Al-Qaeda Takes it to the Streets..

Steve Simon and Jonathan Stevenson have a very good piece in today's Washington Post on Al-Qaeda's evolving strategy of terror (see attached link).  In essence, what we saw in Mumbai is what we can expect in the future (and what we may have blessedly escaped in around Europe in recent weeks as an apparent combination of drone attacks in Pakistan and hardcore counter-terror efforts in France, the UK and even Germany rolled up).

German jihadi Eric Breininger,
reportedly recently killed in Pakistan.

What I find of particular concern is the fact that there appears to be a new class of Jihadis in training to carry out these attacks - specifically, Westerners who have converted to Islam and swallowed the radicalization poison, mostly I suspect as a way of getting back at the fractured Western culture they grew up in (divorce, alienation, rampant materialism and a general dehumanization of our lives).  Evidence of this is that amongst the successful drone attacks in Pakistan recently was one strike that reportedly killed five Germans -- blond, blue-eyed, native Germans.  If this is true and there is some sort of real spike in Western jihad converts, then the entire game has changed.  And we are not prepared as a country and a culture to deal with it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/08/AR2010100802664.html