The most dangerous job in the world?

We here at AM have said it before, and we are saying it again; the most dangerous job in the world has to be the number three spot in al-Qaeda. The Guardian has a story from its stringer in Pakistan's NWFP that Abu Saeed al Masri has been killed in recent fighting.

It's now getting beyond a joke. Call him cynical but Londonstani thinks there's three options here; 1) AQ's top two figures are jealously guarding the tricks that make them so hard to find from the odd-one-out guy that no one really wants to play with. 2) Being number three means you actually have day-to-day responsibilities that require you to be more cavalier with your personal security. Or, 3) the journalists and military/intelligence people they talk to about AQ in Pakistan's border areas don't really know what AQ's organisational structure looks like, and so all this "number three" stuff is hearsay.

Londonstani is leaning towards the last option partly because he has a bit of an issue with the look of this story. The sourcing is very hazy. The origin of the information isn't cited in the first paragraph and when it talks about "local media reports" in the second, it’s not clear if the local media reported al-Masri's death, his position within al-Qaeda or both. So how can we assess its reliability? Well, we can't really.

So, in the end, it doesn’t really help us figure out whether being al-Qaeda's number three is more dangerous than being a window cleaner on a glass-fronted sky scraper, a logger or a traffic policeman on a busy street in Beijing.

But, it does underline the fact that there's some serious s**t happening up in Pakistan at the moment and its not really getting much coverage - most probably due to the Olympics.

The story goes on to state; "Taliban insurgents, who are allied to al-Qaida, blew up a bus carrying Pakistani air force personnel yesterday, just outside Peshawar. The powerful blast, thought to come from a roadside bomb, claimed 14 lives, including civilian passersby, and injured 10."

"Over the past week, there has been an eruption of violence in two tribal areas, Bajaur and Kurram, which lie along the Afghan border, and in the Swat valley, in NWFP."

Swat?? That's like on the other side! And all this after a civilian government (which made lots of noise about fighting terror when it was trying to gain power) signed an agreement with the militants in question.

Londonstani saw a very informative report by the BBC's Barbara Plett on Taliban-held Pakistan. Oh yes, make no mistake - it was they who were very much in charge, quite happily showing her around the areas they had wrestled from the Pakistani army. Londonstani - despite his background - is no expert on the Taliban, or the current situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but he was struck by how ordinary the fighters looked. Which reminds him of the ordinary everyday Afghans who back in the pre-9/11 days joined up with the Taliban - in the grand tradition of Afghani politics - because they were the biggest boys in town. Now, what does that say about the state of play in the tribal areas and the rest of NWFP?

Apologies for not providing a link to the BBC story. It seems BBC reports are only available online for a limited time (and possibly only in the UK). If someone much cleverer than I can defy the evil corporate copyright Nazis and find it online, I'll put it up.

UPDATE: The NYT has some good coverage. These two stories over the last three days make it sound as if things are pretty dramatic up there.