War On Terror Seen As Double Edged Sword For U.S.

WASHINGTON, Sept 22 (AFP) - The war on terrorism is turning out to be a double edged sword for the United States as it faces a more determined and nimble group of militants lurking in an environment more hostile towards Washington, officials and analysts told a conference here Wednesday.
William Pope, a senior US State Department counterterrorism official, said while many in the al-Qaeda top brass had been caught, a new cadre of lesser-known but equally powerful leaders had emerged and was becoming harder to track down.
Similarly, while the United States had effectively driven out terrorists from the international financial system through cooperation with other governments, it was now finding it difficult to pin down their financial networks because they evaded banks and used informal financial channels.
Pope told the "strategic Asia and the war of terrorism" conference in Washington that al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups were forming or trying to coalesce into a global jihadist network by establishing links with like-minded groups.
Among them is a network controlled by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who has claimed responsibility for a series of beheadings of hostages, including US citizens, in Iraq.
Pope said there were also growing indications that a number of largely Sunni Islamic extremist movements were try to depict al-Qaeda standards and attempt to pursue a global jihad (holy war) against the United States and its allies.
"The problem is that the other younger, lesser known (leaders) are very serious about it -- they want to blow people up just as much as the more senior ones did," said Pope, the principal deputy coordinator in the State Department's counterterrorism office.
"But it is harder to know who they are and where they are."
He predicted that if the al-Qaeda leadership successors linked up in a more diffused way with other localised groups, many of which predated al-Qaeda, the authorities would face a "harder situation."
"It is similar to the analogy of the money. We have basically driven terrorists out of the international banking system and into other ways of moving money -- including cash carried in suitcases."
Since the end of 2001, more than 170 countries had isued orders freezing or seizing about 142 million dollars in terrorist-related financial assets while 1,500 terrorist related accounts and transactions have been blocked, Pope said.
"So the good news is we have driven them out of the international banking system and the bad news is that we have driven them out of the international banking system," Pope said of the new dilemma facing the authorities.
"It's a long way of saying that we are in a transitional phase from the organised al-Qaeda and another more diffused group of dangerous but not yet global organization. I dont know how that is going to come out but either way we are going to track them," he said.
Ashley Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Research, said that as the war on al-Qaeda became more and more successful, "you'll get terrorism that is subsalient, nonetheless very real because you are effectively denying them the ability to conduct high profile attacks.
"When a building with 3,000 people gets blown up, you tend to take notice but you can have a very efficient terrorism strategy that, for example, regularly kills a very small number of officials abroad.
"It doesn't have to be spectacular but nonetheless corrosive because it is a low level degradation which continues and over time have serious cumulative effects."
"In that sense, the war on terrorism is a double edged sword."
Another example Tellis cited of the inadvertent consequences of the war on terrorism was current state of US relations with the Muslim world.
"Even though we are going after a justifiable class of targets, there are unintended consequences -- fear in the Muslim world that we are involved in the campaign against civilization," he said.
Graham Fuller, a former senior CIA officer, said the US-led war in Iraq was "perceived by nearly everbody as a war for and on behalf of American imperialism in the region.
"And, worse is that it is integrally linked with Israeli ambitions. The two are now inexplicably linked. This is very devastating" to the Muslim world, he said.