The April issue of the CTC Sentinel is now posted -- The Sentinel is the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point's public face and -- as many are now saying - an essential read. April's edition includes:
Defining the Punjabi Taliban Network by Hassan AbbasThe 2008 Belgium Cell and FATA's Terrorist Pipeline by Paul Cruickshank
President Obama's Overseas Terrorism Challenge by Tom Sanderson
Improving India's Counterterrorism Policy after Mumbai by Paul Staniland
Leveraging History in AQIM Communications by Lianne Kennedy Boudali
AQAP a Rising Threat in Yemen by Brian O'Neill
Role of the UN in Defeating AQ and Associated Groups by Richard Barrett
Recent Highlights in Terrorist Activity
Here's what Tom Ricks at Foreign Policy's Best Defense has to say about the CTC Sentinel:
Overall, I am struck by how quickly the Sentinel has become one of my essential reads. I think this is partly a reflection of the electronic age-they can pull together an issue and publish it almost instantly, with the electrons racing around the globe. It reminds me a bit of Andrew Exum's Abu Muquwama and The Small Wars Journal, which went from start-ups to essentially daily reads almost overnight. It also represents a form of disintermediation, which may be one reason that newspapers are becoming less important. That is, if the experts can publish their own newsletter and make it broadly available, why wait for generalist reporters to re-hash it?