reoffend, although whether or not the hard-drives of their minds have been cleansed remains known only to them.26

As Olivier Roy has cogently argued, although Al Qaeda cannot realise its caliphate—for that would give the US a concrete object to destroy—it can expand the lawless grey areas in which it thrives. It has sought to exaggerate its global reach through regional affiliates: hence Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and, if it is to be believed, Al Qaeda in Britain. In the first two cases it is seeking to subsume local conflicts, presumably to reorientate these fighters against US and other Western targets by emphasising the ultimate source of their local ills. It wishes to transform itself from being a bright star into a glistening galaxy or nebula. Again this is not as straightforward as it seems. The strategy is vulnerable to the extirpation of the key figures who link the centre with the area concerned. That was why the January 2008 killing in Pakistan of Abu Laith al-Libi, the driving force behind bringing the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group into Al Qaeda’s orbit, was so crucial. The second, successful Cruise missile strike on Adan Hashi Ayro on 1 May 2008 in Somalian Dhusamareb may similarly disable the Al-Shabaab movement in that country.27

Creating vast regional umbrella organisations, such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, papers over real tensions between, say, Algerian and Libyan militants derived from the fact that in the 1990s the Algerian GSPC killed many Libyan volunteers as apostates. Algerian Islamism itself is riven with strategic differences about whether to focus on toppling the Bouteflika regime or to hit Western targets. Having alighted upon the Berber Kabylia as terrain suitable for waging terrorism, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has alienated many Berbers with the reign of terror it has established in towns like Tizi Ouzo.

Because of the multiple pressures Al Qaeda has experienced in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, it has sought to extend operations to Mauritania and other states of the Sahel, that is the belt of countries running from Mali to Somalia. Mauritania has seen the murder of European tourists and has become so unstable that the annual Paris-Dakar rally,