A Resurgent Menace
U.S. spy agencies say al Qaeda's top leaders, once on the run, have regrouped
Pakistan has been an American ally against al Qaeda, but U.S. officials are increasingly frustrated by its inability-or unwillingness-to crack down in the tribal regions. "The Pakistanis do just enough to avoid jeopardizing U.S. support," says Daniel Byman, a former CIA analyst who teaches at Georgetown University. U.S. options for operating there are very limited: "You would put [Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf at risk, and you would face a heavily armed not only adversary but population," says a senior U.S. intelligence official.
There was one event in particular last year that prompted the intelligence community to rethink al Qaeda. Authorities in Britain last summer disrupted a plot to down airliners bound for the United States using liquid explosives. At the time, experts said that the sophisticated plan to simultaneously hit multiple targets bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda. Now, a senior U.S. government official tells U.S. News that the liquid explosives plot has been traced back conclusively to "midlevel operational elements of al Qaeda" in Pakistan. Another concern: The explosives could have worked, suggesting that al Qaeda has managed to replace the bomb makers it has lost. "What the British plot showed us was that they had people to backfill and people who were pretty smart," the official adds. "This was pretty damn clever."
British investigators also found that despite initial conclusions to the contrary, earlier plots like the July 2005 London subway bombings were also planned with the active participation of al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. "In case after case, the hand of core al Qaeda can be clearly seen," Peter Clarke, Scotland Yard's counterterrorism chief, said in a recent speech. Two of the subway bombers-along with the leader of a group of five British citizens convicted last week of plotting to blow up a nightclub and power plants in London with fertilizer bombs-allegedly attended training camps together in Pakistan and met Abdul al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a senior al Qaeda figure now in U.S. custody at GuantÃÂÃÂÃÂánamo Bay.
"Conveyor belt." At the same time, the broader movement inspired by al Qaeda has only grown bigger, largely because of the group's powerful propaganda machine. Bin Laden and Zawahiri have been able to fill in the gaps between their megaplots with a rising stream of smaller-scale, homegrown attacks. "You could have hoped that we would have a serial war-that as al Qaeda declined, you could focus on its affiliates and the homegrowns," says the senior U.S. intelligence official. "I think now what we see is a parallel war, which is harder to fight, obviously."
The State Department issued a report last week warning about the emergence of a terrorist "conveyor belt" that seeks to radicalize alienated minorities and drive them toward violence. Overall, the report found that terrorist attacks worldwide jumped by more than 25 percent last year over 2005, with fatalities from those attacks rising by 40 percent.
The news is not entirely bad. In several countries with well-functioning governments and powerful security forces, al Qaeda has run into trouble. Two weeks ago, for example, authorities in Saudi Arabia announced that more than 170 suspected terrorists have been arrested in recent months as part of a plot to target oil fields and other targets. "The franchise in Saudi Arabia has been defeated," says Bruce Riedel, a veteran CIA analyst now with the Brookings Institution. "In Egypt, it never got off the ground. In Indonesia, there was a big threat in 2002 and 2003, but it seems to have lost momentum."
Even in these places, the success could be temporary. "It's not like they've defeated the thought," warns the senior U.S. intelligence official. "It's just that the capabilities of these cells to execute has been really damaged."
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