This week gunmen overran a Christian church in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad during Sunday services, instantly murdering a priest and an acolyte. In the hostage siege that ensued, more than 50 people were killed and dozens were wounded when attackers sprayed bullets and set off suicide vests. The Al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq took responsibility and released a statement warning of more attacks to come against Christians.

During the rule of Saddam Hussein, there were an estimated 1.4 million Christians living in Iraq -- many of them Chaldean-Assyrians and Armenians, but also a smaller number of Roman Catholics.

Two-thirds of Iraq's Christians have left the country since 2003, according to some estimates -- leaving fewer than 450,000 Iraqi Christians there today. Tragically, more Iraqi Christians may now join the exodus as a result of Sunday’s massacre. They know that without a government to enforce law and order and with the Americans on the way out, there will probably be more attacks.

Al Qaeda militants want the exodus to continue. Al Qaeda in Iraq has declared war on half a million Iraqi Christians because two Egyptian women, who supposedly converted from Coptic Christianity to Islam, are rumored to be held prisoner by Coptic monks somewhere in Egypt. Al Qaeda in Iraq posted an internet statement saying "the killing sword will not be lifted" from the necks of Christians, in Iraq and across the region.

The speaker said his group will go after "your children" in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, adding there are hundreds of thousands of Christians and hundreds of churches on Islamic soil.  He said they will be targeted if Christians do not submit to his group's demands.

Leaders of the Coptic Church deny the women are being held anywhere, calling the assertion "an illusion in the minds of sick people.” Even if this story about the Coptic monks is true, it is utterly mind boggling why Iraqi Christians are held responsible for something done in Egypt? However, there has not been any logic behind all the death and destruction that have become a part of Iraqi daily lives.

Two days after the Sunday massacre, more than 70 people were killed and 250 wounded as sixteen car bombs and roadside bombs detonated across the city on Tuesday. The coordinated bombings seemed designed to demonstrate that Al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent groups still have a significant presence in the capital.

"For the last four months we have seen attacks around Baghdad, but now they are inside (the city)," Mohamed al-Rubeiy, a Baghdad provincial council member for Karrada was quoted saying by the Associated Press. "Karrada is the center of Baghdad and Baghdad is the center of the government. That means the terrorists are sending a message to the world: 'We are back and we are here'."

Religious leaders from around the world condemned the attacks, including Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani. 

Condemnation, however, is not enough. Iraqi leaders and security forces must do more to protect a Christian population whose roots in the country reach back in history. Moreover Iraq's current security and political dysfunction could prove a liability to the entire region, becoming a deadly breeding ground for terrorist groups with global aspirations.

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Relations between the United States and Pakistan have quickly soured following a helicopter strike on a border post that killed three Pakistani soldiers last week. The incident prompted Pakistan to close an important border crossing for NATO supplies into Afghanistan. Criticism of the U.S. and NATO has dominated the news in Pakistani media even after the U.S. apologized for the incident.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has recently accused some elements of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the terrorist networks in the country, thus undermining the war against terrorism by the U.S.-led international forces in the region. Recently, militants attacked 50 NATO supply trucks in Pakistan's northwestern town of Nowshera, the seventh attack in a short period of time. The U.S. has dramatically ramped up strikes with unmanned aerial drones in Pakistan's tribal areas in recent weeks.

But these are not the only stories that dominate Pakistani news. Reports about the human suffering due to the recent devastating floods, though they have all but vanished from Western newspapers, remain in the headlines in Pakistani ones. Terrorism acts are constant reminders of instability and insecurity for the average citizen, most recently punctuated by two blasts at a shrine in Karachi which left 9 dead and scores injured. The economy has tanked, inflation is at 18-20 percent, and the government seems to be helpless to do anything about it.

Pakistan is a troubled nation with deeply divided loyalties.

Even the once prestigious military establishment is now in trouble. A video purporting to show a group of Pakistani soldiers gunning down six blindfolded men in the country's troubled northwest has been circulating on the Internet for weeks. The troubling video has renewed long-standing concerns about military human rights violations during operations against the Taliban.

The war in Afghanistan has entered its tenth year. Many Pakistanis believe that “America’s War” has become their war. Fears are growing in Pakistan that the U.S. could bolster its drone attacks with a bombing campaign using fixed-wing aircrafts. This would most certainly increase Pakistani anger that could spill over into violence aimed at the thousands of Americans who are currently stationed in the country.

“The U.S. is trying to win its war in Afghanistan, through Pakistan,” says journalist Imtiyaz Mohammed.

