The lead Paragraph says so much:

American and Pakistani intelligence agents are exploiting a growing rift between Arab members of Al Qaeda and their Central Asian allies, a fissure that's tearing at the network of Islamic extremists as militants compete for scarce hideouts, weapons and financial resources, counterterrorism officials say.

I know the first thing out of some mouths (fingers) will be "Those Eeeeevvviiiilll Americans!".  But that is only natural.

Since the start of the war on Terror, we have been regaled to how much bad we are doing, how we are feeding the terror network, how the hydra has grown 7 heads for each one chopped off.

This in spite of the facts that there have been sucesses.  Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is done with for the most part, bin Laden is on the run, Number 2 cant crawl out from under his rock for fear of getting it shot off, several plots have been foiled, many high ranking terrorist killed or captured.  And yet all this good news rarely makes the MSM sites.  It does not fit in with the left's idea that this is all a mistake and we whould make peace with the unpeaceable.

But the news cannot be stopped, and the good news continues.  We have one member on JU that writes articles almost daily of the good news from Iraq, the news you will not see on the MSM outlets. (how many people killed by suicide bombers and the soldiers death toll seems to be their only news worthy of reporting).

Yet here we see cracks, cracks from the stress of fighting the US and most of the civilized world, beginning to appear.  Al Qaeda is not a monolithic monster, but a collage, and not all the crazies in it are are stupid and suicidal as the arab faction, admittedly the most extreme in terms of actions.

I know this news wil be poopooed and played down.  It is another example of President Bush and his policies being effective.  But that goes against the grain of him being a stupid dunce bumbling into one war after another (when in fact they are all the same war).

It has been said often, and by many that this is a very long war, and will not be over in 1, 5 or 10 years.  And I still beleive this to be true.  We are not fighting the "United Stans of Al Qaeda", but evil sadistic people whose only commonality is their evilness. 

But in that, they are not always stupid (and I dont think anyone is really saying they are stupid) and realize that fighting for another's cause while ignoring your own often leads not to martyrdom and 72 virgins, but to a forgotten death in a land you dont have any beef with.

And that is going to help the fight against this insidious network more than anything else.  As the article states, an Uzbeki al Qaeda will not rat out a fello Uzbeki, but has no problem ratting out an Arab.

Maybe after the butchering of the CIA by the Clinton Administration, we are starting to see the efforts of the rebuilding of the Bush administration bear fruit.  Maybe the next Administration will not have to take out Basheer Assad because the intelligence is faulty due to making the CIA a country club instead of a leading spy agency.

Maybe.