Ex-Counterterrorism Aide Warns Against Complacency on Al Qaeda

[Valin]

NY Times:

ERIC SCHMITT
July 28, 2011

ASPEN, Colo. — The recently departed director of the nation’s main counterterrorism center said Thursday that Al Qaeda in Pakistan still posed a serious threat to the United States, and he warned that assessments that Al Qaeda was on the verge of collapse lacked “accuracy and precision.”

The comments by the official, Michael E. Leiter, who stepped down three weeks ago as head of the National Counterterrorism Center, are the most significant pushback to a growing chorus of statements by American officials that the death of Osama bin Laden and years of Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes in Pakistan have brought the United States “within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda,” as Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta put it recently.

Mr. Leiter said that Al Qaeda’s leadership and structure in Pakistan were “on the ropes,” but he contended that “the core organization is still there and could launch some attacks” and that “Pakistan remains a huge problem.” He noted that the failed plot to blow up an explosives-packed vehicle in Times Square in May 2010 was carried out by a Pakistani-American trained by the Pakistani Taliban. The Qaeda affiliate in Yemen also remains especially dangerous, he added.

Mr. Leiter also raised concerns that a decade of intensive paramilitary operations by the Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen had begun to change the nature of the spy service, and not necessarily all for the better.

(Snip)

Aspen Security Forum 2011


OTOH you can go over the edge on this....
Says the guy who obsesses on it.