• Thus far, the US government has chosen (wisely, in my view) not to release how this information was obtained. Inside of Pakistan, bin Laden has been known to use a network of couriers and runners provided to him by the Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islami political parties as well as trusted members of Dawood Ibrahim's cartel. In addition, information recovered from computers seized in Fallujah indicated that Zarqawi was in regular contact with bin Laden from April to November 2004. It is quite possible that the two men are continuing to communicate electronically, as Zarqawi apparently has enough IT infrastructure to post daily claims of responsibility as well as video clips on his organization and other al-Qaeda websites as well as periodic audio statements by the terrorist himself. Communicating electronically, while it poses considerable risks for both parties with respect to the possibility of having his location compromised, is probably the most plausible option from Zarqawi's perspective given that he has been reported as having fled to Tuz Khormato, Kirkuk, Mosul, and Baghdad, with his current whereabouts being unknown. Another possibility if couriers were involved is that they likely headed into the two main regions that the insurgents fled following their defeat in Fallujah: the rural areas in and around Mosul and Kirkuk on one-hand and the various towns like Baquba and Ramadi that lie south of Fallujah in the Sunni Triangle.

• The message was relayed from bin Laden to Zarqawi by members of Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). EIJ apparently has long-standing ties with Zarqawi's own al-Tawhid wal Jihad organization and a number of members of the group accompanied Zarqawi to Baghdad back in 2002 following his departure from Iran. Other possible ties between the two groups can be seen in Rabei Osman Sayyid Ahmed (Mohammed al-Masri), an EIJ member and former Egyptian explosives expert who was coordinating at least some of the al-Tawhid/GSPC/GICM/Takfir wal Hijra network in Europe prior to his arrest by Italian authorities in June 2004.

• On a related note, the fact that Zarqawi is now receiving direct messages from bin Laden represents a significant rise in his status within the al-Qaeda hierarchy. Prior to this point, Zarqawi's assignments from the al-Qaeda senior leadership were relayed to him by Saif al-Adel, whom the FBI describes him as a "close associate" of. I don't want to over-emphasize this, however, since it's basically the difference between getting your orders straight from the President rather than through the Secretary of Defense. Al-Qaeda command and control distinctions are a pretty loose thing to begin with, which is one of the reasons why it's more or less irrelevant whether or not Zarqawi had the official decoder ring back in 2002 or 1999.

• The US officials quoted in media reports don't seem to be terribly worried about this, which I think is a fairly valid assessment given that a lot has changed for Zarqawi inside Iraq since December. As I noted in my assessment of the Iraqi elections, Zarqawi's Qaedat al-Jihad fi Balad ar-Rafidayyin coalition is not in the best of shapes these days and, what happened recently in Hillah aside, I don't think that bin Laden is going to look too favorably on his erstwhile lieutenant for not being able to derail the Iraqi elections.

• That said, Zarqawi has shown himself as being more than able to carry out and forment terrorist plots outside of Iraq as the situation has warranted: the Istanbul bombings, 3/11, the Amman plot, etc. It remains to be seen whether or not the progressive attrition of his minions in-country will affect those already in place abroad. I am also concerned by Franco-German law enforcement reports that Iraqi jihadis are returning to Europe at a time when it would seem to suggest that their services would be far better spent in-country. This may well be an indication that somebody somewhere is up to no good at Zarqawi's behest.

• Why bin Laden would try to enlist Zarqawi to launch an attack rather than issue of the orders himself is likely somewhat multi-faceted, as he no problem organizing the Waziristan terrorist summit last spring. If I had to guess, I would say that the presence of so many of his key lieutenants inside Iran likely has at least some kind of restraining effect on them (something that Secretary Rumsfeld has alluded to) with respect to their ability to launch attacks on the continental US. Zarqawi, on the other hand, has already shown himself both willing and able to strike at targets in Western Europe and hence might be seen as the best al-Qaeda leader to be given the job of going after the US.

