The State Department today released its much-followed report on terrorism around the world. Along with it comes a statistical compendium of terrorist incidents, prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center.

The headline is as sobering as it is is unsurprising:  terrorist attacks climbed dramatically in Pakistan and (to a lesser degree) Afghanistan last year, even as they declined significantly in Iraq. (The report only covers calendar year 2008, and does not include the recent spike in suicide bombings in Baghdad and Mosul, Iraq).

Here's some numbers:

_ terrorist incidents in Iraq in 2007 accounted for 43% of all incidents worldwide. Last year, they accounted for just 28%.

_ meanwhile, the number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan *quadrupled* between 2006 and 2008. The violence was concentrated in Pakistan's semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province. Al Qaida senior operatives are believed to be hiding out in the FATA, while the Pakistani Taliban have steadily been gaining ground and political-military power in the NWFP.

Russell Travers of the NCTC told reporters that there were 61 terrorist attacks in the FATA in 2006, compared with 321 in 2008, and 28 in the North-West Frontier Province in 2006, compared with a whopping 870 in 2008.

On al Qaida, the report presents a mixed picture. On the one hand it says, as McClatchy and others have reported, "AQ has reconstituted some of its pre-9/11 operational capabilities through the exploitation of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the replacement of captured or killed operational lieutenants, and the restoration of some central control by its top leadership, in particular Ayman al-Zawahiri."

On the other hand, the report says that "worldwide efforts to counter terrorist financing have resulted in AQ appealing for money in its last few messages" and that "(Osama) bin Laden and Zawahiri appeared to be in the position of responding to events rather than driving them, particularly in the latter half of 2008." If true, that's a potentially major setback for a group that seemed at times to be driving the global agenda in the years after September 2001.

So, those are the headlines. But the report also contains some interesting tidbits that N&S thought might just make you rethink some assumptions about terrorism:

_ What was the single deadliest terrorist attack in 2008? In the Mideast or South Asia, right? Wrong. Travers said it was an attack on civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo by the Uganda-based Lord's Resistance Army, where between 600 and 700 people were killed by machete.

_ Islamic extremists kill non-believers, right? Wrong again. The data show that of the 50,000 people killed or wounded by terrorism in 2008, more than 50 percent were themselves Muslims.

_ Even with the relatively good news from Iraq, the overall trend in terrorism isn't improving, according to the NCTC. Excluding attacks that took place in Iraq, the number of attacks and fatalities grew-slowly but steadily-between 2005 and 2008.

_ Finally, absent some new terrorist spectacular from al Qaida or one of its offshoots, the chances you - if you are a civilian - will die in a terrorist attack are pretty slim. There were 33 U.S. noncombatant fatalities in 2008, according to the State Department. 

Today's N&S guest blogger is McClatchy's science and technology correspondent, Robert Boyd... 

Three high-tech spook operations are consolidating their activities in a well-guarded new building just off the University of Maryland's campus in College Park, Md.

      The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) brings together the National Security Agency’s Disruptive Technology Office,  the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s National Technology Alliance; and the Central Intelligence Agency's Intelligence Technology Innovation Center.

     The consolidation is supposed to plug dangerous gaps and end wasteful overlaps in the next generation of spying and counterspying.

    IARPA's three divisions bear lofty titles: ``Office of Smart Collection,''  ``Office of Incisive Analysis,"  and ``Office of Safe and Secure Operations.'' 

    According to IARPA's website, ``Incisive Analysis''  includes such activities as exploring ``Virtual Worlds and Massive Multiplayer Online Games.''

    Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair dedicated IARPA's half-finished headquarters Monday, along with Maryland politicians who wrested the project away from a competitor site in Northern Virginia.

    IARPA is located in the congressional district of House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and the home state of Sen. Barbara Mikulski,  powerful Maryland Democrats who belong to the Intelligence committees of their respective chambers.

.    IARPA's task is to figure out ``the best ways of preventing terrorist attacks,'' Mikulski said.

King Abdullah II of Jordan, the first Arab leader to visit Washington and meet with President Barack Obama, spoke Friday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank here.

Abdullah's speech was a barely-disguised plea for Obama to put deeds behind his promises of a commitment to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict -- and to put pressure on Israel's new hard-line government to compromise.

"Events are already testing American credibility. These include Israeli voices for turning back the clock on negotiations -- to disestablish the established agenda for peace. And they include extremist voices in the Arab world that preach peace."

The "Israeli voices" that Abdullah was referring to come from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has questioned the Annapolis peace process begun under the former Bush administration, as well as previous peace deals.

"One of the vital functions the United States can play right now is to help its friends think and act in ... strategic terms," Abdullah said. Translated out of diplomatic code, Abdullah is saying that Obama should convince Israel that peace with the Palestinians is in its own best interest, and it needs to change course on key issues such as Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

"We do not have time to engage in yet another open-ended 'process'. We have seen what comes of process without progress," he said.

Abdullah--who presumably delivered a similar message to Obama in the Oval Office--also pushed back against the approach being advocated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said economic development in the West Bank must come before a political deal.

"Let me be clear: any Israeli effort to substitute Palestinian development for Palestinian independence cannot bring peace and stability to the region. The path for peace can go only through the two-state solution," the king said.

Abdullah was warmly received in Washington. But he'll be followed next month by Netanyahu, who'll be bearing  quite a different message. It'll be Obama's happy task to try to bridge the gap.

