WASHINGTON, Sept 7 (AFP) - Three years after Al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people in its suicide airplane strikes against New York and Washington, the United States confronts a terror network less centralized but still intent on hitting the country, analysts say.
US authorities have warned in recent months that Al-Qaeda plans to attack the country in an effort to disrupt the US presidential election and that evidence showed financial institutions in Washington and New York were being targeted.
Although the United States declared war on terrorism after September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda remains active and includes a network of nearly independent extremist groups that still have the ability to strike hard, analysts say.
The United States is facing a "more diffuse form of terrorism now," said Fiona Hill, a foreign policy expert at Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.
"We are getting more and more smaller groups who are self-sustaining themselves," Hill said. "They are part of Al-Qaeda but they are not really tied into the Al-Qaeda structures."
"They have less capacity for pulling off huge spectacular attacks," but they could still hit a "number of targets" such as military ships or embassies, she said.
Although it is believed that Al-Qaeda is less centralized, the network's core remains "a great and serious threat," said Christian Beckner, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
"There are clear signs that at the central level there has been reconstitution and replacing people who have been captured," he said.
Germany's spy chief, August Hanning, recently warned that Al-Qaeda had completely reconstituted its ranks in recent months and could pull off an attack before the US election.
Peter Singer, a national security expert at Brookings, said that despite the capture of Al-Qaeda lieutenants and assets, the group "remains vibrant, its senior leadership largely intact, its popularity greater than ever, its ability to recruit unbroken."
The creation of the US Homeland Security Department has helped the United States improve its fight against terrorism, although authorities still have much progress to make in their efforts to defend the United States, analysts say.
David Rothkopf, a national security expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said security at air and sea ports needs to improve.
Although "some progress" has been made regarding passenger planes, the risk of someone carrying a bomb into a cargo aircraft remains, he said.
Analysts are skeptical about the war on terrorism's long term success.
President George W. Bush was right to say recently that the war on terrorism cannot be won, before backtracking and declaring that the United States will win the conflict, Rothkopf said.
"What you can do is you can contain terror," he said. "You can go after threats whether they exist. You can eliminate them in a few cases, but you never eliminate (them) all together."
Benjamin Barber, a government and politics professor at the University of Maryland, said the United States is "still trapped in 19th century ideology of nation states and traditional warfare."
"The problem is not terrorists. There are only a few crazy terrorists," he said. "The problem is a large number of people who are not terrorists but who look the other way or support the terrorists."
"You can't change Osama bin Laden's mind, but you can change the mind of the many who create a safe zone for him," Barber said. "That's the job of cooperation, of multilateralism."