U.S.: Al-Qaida shifting from Iraq to Pakistan

updated 3:46 p.m. ET Feb. 5, 2008

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaida, increasingly shut down in Iraq, is establishing cells in other countries as Osama bin Laden’s organization uses a “safe haven” in Pakistan’s tribal region to train for attacks in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa and the United States, the U.S. intelligence chief said Tuesday.

“Al-Qaida remains the pre-eminent threat against the United States,” Mike McConnell told a Senate hearing more than six years after the 9/11 attacks.

He said that fewer than 100 al-Qaida terrorists have moved from Iraq to establish cells in other countries as the U.S. military clamps down on their activities, and “they may deploy resources to mount attacks outside the country.”

The al-Qaida network in Iraq and in Pakistan and Afghanistan has suffered setbacks, but he said the group poses a persistent and growing danger. He said that al-Qaida maintains a “safe haven” in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it is able to stage attacks supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani tribal areas provide al-Qaida “many of the advantages it once derived from its base across the border in Afghanistan, albeit on a smaller and less secure scale,” allowing militants to train for strikes in Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa and the United States, McConnell said.

Terrorists use the “sanctuary” of Pakistan’s border area to “maintain a cadre of skilled lieutenants capable of directing the organization’s operations around the world,” McConnell told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Next strike seen from Pakistan
The next attack on the United States will most likely be launched by al-Qaida operating in “under-governed regions” of Pakistan, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned to tell Congress on Wednesday.

“Continued congressional support for the legitimate government of Pakistan braces this bulwark in the long war against violent extremism,” Mullen states in remarks prepared for a separate budget hearing and obtained by The Associated Press.

The U.S. has expressed growing concern that al-Qaida figures who fled Afghanistan after the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001 have been able to regroup inside tribal regions, posing a threat not just to U.S. forces across the border, but offering a potential base for global operations.

U.S. officials have said they believe that bin Laden is taking refuge in the Pakistani tribal region, likely on the Pakistani side of the border.

Still, McConnell praised Pakistan’s cooperation in the fight against extremists, saying that hundreds of Pakistanis have died while fighting terrorists. He said Islamabad has done more to “neutralize” terrorists than any other partner of the United States.

Despite the Pakistani cooperation, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the Pakistani military has been unable to disrupt or damage al-Qaida terrorists operating in the tribal border region. And the U.S. military is prohibited by Pakistan from pursuing Taliban and al-Qaida fighters that cross the border to conduct attacks inside Afghanistan.

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