Terror threat still strong 3 years after 9/11

WASHINGTON — Three years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the terrorist threat to the United States and its allies remains as serious as ever, despite an intense, multipronged assault on al-Qaida, according to senior U.S. officials, diplomats and counterterrorism experts.

That assault has badly wounded al-Qaida's central leadership, including many of the men who were behind the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

But it's 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 they're 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 U.N. panel said in a report issued in late August.

President Bush, who's made the "war on terrorism" the core of his re-election campaign, appeared to waver last week on how it's proceeding. He said in a television interview Monday that "I don't think you can win" the war. The remark quickly drew criticism and he modified it, saying the next day: "Make no mistake about it: We are winning and we will win."

Yet in interviews and writings, senior U.S. counterterrorism officials presented a less black-and-white picture of success and failure, and recent events argue that it's anything but certain that Americans are safer today than they were three years ago.

The threat from al-Qaida itself, the organization bin Laden built with fellow veterans of Afghanistan's wars, probably has waned, and the group is battered and frayed, experts said.

New threats

But the threat from the new "franchise" groups is growing rapidly and may even have surpassed it. It's 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.

For Americans worried about new terrorist attacks, that picture is mixed, too.