Al Qaeda's latest mass murder strategy aimed at the West

CNN:

The trial of three Birmingham men convicted Thursday of plotting to launch a "catastrophic" suicide bombing attack in the United Kingdom revealed that al Qaeda has developed a new strategy to target the West.

The new strategy involves a teacher-training approach in which a select few Western operatives are taught bombmaking and other aspects of terrorist tradecraft in the tribal areas of Pakistan and are then instructed to return back to the West to "spread the knowledge" to a larger body of Islamist extremists keen on launching attacks.

The new approach is a response to the growing toll of drone strikes which have made travel to the tribal areas increasingly perilous for Western recruits and significantly diminished al Qaeda's ability to orchestrate terrorist plots from the region.

The trial revealed that terrorist groups in Pakistan are actively dissuading Western militants from making the trip.

Two of those convicted Thursday - Irfan Naseer and Irfan Khalid - received 40 days of terrorist training in the tribal areas of Pakistan in the spring of 2011, mostly inside houses in the valleys of Waziristan.

In conversations bugged by British police, the plotters described being handled by al Qaeda operatives and having attended a training camp run by Harakat al Mujahideen, a Pakistani terrorist group closely affiliated with al Qaeda.

The recordings revealed that like other Western militants before them, they were provided detailed instruction in the tricky and potentially hazardous methods to make bombs out of substances readily available in the West, and practiced detonating them. Their instructors included Arabs and Pakistanis.

They also were taught how to put poisons in face creams.

And their teachers emphasized they should put nails inside their bombs, to act as razor-sharp shrapnel.

... 

There is much more.

Al Qaeda remains an adaptive enemy.  They are far from reaching the conclusion that their cause is hopeless, which is a necessary element to their defeat.  I believe that Obama's retreat has instead given them hope.  While the drone program has inconvenienced them and kill many operatives it has not effectively disrupted their training efforts.  It would take boots on the ground to do that and neither the US or Pakistan are willing to do that.