Al-Qaeda 'stronger than ever'

2003-09-09 07:54

London - The al-Qaeda terrorist network is stronger than before the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the US-led "war on terror" has so far been a failure, a British academic concludes in a study published on Tuesday.

Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford in England, said the US campaign's military successes in Afghanistan and Iraq had failed to crush al-Qaeda's structure or stem its recruitment.

"(Al-Qaeda) and its associates have managed to plan and often undertake a remarkable range of activities, with these collectively showing a capability that exceeds that existing before the September 11 attacks," Rogers wrote.

"On this basis alone, it is difficult to accept any claim that the war on terror is being won."

Rogers's report was compiled for the Oxford Research Group, a think-tank specialising in arms control and nonproliferation issues.

Chaos in Iraq

Other terrorism experts said the United States and its allies had scored significant victories against al-Qaeda, but cautioned that the chaos of post-war Iraq represented a setback.

In his report, Rogers said that while US-led anti-terrorism efforts had succeeded in preventing some terrorist plots, al-Qaeda linked attacks have killed more than 350 people and injured almost a thousand in the two years since September 11.

The attacks include the October 12, 2002 bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali that killed more than 200 people; car bombings of residential compounds in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, that killed 26 people in May; and the August 5 car bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in which 12 people died.

Al-Qaeda, the loose network led by Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, has been blamed for a number of attacks in the years before September 11, including the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in which more than 250 people died.

Almost three thousand people were killed on September 11, 2001 when attackers flew hijacked airplanes into New York's World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Soon after, US President George W Bush vowed to launch a global "war on terror" to hunt down the culprits.

Hollow victories

Rogers said the two major achievements of that war - the ousting of the fundamentalist Taliban from Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein from Iraq -were hollow victories.

In Iraq, foreign-based militants are "slipping easily through porous borders and possibly even linking up with dissident elements within the country," while the US-led occupation offers a focus for radical groups.

"By occupying Iraq, the United States has provided 140 000 targets - a very powerful focus for future opposition," Rogers wrote.

In a speech to the nation on Sunday, Bush said the United States would "do what is necessary" to defeat the "enemies of freedom" in Iraq.

Jeremy Binnie, Middle East editor of Jane's Sentinel, said successfully rebuilding Iraq would be key to fighting terrorism by "showing Muslims and Arabs that the US way is not so bad.

"That's a very long-term plan," he said.

In the short term, Binnie said, the war on terrorism had produced "significant progress in many respects," including the death or capture of many al-Qaeda leaders, the freezing of some funding to terrorist groups and the removal of Afghanistan as a safe haven for militants.

Paul Wilkinson of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews University, said intelligence, rather than military strength, would be key to defeating terrorists.

"If you were trying to assess the success or failure of the war on terrorism in purely military terms, that would be wrong," he said.

Wilkinson and Binnie were commenting on terrorism in general, and had not seen Rogers's report.

Share resources

Rogers said the United States's "excessive and counterproductive" emphasis on military action would not stop terrorism. He called for a broader approach, including more development aid for Afghanistan, a greater role for the United Nations in rebuilding Iraq and a push to narrow "the growing global socio-economic divide."

"Security will unavoidably mean sharing out the world's resources more fairly," he said.

- AP