not some skirmish between gang members.

Moreover most of the things are outsourced these days. I wonder when Indian muslims will start getting such international contracts because India has a huge audience of PEACE TV with its star commentator Dr. Zakir Naik (he is a real MBBS )

As Brian Fishman rightly points out, it is not the number of Al Qaeda cadres but the influence that small number of Al Qaeda cadres exert on a host of other terror organizations spawned in Pakistan that matters.

Taliban, LeT, JeM, JuD, HuJi and countless other terror outfits have been spawned in Pakistan, the official ’terror center’ of the world as per CIA with the help, support and sanctuary provided by the Pakistani State that is owned by Pakistani Army that uses ’terrorism’ as an official tool of state policy to further its own objectives.

Let us NOT forget that Pakistan’s democratic government chose of its own free will, to facilitate relocation of Osama bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996.

Let us NOT forget that Osama bin Laden had publicly congratulated Pakistan in 1998 for exploding world’s first Islamic nuclear bomb.

Let us NOT forget that Pakistani Army used to provide military protection to Osama bin Laden during his umpteen visits to Pakistan. Let us NOT forget that Osama bin Laden has received many dialysis treatments at Pakistan’s military hospitals.

Let us NOT forget that Osama bin Laden has made huge campaign contributions to Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s election campaigns. Let us NOT forget that Nawaz Sharif has personally met Osama bin Laden at least three times in Saudi Arabia at Nawaz Sharif’s own request.

Even if you did that didn't change the source from where you cut and paste.

hahahaha

Anyway you wrote whatever I said in more lines.

Maybe some first time readers will thank you

i would say that with the marriages strongly encouraged between Pashtun women and Al Qaeda's Arabian men, that there has started to be a mixing of cultures in which the suicide bombing is not so reviled any more. I think if the objectives are the same, a super-orthodox, super political, super ideological form of religious government, the Taliban put up with suicide bombers as long as it's not THEY who have to do it. It's considered just a tactic.

A very detailed description of the workings of the Khaldan camp in the mid-90's can be found in a book called "Inside the Jihad". Written by a spy who passed through (and then described) the entire training process. Today he's apparently broke in Germany and needs you to buy his book, but he can't do the TV talk shows because he must still conseal his identity.
The camp needed to be large because they were constantly training on often high-caliber weapons, firing into the side of a mountain. But this was the "basic training" that all mujahedeen went through, there were future al Qaida, but also Chechens and Kashmiris there, and they would be using these weapons when they go home to fight their jihad. The Emir of Khaldan was a Lybian who was never a member of al-Qaida but who knew most of the leadership at that time. He was the infamous Ibn Shaykh al-Libi. Synergy? Yes. But they had a strong dislike of the Taliban back then, partly on the grounds that it was too extereme in its punishments! You could arrive at Khaldan with a letter from al-Qaida or one from Shamil Basayev, it did not matter to al-Libi. But Taliban were not welcome and were seen as a threat to the camp.
Next the al-Qaida recrutes were sent for specialized terrorism training in a camp called Darunta. This was part training camp, part millitary base, both belonging to Hekmatyar. More synergy? Yes, again. This camp was close to the front line in Kabul, where Hekmatyar fought Massoud. Many of Hekmatyar's men were deffecting to the Taliban at this point. But the al-Qaida recrutes were forbidden from entering into Afghan politics and focussed on learning how to make non-conventional explosives. For when you have to make a bomb in a country where conventional explosives are unavailable. For this purpose the camp featured an explosives test range. Terrorists from far and wide would travel to Darunta to test their explosives mixture on a smaller scale and then calculate how much it would take to destroy their intended targets.
There was no mention of a jungle gym in either camp, (though there was a captured soviet tank musium at Darunta, that was extravagant), but perhaps you can see now that the camps, for the most part, had to be the size that they were befere 2001 in order to provide a full range of terrorism training.
So I propose that camp size is a valid indicator of strength, while numbers of men are certainly meaningless. A small number of well-trained men has been the strategy that has worked best for al-Qaida.

Re: "In Iraq, for example, the insurgency developed and THEN formed ties with Al Qaeda, not the other way around."

With all due respect, you really do have it uside down. But 2003 Iraq was such chaos that determining the sequence of evens is not a trivial task.

I go by the amazing reports (published in the Guardian) by an amazing Iraqi named Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. Currently living in Beirut after being one of three photographers in the successful book "Unimbedded", this man managed to interview members of every kind of insurgent group from al-Qaida to the Mahdi army and everything in between. A Sunni insurgent commander in around '04-'05 admitted that there was no insurgency before al-Qaida, as he was explaining why the insurgency will have to fight al-Qaida in Iraq at some point in the future. At the time he thought they would kick out the Americans first, and then al-Qaida would never leave peacefully. That's why the "Sons of Iraq" thing happened so quickly, Sunni insurgents had been mentally preparing to fight al-Qaida for several years before 2006. But in the begining, Sunni men of fighting age had only been trained for conventional (and chemical) warfare. They knew nothing about how to conduct an insurgency, how could they? When Saddam's army collapsed this future insurgent went home and cried for a week (that's what he said, he may be exagerating here). They saw no hope in fighting such a powerful army, but their honor demanded that they fight the foreign occupation of their country. Then al-Qaida came and showed how it's done. The Iraqis learned quickly from watching al-Qaida, soon they could carry on the insurgency on their own. And that's when al-Qaida's disrespect of tribe elders, constant extortion of money and weapons from the smaller insurgent groups, and most of all, it's motivation for being in Iraq in the first place, all came into focus.
For al-Qaida, Iraq produced a new post-Afghan generation of leaders with recent combat experience, for a while the whole of Iraq was like a vast training ground for them. The new generation will aim to emulate al-Zarqawi, and so will raise the level of brutality of future operations to their Iraq standards.
But this trend of becoming arrogant and mistreating the host population will be their undoing if it continues. Terrorizing the locals may work in ungovernable Afghanistan but the strategy backfired in Iraq and may hence backfire in other Arab states, even if al-Qaida does manage (in their dreams) to topple one of the Arab dictatorships.