Al Queda management trainees coming from Pakistan

The next wave of Al Qaeda leadership is not coming from the Arab world but from Pakistan.

Traditionally, most[al Queda leadership] were Arabs who gained status by resisting the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Younger, educated recruits tapped for suicide missions like 9/11 typically came from Middle Eastern countries with long histories of pan-Islamic resistance. What sets this new breed apart is that they are joining from places like Pakistan, where the focus has been on regional grievances, like independence for the disputed area of Kashmir. But as the Al Qaeda leadership ranks begin to thin, men like Rehman are starting to climb the ladder.

"It is a new generation of Al Qaeda," says Riffat Hussain, a leading defense and security analyst based in Islamabad, Pakistan. "These are new converts to Al Qaeda. They may have no links with Al Qaeda in the past, but now they are willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause as they feel Al Qaeda is the name of defiance to the West. They are young and angry, and their number has swelled in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq."

The recruits are drawn from local resistance organizations in Pakistan.

Some of the jihadis are drawn from the ranks of local militant organizations, including Al-Badr (backed by the extremist religious party Jamaat-e-Islami), the Kashmiri outfits Harakat-ul Mujahideen and Jaish-e Mohammad, and the Sunni group Lashkar-e Jhangvi. Most of these groups have, until recently, focused their energies on Kashmir or sectarian conflicts.

The new independent splinter groups are small, receive funding from Al Qaeda, and attack Western targets using tactics like suicide bombings - once unheard of in Pakistan. Investigators in Karachi say several such groups of around 10 members each are operating in the city alone.

"They [Al Qaeda] are mostly banking on local jihadis," says one police investigator. "They themselves don't want to be seen on the ground as they don't feel safe, so they rely on these brainwashed jihadis."

To recruit, Al Qaeda leaders or operatives rely on trusted contacts, preferably people who have fought with Arabs or have been trained by them, says a senior Karachi police investigator. The go-between appoints a group of leaders, who in turn hires the services of members and assigns tasks mostly on the instructions coming from the go-between. For the jihadis, the work can be lucrative - they are paid $170 to $340 a month.

This franchising of al Queda is what now makes fighting it so difficult. The perception that the west is on a "holy" crusade against Islam has increased since the invasion of Iraq becoming the best recruiting tool for al Queda. Of course, George W. Bush's crusade rhetoric has also fed that feeling of a "Holy War". George W. Bush said "you're either with us or against us", well the entire Islamic world now knows what side they are on. Is the U.S. in more danger today than it was before the invasion of Iraq? "You betcha"., as Donald Rumsfeld would say, and the danger increases everyday. The fact is al Queda has gone from a largely Arab movement to a truly pan-Islamic movement with will result in the west being very unsafe for a very long time.