Less than a year after the Central Intelligence Agengy warned of renewed threats from a resurgent Al Qaeda, its director Michael Hayden portrayed the terrorist movement as largely defeated in Saudi Arabia and Iraq and on the backfoot throughout the world, including in its stronghold along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Reports mentioned that the CIA director said they had achieved major gains against Al Qaeda in the Middle East and had run a highly sucessful campaign to destabilise the terror networks' leadership and structure. The director cautioned that Al Qaeda remained a serious threat but their ability to to exploit the Iraq war to recruit new members from the Islamic world was largely waning as they lost the 'battle of hearts and minds'.
The CIA in a previous report had concluded that the war in Iraq was a boon for the Al Qaeda, as it generated a large amount of donations and volunteers for the organisation.
The sense of the shifting of balance in the war against terror is agreed upon by many experts, but all caution that that it is to soon to gauge the permanency of the gains. Inspite of this experts still classify the Al Qaeda as a threat and point to its resilience as a woorying factor.
A study by American intelligence agencies found the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to be the area where the Al Qaeda was regrouping and reorganising itself to attack the West.The Americans have used unmanned aircraft to strike at Al-Qaeda posts and safe houses in the area. However the Americans' consistent failure to capture Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri points to their limited sucess. Both the top terrorists are thought to be living in the mountainous tribal belt in locations known only to a few top aides. Since the start of this year Al Qaeda has lost two its senior leaders,
Abu Laith al-Libi and Abu Sulayman al-Jazairi to American missile strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Bush government is also watching the political developments in Pakistan closely as the newly elected government would not be tolerant of unilateral American action in Pakistan.
The CIA director is worried that the growing complacencey in people will lead to a mindset that existed before the Twin tower bombings in September 2001. Hayden was also concerned that their European allies were focussed more on the tactics used, and less on the threat itself. Hayden warned that progress in Iraq is being undermined by increasing interference by Iran, which he accused of supplying weapons, training and financial assistance to anti-U.S. insurgents.
