'AL QAEDA," President Bush declared confidently in October, "is on the run." The extremists, he said, had "played their hand." The masterminds of the organization had been "brought to justice."
But just as we underestimated Al Qaeda before 9/11, we risk making the same mistake now. Although Al Qaeda is often spoken of as if it is in retreat -- a broken and beaten organization incapable of mounting attacks, its leadership cut off, living in caves somewhere in remotest Waziristan -- the truth is that the organization is not on the run but on the march. It has regrouped and reorganized from the setbacks it suffered during the initial phases of the global war on terrorism and is marshaling its forces to continue the epic struggle begun more than 10 years ago.
Rather than being degraded to the point that it can threaten only softer, more accessible targets like hotels and mass transit, Al Qaeda is very much sticking with its classic playbook of simultaneous, spectacular strikes against even hardened objectives. In other words, we have more to fear from this resilient organization, not less.
Ongoing investigations increasingly suggest that recent terrorist threats and attacks -- the foiled 2004 plan to stage simultaneous suicide attacks in the United States, the 2005 suicide bus and subway bombings in London and the August 2006 plot to blow up 10 planes over the Atlantic -- were all coordinated in some way by Al Qaeda and not by homegrown terror groups.
Consider what we have learned since the London bombings. Initially, British authorities concluded that the attacks were the work of disaffected British Muslims, self-radicalized and self-selected and operating purely within the country. We have subsequently learned, however, that the cell's ringleader, Mohamed Sidique Khan, and a fellow bomber visited Pakistani terrorist camps between late 2004 and early 2005 and met there with Al Qaeda operatives.
In addition, following the London attacks, a reliable source working for Britain's security service recognized Khan from news reports and claimed to have seen him at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 1999 or 2000.
The London bombings' pedigree is familiar. Exactly a year earlier, British and American authorities had disrupted a plot by a London-based Al Qaeda cell to carry out simultaneous suicide attacks on the New York Stock Exchange, the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., and the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington. The trail again led to Pakistan.
