ALGERIA - US Help.

It is not clear whether the US monitored the Salafi insurgency in Algeria as closely as it should before it invaded in Iraq in March 2003. But judging by Seymour Hersh's report - "The Coming Wars" - published on Jan. 17, 2005, by The New Yorker, it seems the US is closely watching things where Islamic militants are active.

One indication was made in articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defence analysis at the US Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant on terrorism for the Rand Corporation. "It takes a network to fight a network", Arquilla wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle: "When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists". These "pseudo gangs", as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists' camps. Hersh said: "What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today's terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult".

Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the 20-year-old Californian who was seized in Afghanistan as one of the foreign members of the Talibans: "If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda, think what professional operatives might do". Hersh said a Pentagon adviser told him a "few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, "and a terrorist cell in Algeria was 'rolled up' with American help". Hersh said the adviser was "referring, apparently, to the capture of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda".