WASHINGTON -- Two senior Bush administration officials this week offered differing assessments of al-Qaeda's capability to carry out a major new attack against the United States (see GSN, Jan. 5).
(Jan. 9) -
Bush administration officials recently disagreed over the threat posed by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (Getty Images).
The terrorist network continues to pose a serious threat to the United States, potentially involving the use of weapons of mass destruction, according to a key White House adviser.
Kenneth Wainstein, homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush, said Wednesday that the United States succeeded in weakening al-Qaeda shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Washington and its allies quickly expelled al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts from Afghanistan, and since then have targeted high-ranking operatives and their financial networks throughout the region and around the globe.
Most recently, a CIA missile strike in northern Pakistan on New Year's Day killed two top al-Qaeda lieutenants long on the U.S. most-wanted list, the Washington Post reported today.
However, Wainstein said, the group led by Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains operationally viable and interested in inflicting maximum damage against the United States. Over the past few years, al-Qaeda has reconstituted much of its senior leadership, rebuilt its operational base and re-established some capability to sow terror, Wainstein said. The group's top leaders are believed to be hiding in Pakistani tribal areas.
"No matter how much you degrade the opposition's capability, we still have to keep our pedal to the metal ... because of the potential that terrorists will get their hands on weapons of mass destruction," Wainstein said in response to questions after delivering a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
"Now they are globalized and have the capability potentially to get access to -- whether it's biological or nuclear -- components that can actually kill Americans by ... the hundreds and thousands," he said.
A day earlier, though, another senior U.S. official said the United States and its allies had effectively contained al-Qaeda's ability to stage big attacks.
"The international community has really beaten them back into the hole," Dell Dailey, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, said at a Tuesday question-and-answer session with reporters. "They are kind of bottled up. I submit to you that bin Laden can't get an operational effort off the ground without it being detected ahead of time and being thwarted."
As an example, he cited the discovery and prevention of a 2006 al-Qaeda plot to board as many as 10 airliners in the United Kingdom and blow them up while en route to the United States.
"Their ability to reach us is nonexistent," said Dailey, a retired three-star Army general experienced in special operations and counterterrorism. "All Zawahiri can do is make public announcements, that's all. The only thing they have right now is [an increasingly] weakened media program."
He added that given the strides in degrading al-Qaeda, capturing or killing its top leaders might be seen as more of a "symbolic accomplishment" than a crippling blow.
Wainstein took issue with that view.
"They are still alive and they are still a threat," he said of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. "I'm not in a position to say that we face no danger from al-Qaeda or that al-Qaeda senior leadership's at a point where they cannot operationally be involved in a way that would direct an attack against the [U.S.] homeland."
Dailey noted that although he emphasizes al-Qaeda's operational limitations, others in the U.S. counterterrorism community continue to regard the group as a serious threat. Even if al-Qaeda is largely hamstrung today, a slight-but-lingering possibility that the group could acquire weapons of mass destruction and pull off a WMD attack remains a worry for U.S. intelligence analysts, he said.
"[Its] intent, in the scheme of things, is to come after the United States all ways it possibly can, to include WMD," Dailey told reporters attending the Defense Writers' Group event. "We accept that their intent is rolled into the [intelligence community] analysis of al-Qaeda as a threat to the United States."