The Israel-Hamas war has ended for now in the Gaza Strip, and the TV news cameras and newspaper front pages have moved on. But for Gaza residents, the suffering goes on.

Here is a first-person testimonial from Sabah Al Barakoni, a local staffer for American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), a Washington-based nonprofit that describes itself as a non-political, non-religious organization that provides development assistance to Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Jordan.

Sabah writes of trouble finding shoes, and of skyrocketing prices for meat and other goods. "The only people who have jobs in Gaza today are those who work for international NGOs and the government. There is no income, no money and the cost of everything has tripled," she says.

Bill Corcoran, ANERA's president, told me in an interview Thursday that 90-95 percent of Gazans are now dependent on outside food support, compared to 84 percent before the war. There is growing evidence of malnutrition, not to mention widespread psychological trauma among Gaza's civilian population.

Due largely to import restrictions imposed by the Israeli government, there is virtually no rebuilding or development taking place in Gaza, Corcoran said, only basic humanitarian relief. While that is necessary given the situation, it is taking money away from long-term development projects needed to get Gaza back on its feet.

"The NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and international aid community cannot sustain this forever," he said. 

That's Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence to you. The PDDNI is the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official, deputy to the Director of National Intelligence, retired U.S. admiral Dennis Blair.

There is no PDDNI right now. But Nukes & Spooks is hearing that a leading candidate is David Gompert, a former top official at the State Department and National Security Council who is currently a senior fellow at the RAND Corp.

Gompert has wide experience in dealing with questions of failing states and violence, having worked over the years on the Balkans, Sudan, Liberia and other crises. He's also, perhaps not coincidentally from Blair's perspective, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy.

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would only say that a final decision on a PDDNI has not been made.

but is not a good place to work.

That's the bottom-line conclusion of a new report by the State Department Inspector General's office, after inspecting the Voice of America's 24 hour-a-day Farsi-language broadcasting service, which beams news about U.S. foreign policy and life to the people of Iran.

"Virtually everyone voluntarily brought up the subject of disgruntled employees and destructive rumors. Some said it was the most unpleasant place that they had ever worked, citing raised voices and the lack of civil, professional conduct when disagreements arose," states the report, based in part on interviews of Persian News Network (PNN) staff and management.

The report cites tension over hiring and advancementt; between employees in the shrinking radio vision and the expanding television division; and between individuals of Iranian descent and those who are not.

It also includes this tidbit (go straight to Page 31): A supervising executive producer hired two subordinates who had been his colleagues at ABC News. Apparently the two, who are not named, don't have Farsi language skills, however. "How could you produce 'Meet the Press' without an English-speaking person in charge?" one PNN worker is quoted as saying.

Part of PNN's problems may be growing pains. Under a Bush administration policy to vastly expand public diplomacy aimed at Iran, the service grew from 30 staff in 2007 to 83 full-time equivalents and 120 contractors today.

The report praise the network's impact, saying that it is performing a "vital function," and has been built up in an "extraordinarily short period of time," now reaching 29 percent of Iranians in Iran.

North Korea's test launch last weekend of a Taepodong-2 missile was a failure, right? Unless you believe the Pyongyang government's propaganda (we're skeptical), the missile failed to place an experimental satellite into orbit. The rocket's third stage did not do its job, essentially.

Well, yes ... and no. Bruce Bechtol, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and professor at the U.S. Marine Command and Staff College, argued at a forum at the conservative American Enterprise Institute this week that the launch did bring benefits to North Korea.

"It was not as successful as it could have been," Bechtol said, but North Korea learned from the failure. It shows the North Koreans "have advanced their capabilities for an ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile)."

The launch was certainly more successful than the last test in 2006, when the rocket exploded 40 seconds after lift-off.

The nightmare scenario, for Japan, the United States and others, is that North Korea could someday develop a reliable missile with intercontinental range that could carry a miniaturized nuclear weapon. For now, Pyongyang has neither a reliable missile or, as far as we know, a miniaturized nuclear weapon.

Bechtol pointed out that it also does not have the advantage of surprise. During the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles were ready to be fueled and launched within minutes. With North Korea's Taepodong-2 missile, U.S. spy satellites watched for weeks as the missile was taken out of a building, transported to the launched pad, erected and fueled.

"A missile that takes two months to get ready is not a threat to us or anybody else," Bechtol said.

Bechtol, a retired Marine who has lived and worked in South Korea, is a bit of a hard-liner where the North is concerned. He's author of Red Rogue: The Persistent Challenge of North Korea. At the AEI session, he dismissed the prevalent political analysis about why North Korea undertook the launch now--to test Obama, to strengthen ailing leader Kim Jong-Il's internal position, etc.--in favor of a much more simple explanation. The main reason North Korea tested the missile? "It was ready." North Korea gets valuable hard currency from missile sales, with Iran being its No.1 customer.

Judging the development of ballistic missile programs, particularly in controlled societies like North Korea, is a tricky business. A commission headed by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted that countries such as North Korea would be able to "inflict major destruction" on the United States within five years of a decision to pursue ballistic missile capability. It said North Korea's Taepodong-2 could be flight tested within six months of a decision to do so, and, if the test was a success, the missile operationally deployed rapidly after that.

The Rumsfeld Commission issued its report in 1998.