Seven years after 9/11, Al-Qaeda leaders plot on in safe havens
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Seven years after the deadliest attack on the United States, Al-Qaeda's masterminds remain beyond US reach, stirring violence and plotting new attacks on the West, officials and analysts say.
From sanctuaries in nuclear armed Pakistan, Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are presiding over an Al-Qaeda that has sprung back from serious setbacks with help from its old friends, the Taliban, they say.
They are "not only still at large, but actively communicating with their followers around the world by video messages, and actively engaged in supporting two wars against American forces -- in Afghanistan and Iraq," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer.
With political turmoil in Pakistan and a revived Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda is in the thick of things once again despite shattering losses in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
"Today, if violent extremism and terrorism have a center, it is Pakistan and not Iraq," said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
US intelligence worries that Al-Qaeda is using its Pakistani safe havens to prepare for attacks on the West.
It now enjoys many of the operational and organizational advantages there that it had in Afghanistan before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, said Ted Gistaro, the US government's top intelligence analyst for transnational threats.
"In spite of successful US and allied operations against Al-Qaeda, especially the death of important Al-Qaeda figures since December, the group has maintained or strengthened key elements of its capability to attack the United States in the past year," he told a Washington think tank last month.
It has replenished its cadre of skilled operatives, and "is identifying, training, and positioning operatives for attacks in the West, likely including the United States," he said.
That may explain, in part, the intensifying US operations in the tribal areas, which have included stepped up missile attacks and a reported cross border raid this week by heliborne US commandos in south Waziristan.
Gistaro said he was not aware of any "specific, credible" plot to attack the United States.
But, he said, "As the (November) election nears, we expect to see an uptick in such threat reporting -- of varying credibility -- regarding possible attacks."
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, notes that Al-Qaeda has made major attention-getting moves before US elections, striking the USS Cole in October 2000 and airing a video tape of Osama bin Laden before the 2004 vote.
Most famously, the Madrid bombings in March 2004 three days before general elections prompted the defeat of the ruling party and Spain's withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
"I'm also hearing from people in the Pentagon that, yes, there is a 'We've only got four more months on Bush's watch, and we're going to find ourselves in a position where the perpetrator of the greatest mass murder in American history has outlived the president on whose watch it happened," said Riedel.
"I'm sure they're getting a lot of pressure to do something about that," he said.
But Riedel, author of the recently published "The Search for Al-Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology and Future," said the threat cannot be eliminated without shutting down the Pakistani safe havens.
"Commando raids, Predator attacks may get you, if you have extraordinarily good intelligence and luck, high value targets like bin Laden," he said.
"But they can't really eliminate the sanctuary itself, which can only be eliminated by Pakistanis doing it in cooperation with us or on their own," he said.
"The trick of this is to get the Pakistanis to do more. And to the extent that we come into a more hostile relationship with Pakistan by violating their sovereignty, chances are that that kind of cooperation will diminish.
"So we are in a very difficult situation here."
How did it get so bad?
Many analysts believe that the US invasion of Iraq diverted intelligence assets, resources and high level attention from Afghanistan at a time when Al-Qaeda was at its most vulnerable.
"The short answer to that is they took the eye off the ball," Riedel said.