• Moreover, as Praktike and I discussed at length whether or not Zarqawi has a network inside the United States back in January. Leaving out the dispute that arose from that exchange, I'll quote here the same excerpt from the State Department that I did to him in my initial response:

In the past year, al-Qaida operatives in northern Iraq concocted suspect chemicals under the direction of senior al-Qaida associate Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi and tried to smuggle them into Russia, Western Europe, and the United States for terrorist operations.

If nothing else, I hope that we can all agree that a plot against the continental US would by no means be the last thing on Zarqawi's mind or even necessarily beyond the capabilities of his external network. Whether he's using his own network is co-opting al-Qaeda's existing US network, I think that the US would be wise not to just dismiss his capabilities off-hand.

• Another reason why bin Laden would need to go to Zarqawi rather issue orders to launch an attack himself represents a major downside to the hallowed decentralization of his network. While a lot of pundits seem to portray as the enemy you cannot kill, the downside of such an approach is that it makes it pretty tough to pull your resources together to launch a major attack. In all likelihood, Zarqawi and his (surviving) lieutenants probably have the contact information for just as many terrorist cells in Western nations as does bin Laden or al-Adel. In the absence of a central war room like they had in Afghanistan, collating all this data becomes a lot more difficult than it sounds, especially when you're the subject of the largest international manhunt in history.

• Currently, al-Qaeda is in something of a vexing dilemma. Their major plans to sabotage the Afghan and Iraqi elections fell flat on its face and while they succeeded in their plan to evict Spain from Iraq, that is basically the equivalent of straining a gnat and swallowing at this stage as far as their long-term plans outlined in Iraq al-Jihad are concerned. They've been on the defensive inside Iraq since at least November 2004 and the fall of their stronghold in Fallujah and until quite recently the Taliban in Afghanistan has been equally ineffectual. They need a victory soon to re-establish the perception of them as being in ascendance, otherwise they are going to start losing recruits from their traditional support bases inside the Middle East.

• Moreover, whether or not the Bush administration is behind the current surge of pro-democracy sentiment in the Middle East (and if you don't think that al-Qaeda doesn't regard it as such with their penchant for elaborate conspiracies you're delusional), the very existence and public recognition of such sentiments is nothing short of an existential threat to bin Laden and his agenda. Prior to this point, he could more or less bide his time, secure in the knowledge that so long as the US continued to support the various despot regimes of the Middle East that he could continue to claim that despite all the high-sounding US rhetoric, he was the only one who was really standing up for the oppressed masses of the region. The problem is that all of this "people power" rhetoric combined with the Iraqi elections and the very real possibility of Syria being partially or fully evicted from Lebanon is now serving as an implicit counter-argument to bin Laden's charge that real changes in the Middle East can only be achieved through violence and terrorism. If this perception takes hold and the United States begins being seen as an enabler rather than an inhibitor in the region, I believe that you'll see a sharp decline in the number of people willing to join or support bin Laden's cause.

• I do not want to oversell this because even if al-Qaeda is defeated in the Middle East there are still other areas where it will be able to thrive for a variety of reasons - Western Europe, the Caucasus, South Asia (with Bangladesh in particular looking as though it could easily degenerate into another Afghanistan), etc. All the same, anybody who doesn't believe that al-Qaeda will suffer if its ideology ceases to thrive in the same region whose current political culture sustained and nurtured it is living in a fool's paradise.

• That said, we are by no means to the end or even the beginning of the end of the scenario that I outlined above, but it is now starting to look as though their may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Egypt's first multi-candidate elections could easily turn into another fraud, while Lebanon's Cedar Revolution could easily turn into another Hama. The prospect of the latter occurring, one might add, are significantly lessened by the presence of a large US military force in neighboring Iraq that, according to much of the chattering classes in Europe and the more paranoid elements of the Syrian hierarchy is just waiting for the right moment to head west.

• A lot of criticism is being hurled around in various circles as far as whether or not what has taken place in Iraq is the cause of these developments and if so whether or not that justified the alleged mendacity of the administration going into the conflict. I'm not going to get into the finer points of this since it's something that people are going to have to read and decide for themselves, but regardless of whether or not these developments are occurring because of what happened in Iraq I would strongly suggest that they are occurring concurrently alongside extremely positive developments in that country. And that, we can hopefully all agree, is a good thing.