He added that Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari is in a major predicament of trying to appease the United States while also trying to calm down an angry population.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is currently ranked the 10th most failed state in the 2010 Failed State Index released by Foreign Policy magazine this summer. Just three places below Afghanistan.

But former President Pervez Musharraf attributes Pakistan’s woes to "failure" of governance.

"I would say failure of governance is the greatest threat today," said Musharraf, who has announced his return to active Pakistani politics from London where he has been living in self-imposed exile since the general election of 2008.

However, many Pakistani pundits believe that this announcement is no coincidence, and has the United States' markings all over it.

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Not too long after some 15,000 U.S., British, and Afghan national forces launched the largest attack on Taliban forces since President Obama signed orders to send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, news broke of the arrest of the second most senior Afghan Taliban commander since 2001, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

According to officials, he was seized in a secret raid in Pakistan several days ago by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence forces. His capture reflects a markedly changed attitude by Pakistani intelligence toward an insurgent force that the country had allowed to operate with relative impunity for the past eight years.

Stunned by the success of this operation, however, a Taliban spokesman denied reports of Mullah Baradar's capture, saying he was still in Afghanistan, actively organizing the group's military and political activities. 

"Mullah Baradar has not been arrested, he is in Afghanistan, I don’t know who spread the rumor, but it’s absolutely false,” Qari Mohammed Yousef, a spokesman for the Taliban, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani media's response to the arrest of Mullah Baradar has been surprisingly muted.

The arrest made international headlines throughout the day this past Tuesday. But Pakistani newspapers and television channels barely covered the news, with some completely ignoring it. Analysts say the blackout was because Pakistan's government and army have been wary of being perceived as an American lapdog. Any collaboration with the U.S. in its "war on terror" in Afghanistan has become increasingly unpopular in Pakistan since Asif Ali Zardari’s government took power in 2008.

The U.S. and Afghanistan have repeatedly pressed Pakistan to do more to combat Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters operating in its territory. But Pakistan's spy agencies have long been accused of protecting top Afghan Taliban leaders, many of whom are believed to have fled to Pakistan during the U.S.-led invasion, in order to use them as tools to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan when the Americans withdraw.

"If Pakistani officials had wanted to arrest him, they could have done it at any time," said Sher Mohammad Akhud Zada, the former governor of Afghanistan's Helmand province and a member of the Afghan parliament in an interview on Al Jazeera. "Why did they arrest him now?"

Many analysts believe that the Pakistani government has realized that the Taliban is a serious threat to them since an all-out war between the Pakistani army and the Taliban broke out in Swat Valley last year, leaving many civilians dead and hundreds of thousands displaced.

“The honeymoon is over,” commented Iftikhar Mohammed, a freelance reporter and an expert on Pakistani affairs. According to him the Pakistani intelligence apparatus and the army have been complacent in the past in curbing the terrorist activities of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

What could this mean for the hunt for Osama bin Laden, who is often said to be hiding along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border?

The answer depends on the information Baradar provides to interrogators in the coming few days.

Baradar was the main link between Mullah Omar and field commanders, and knows of the whereabouts of the Taliban leadership, according to security experts. In 1998, the Taliban regime mulled turning bin Laden over to the Saudi government, but the man who Osama bin Laden once called, “Amir al-Mu’minin”, or Commander of the Faithful, interceded.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently said that while the United States backed the Taliban integration program, the offer did not include the group’s top leadership. Earlier, in late January, Geoff Morrell, spokesman for U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, suggested that the United States could not negotiate with Mullah Omar because he has "the blood of thousands of Americans on his hands.”

Could the capture of Mullah Baradar create a domino effect and deliver the beginning of the end of bin Laden, or is this going to be a Tora Bora redux…another wasted opportunity?

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The recent incident of the Jordanian suicide bomber who blew himself up at a Central Intelligence Agency base in Khost Province, Afghanistan, took many Jordanians by surprise, especially when they learned through the media about the depth of the cooperation between their government's intelligence service Mukhabarat and the United States in its "War on Terror." The Jordanian intelligence services recruited Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi and put him in touch with the CIA, and Jordan has since been deeply embarrassed by the fact that Balawi turned out to be a double agent.

Jordanians have also recently been made aware of the fact that an increasing number of their nationals have been volunteering to join the Taliban and al-Qaeda to fight against the United States in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Only days after the funeral of Captain Sharif Ali bin Zeid, the Jordanian Mukhabarat agent killed in the Khost attack, which was televised on Jordanian television and attended by King Abdullah II and other high ranking officials, a memorial took place for a Jordanian al-Qaeda member who was recently killed in a U.S. drone attack along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Bearded men poured into a reception hall in the town of Irbid to offer their condolences to his family.

