Al-Qaida's leadership is hurt, but bin Laden's ideology and tactics still spread

By WARREN P. STROBEL

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Three years after the Sept. 11 atttacks, the terrorist threat to the United States and its allies remains as serious as ever, despite a multipronged assault on al-Qaida.

That is the assessment of senior U.S. officials, diplomats and counterterrorism experts.

The assault on the terror organization has badly wounded al-Qaida's central leadership, including many of the men who were behind the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in the 2001 attacks.

But it has failed to stem the spread of Osama bin Laden's ideology and methods, which have been adopted by violent Islamic groups worldwide. Those groups are even harder to track and capable of great damage, the officials and experts said.

“The threat of al-Qaida-related terrorism remains as great as ever. But the nature of the threat has changed,” a United Nations panel said in a report issued in late August.

President Bush, who has made the “war on terrorism” the core of his re-election campaign, appeared to waver recently on how it is proceeding.

He said in a television interview that “I don't think you can win” the war. The remark quickly drew criticism, and he modified it. The next day he said: “Make no mistake about it — we are winning, and we will win.”

In interviews and writings, senior U.S. counterterrorism officials presented a less black-and-white picture of success and failure.

The threat from al-Qaida itself probably has waned, and the group is battered and frayed, experts said.

But the threat from the new “franchise” groups is growing rapidly and may even have surpassed it. It is fueled by widespread resentment in the Muslim world of U.S. policies, including the invasion of Iraq and unblinking support for Israel.

“Even with al-Qaida waning, the larger terrorist threat from radical Islamists is not,” senior CIA official Paul Pillar, a former head of the agency's Counter-Terrorist Center, wrote recently.

“Al-Qaida still has the capacity to inflict lethal damage, but the key challenges for current counterterrorism efforts are not as much al-Qaida as what will follow al-Qaida,” he wrote.

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