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War helping al-Qaida regroup, Congress told

Al-Qaida is alive and well and thriving thanks in part to the Internet, terrorism experts told a House Armed Services subcommittee Wednesday.

A panel of experts painted a picture of an Islamic terrorist organization far different from the one President Bush portrays: that al-Qaida “is on the run.”

On the contrary, said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University, “al-Qaida is on the march.”

The organization has regrouped from the setbacks it suffered when U.S. military forces drove it out of Afghanistan.

Hoffman credits al-Qaida with some degree of involvement in attacks that were planned and prevented in August 2006 to blow up 10 airliners flying from Britain to the U.S., in the 2005 subway and bus bombings in London, and 2004 attacks that were foiled in London, New York, Newark, N.J., and Washington.

Hoffman warned that Bush’s strategy of surging an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq to try to quell the rising sectarian violence there “is exactly what al-Qaida wants.”

“Iraq, for them, has been an effective means to preoccupy American military forces and distract U.S. attention while al-Qaida has regrouped and reorganized since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001,” he said.

Hoffman quoted al-Qaida’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as saying, “The Americans are facing a delicate situation in [Iraq and Afghanistan]. If they withdraw, they will lose everything and if they stay, they will continue be bleed to death.”

Hoffman argued that moving U.S. troops out of Iraq and strengthening the capabilities of U.S. allies in the region “would affirm, not undermine U.S. commitments” in the region and enable the U.S. to focus more on dealing with al-Qaida.

Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Institution agreed that al-Qaida “appears to have recovered” from any damage inflicted during the expulsion from Afghanistan. Al-Qaida now is based in tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghanistan border, where the Pakistani government “shows little inclination to dislodge it,” he said.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq “gave the jihadists an unmistakable boost,” he said. Among “self-starter jihadists,” the U.S. invasion and occupation is universally cited as justification for terrorism. The U.S. presence in Iraq has turned the country into “a sanctuary for jihadists better than Afghanistan ever was,” he said.

Military force is ill-suited to battling terrorism, Benjamin said. The presence of military forces alienates local civilians, and military operations invariably result in civilian deaths that turn local populations against the U.S.

Much of al-Qaida’s comeback can be credited to the Internet, said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute. Katz said she spends her days monitoring al-Qaida Web sites, message boards, blogs, e-groups and other cyber-sites where she said a “virtual jihadist network” indoctrinates, communicates, recruits and plans attacks.

The Internet is home to a highly organized al-Qaida presence that features recruiting videos and communiqués, anti-American and anti-Western broadcasts, pro-Caliphate programs, even online libraries of books the justify jihad, she said.

Katz said when she reported some of this to U.S. government authorities, they were uninterested.