Editorials

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attack of 2001, the war on terror has severely battered al-Qaida but, as President Bush cautioned from the first, the battle will be long and is far from finished.

Michael Hayden, CIA director, told the Washington Post in June that al-Qaida movements in Iraq and Saudi Arabia were essentially defeated and struggling elsewhere, including in the terrorism hot-bed Pakistan.

But terrorist experts say the bad news is the Islamist terrorist threat is still evolving, and the gains made on the ground could easily be reversed. They caution that unless the United States takes heed of, and adapts to, new trends in terrorism the result again could be a tragedy on the scale of 9/11 or worse.

Identified as perhaps the most fundamental change is that al-Qaida is a different organization than it was nearly seven years ago when it struck New York City and the Pentagon. Although it still pushes a strict view of Islam, sharply sorting the world into believers and non-believers (including Muslims), and advocates violent jihad to deposit of apostate governments to establish a vast caliphate under repressive sharia law, al-Qaida is not the same as it was in 2001.

Among other shifts, bin Laden is more inspirational than operational, said Peter Brookes, former deputy assistant secretary of defense. Although he is still dangerous, for the moment, he is considered more of a terrorist icon than a terrorist operative as long as he is under pressure and on the run.

He has become, Brookes added, a forceful mouthpiece for al-Qaida's global jihad rather than a commander in the field, providing encouragement as well as guidance to like-minded extremists.

With the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden has developed a significant, and highly successful, propaganda machine, mastering the Internet and Islamist jihadist media outlets to advance their movement across the globe, Brookes noted.

Al-Qaida's Internet is described as "working overtime" to spread its extremist message, seeking recruits and funding "and pushing its foot soldiers to commit acts of terror to overcome setbacks on the ground in places such as Iraq."

Analysts say they believe al-Qaida and its affiliates in South Asia, the Mahgreb and the Horn of Africa are interested in recruiting terrorists from their homes in Europe and then deploying them back to those locations.

These people would have the advantage of having local passports and being familiar with Western cultures, allowing them to travel freely in and out of Europe and, perhaps, even to the United States, still a key target of al-Qaida.

Congress was warned in testimony earlier this year of an "influx of Western recruits" (Europeans) into the troubled tribal areas of Pakistan since 2006. Europol also reported "dozens" of British passport holders fighting alongside Islamists in Somalia who may as well be training in camps there.

Homegrown terrorists have pulled off deadly attacks in Madrid and London and other plots, some of which included American targets, have been hatched in recent years in Germany, Brookes said. And the United States also has had terrorism attempts by so-called "self-radicalized" people inspired by al-Qaida even though they had little or no physical contact with the organization.

Strong evidence indicates al-Qaida and its allies continue to adapt their menacing means and methods to the countermeasures the United States and its allies in the war on terrorism. That calls for us to "evolve with equal vigor to the twists and turns in terrorist tactics," Brookes said.

Complacency might be the most difficult problem to overcome in continuing to deal with the significant challenges that remain in dealing with terrorism.

()