Where Do We Stand After 9/11

The report reproduced below from the Hindustan Times, New Delhi, is suggestive.

And, now we have the blasts at the UN office (Baghdad), Nazaf and Mumbai, to tell us more.

No clear winners in anti-terror war

Washington - September 11, 2003 - President George Bush declared shortly after the September 11 attacks that the United States would fight terrorism on five fronts: military, intelligence-gathering, diplomacy, finance and law enforcement. The Administration and Congress agreed to add a sixth last year, creating the Department of Homeland Security to stop terrorists at airports, power plants and other vulnerable spots inside US borders. Two years after the September 11 terror attacks, there is no clear way to gauge whether the US is winning what US security officials call GWOT, the global war on terrorism. Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the men accused of being most directly involved in planning the September 11 attacks, are in CIA custody. But Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group's leaders, are at large. Bush's repeated assertions that the war in Iraq was part of the broader war on terrorism have proved true, but in ways that the Bush administration may not have anticipated. Al Qaeda is trying to turn Iraq into another Afghanistan, a place where loyal Muslims from across the Islamic world must flock to fight the "crusader forces" of the West. There has been no large-scale terrorist attack since September 11, though experts are divided on what that means. Explanations include: aggressive defensive action by US intelligence and law enforcement; Al Qaeda's preoccupation with defending itself from US attack on its Afghan base of operations; the availability of easier-to-hit US or Western targets in places such as Iraq or Southeast Asia; or; ominously, Al Qaeda's pattern of spacing major strikes several years apart. After September 11, CIA Director, George Tenet, warned that the war on terror would last years, possibly decades, and far outlast individual careers in Washington. Two years after he made those predictions, there appears no reason why he should revise them.

Hindustan Times - September 2, 2003.