Victory still in reach for 'war on terror': Bush

WASHINGTON (AFP) - President George W. Bush insisted Thursday the "war on terror" is not lost despite new warnings from US intelligence that Al-Qaeda is resurgent and Iraq is breeding global extremism.

Nearly six years after the offensive sparked by the September 11 attacks of 2001, Bush is accused by anti-war Democrats of making the United States more vulnerable by invading Iraq.

But the president took issue with media coverage of a classified new intelligence assessment that suggested Al-Qaeda is as strong today as prior to 9/11.

"That's just simply not the case," he told a White House news conference, arguing that because of US offensive action, "Al-Qaeda is weaker today than they would have been."

But Bush added: "They are still a threat. They are still dangerous. And that is why it is important that we succeed in Afghanistan and Iraq and anywhere else we find them."

Speaking on Fox News, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conceded that "yes, I think it's true that in the frontier areas of Pakistan, this has been a period in which we've been concerned about their gaining strength."

"But I don't think that one can argue that Al-Qaeda is the same organization, effective in the ways that they were effective before 9/11," she stressed.

Even if Al-Qaeda figurehead Osama bin Laden himself is confined to the anarchic borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan, experts say, his group has spawned any number of offshoots that are only loosely affiliated.

"It's a paradox: we have succeeded in degrading the operational capabilities of the jihadist enterprise and yet almost every assessment indicates that we are not succeeding," RAND Corp. terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins said.

"In nearly six years, we have blunted Al-Qaeda's ability to launch large-scale attacks from the center but we now confront many little Al-Qaedas, continuing radicalization, and escalating insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that exhaust our military forces and drain domestic support," he told AFP.

Democrats seized on the classified new study by the US government's National Counterterrorism Center, reportedly entitled "Al-Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West."

Bin Laden's network is sheltering in lawless tribal areas of northwest Pakistan to train and to plot attacks, the report said, according to The Washington Post.

The intelligence report coincided with a bleak review of progress in Iraq in a new administration assessment of Bush's recent deployment of 30,000 more troops.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said the intelligence shows that "Al-Qaeda is growing stronger."

"But while Osama bin Laden is operating freely, we understand, on the Afghan-Pakistan border, the president wants to keep our troops in an open-ended war, a civil war in Iraq," he told reporters.

"It's really a travesty that Osama bin Laden is still at large almost six years after 9/11, but it's not surprising that Al-Qaeda has been able to reorganize and rebuild because the administration has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to fighting terrorism."

By invading Iraq in 2003, Bush is accused of diverting US energy and resources from the true sources of Islamist terror and radicalizing a generation of disaffected Muslims in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

If the United States has escaped a repeat of the shocking strikes that felled New York's World Trade Center, other nations such as Britain, Indonesia and Spain have not been so fortunate.

Insurgents in places like Algeria, Somalia and the Philippines have recast themselves as "Al-Qaeda" branches, as extremists cash in on what John Kringen, the CIA's director of intelligence, calls the "trademark" of global militancy.

Al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists appear "fairly well settled into the safe haven" of northwest Pakistan, benefiting from more training, money and communications, he told Congress on Wednesday.

"In terms of the growth of terrorist groups, there is little doubt I think that our engagement in Iraq has served as a focal point for Sunni extremists to flow into that conflict, and has served as a rallying point more broadly internationally," the Central Intelligence Agency official said.