Some quotes from the arties:

There has been much speculation that Mr Bouteflika will seek to amend the constitution to enable him to run for a third term next year. An analyst said the impact of persistent attacks would damage his record, but was unlikely to derail his plans.

"The aim of the cycle of upsurges is really to gain attention both in the public press and the international media. There's no evidence to suggest it's going away, it's almost certain there will be further large-scale attacks over the next few months," said Wolfram Lacher, an analyst at Control Risks. "There are periods of high activity alternating with periods of low activity because the group cannot sustain the pace of attacks over a long period. They need to re-group to prepare for the next round."

Control Risks said the fact that the recent bombings had been in the mountainous east highlighted the limits of the group's operation capabilities. However, attacks in Algiers or the southern oil-producing areas were likely over the coming months, but should be too infrequent to have a significant impact on most foreign operations.

Emphasis added: Kha, like anything would derail the bald gnomes' plans.

Rather more wrinklesome:

“It takes very little in terms of resources and people for an armed group to make a huge impact,” said Gavin Proudley, a British analyst who follows Algeria closely.

“We are now beyond Algeria sliding back to the insurgency of the 1990s. But the tragedy for North Africa is that [perceptions are such] that we are nowhere near the point where people can say: ‘Things are better and there is potential, and we can go back there to invest’.”

Analysts in Algeria and abroad agree that the local militant group – which became AQIM in 2006 – had sought the alliance with al-Qaeda in order to revive its declining fortunes after the insurgency fizzled out.

Emphasis added. Of course it is helpful that the government is actively seeking to make investment harder to do, and less profitable, as well as more risky from a purely stability of rules basis.

Finally, again from the first arty, this is actually becoming rather more worrisome:

Most worrying of all, the US official said, is AQIM’s ability to range across the Algerian Sahara, and into Sahel countries such as Mali, to train militants from countries including Morocco, Tunisia, Niger, Mauritania and Nigeria.

He spoke of gatherings in desert wadis involving four or five trucks and up to 25 people, half of whom would be Algerians from AQIM.

“They would conduct small arms or religious and ideological training for four to six days,” said the official. “Or sometimes the meeting would be for exchanging logistics, or trading the Colombian cocaine by which they earn their money.”

Gunmen who shot dead four French tourists in Mauritania in December last year and who were later captured in Guinea-Bissau were determined to be from AQIM.

While US officials tend to be .... rather absurd in their estimations re these issues, in this instance, I am coming round to this view.