His father was quoted in the Jordanian press saying that he was "proud of him and happy that he died a martyr fighting the Americans."

Most of these al-Qaeda members are known to be from the sprawling towns of Irbid and Zarqa which was the hometown of the late al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

This week, the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition groups demanded that the Jordanian government drop its pro-America stance. In a statement titled "It Is Not Our War," they wrote, "We demand an end to the policy of what is called cooperation or security coordination with the Zionist enemy or the American intelligence agencies, and the withdrawal of Jordanian forces from Afghanistan."

According to the Associated Press, Zaki Saad, former director of the Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood's political wing in Jordan, said that there was so much anger against the government's policies, and the marginalization of mainstream Islamist groups like his own, that it was driving radical young people into the arms of al-Qaeda.

"Balawi is not the first case, and he won't be the last," he said.

Jordan itself has experienced several terror attacks on its territories. In 2005, three suicide attackers detonated nearly simultaneous explosions at hotels in downtown Amman, killing 67 people and wounding more than 150 others. Many experts argue that it was after those attacks that the Jordanian Mukhabarat decided to work closely with the CIA in combating al-Qaeda.

On Thursday a roadside bomb exploded near a convoy of vehicles carrying Israeli diplomats in Jordan near the Jordanian village of Naour, as the convoy was traveling from Amman, the Jordanian capital, to the Allenby Bridge border crossing.

Although, there have been numerous threats against Israeli diplomats and visitors to Jordan since the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1994, this incident cannot be treated as an isolated one. Security officials have speculated that this recent attack on the Israeli diplomats might have been the work of a group affiliated with al-Qaeda or a Palestinian group. In either case, this is the second time in less than a month that the Jordanian Mukhabarat suffers from a breach in security...one too many for a small country like Jordan.

Article first published on the Huffington Post

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"The buck stops with me," declared President Obama on Thursday as he spoke about the results of an internal investigation into the failed Christmas Day airline bombing attempt. The president avoided blaming any particular agency or official for the security failures that allowed Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board an American airliner heading from Amsterdam to Detroit wearing explosives in his underpants.

Now, after the fact, this incident has sparked a renewed interest in Yemen, a country I warned about as a "powder keg" back in August, and a slew of new security measures at airports to make our travel experience more miserable than it currently is. Travelers will soon get used to going through full-body scanners, like they have gotten used to taking off their shoes at security checkpoints at airports, ever since Richard Reid, aka the shoe-bomber, tried unsuccessfully to take down another airliner in late 2001. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda and other groups will try to find other methods to bypass the new security measures until they succeed.

Last summer, Abdullah Asieri, one of Saudi Arabia's most wanted men, avoided detection by two sets of airport security including metal detectors and palace security, by borrowing a trick from the Columbian cartel. Asieri had a pound of high explosives, plus a detonator inserted in his rectum. His target was Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, head of Saudi Arabia's counter terrorism operations. The bomb was remotely detonated via a cellular phone call, but the Prince miraculously was left lightly wounded. The assassination attempt failed, but al-Qaeda managed to defeat security.

The US security failure is not at airports, but rather with overseas intelligence agencies. The President did not name the agency, but I will: the CIA, which has done a shoddy job of gathering information in Arab and Muslim countries and has relied heavily on information provided by security agencies of corrupt and despotic regimes.

What Americans should be worried about is not the few failed attempts by the likes of Reid or Abdulmutallab, but rather by what happened recently with the suicide bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a medical doctor who had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence and then agreed to work for the CIA. He was assigned a Jordanian handler who had a close working relationship with the CIA and was subsequently sent to Afghanistan to help locate top al-Qaeda leaders. In reality, he was also a jihadist sent to infiltrate US intelligence: a "triple agent!"

The reason this succeeded is due to the fact that Afghanistan is an intelligence nightmare, and the CIA does not have enough Arabic or Pashto speakers on the ground. This is also the case in Yemen, Somalia, and Northern Africa, a fact that was confirmed to me by a former CIA employee. Many of he CIA's so-called Middle East specialists lack the language skills needed to analyze the material provided to them and rely on translations, which, as part of my experience producing a news show from the Middle East, I have discovered can be misleading and inaccurate. Many CIA agents are no different than those so-called experts on al-Qaeda that one sees on CNN or FOX news.

This latest infiltration of the CIA is worse than a thousand Abdulmutallabs, and will certainly cause a setback to the agency for years to come, something that the President did not talk about.

Article first published on the Huffington Post

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