Al Qaeda may not have carried out any major attack on the West in 2006, but the next one is only a matter of time and Osama bin Laden and his followers enter 2007 stronger than ever, experts believe.Al Qaeda and its allies “are winning the larger conflict” and recent events “indicate the continued vitality of Al Qaeda and the jihadi movement,” warned Michael Scheuer, former head of the bin Laden Unit at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Centre.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence agency, summed up the scale of the British government’s task in November when she said that “five major conspiracies in the UK” had been halted since mid-2005. “Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices; tomorrow’s threat may include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology.
For the former top CIA official Scheuer, Al Qaeda and other groups have never been stronger. Alongside events in Britain, Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the September suicide attacks on two Western oil companies, in Afghanistan the pace of the Taliban-led insurgency continues to accelerate, and in Iraq the groupÂ’s head has reasserted his support for the leader of the Iraqi resistance, Scheuer noted.
And it is with Afghanistan and with neighbouring northwest Pakistan that many of these plots are inextricably linked, since many of those planning attacks in the West receive training and combat practice from Al Qeada in these countries.
A top Pakistani security source told AFP on condition of anonymity in August that authorities had captured entire groups of militants planning attacks but that most of those seized go on to reappear in other groups, more determined and more dangerous.
For most Western experts Al Qaeda represents a double-edged danger in the coming years: the old guard and new converts throughout the world, alienated in their home countries, indoctrinated via the Internet and inspired by Western setbacks in Afganistan and Iraq.
And for Scheuer, the possible beginning of a phased withdrawal of US-led coalition forces from Iraq “would allow bin Laden to score, in the perception of most Muslims, an unprecedented hat-trick of successes”. US troops going home would allow the redeployment of many Iraq-based foreign fighters to Europe, the Arabian peninsula, other Middle East areas and the Horn of Africa, Scheuer believes, and would dramatically increase bin Laden’s status as a leader.