From Fierce Government:
| By David Perera |  Comment |  Forward |  Twitter |  Facebook |  LinkedIn |
 The central core of al Qaeda is on a "path of decline that we think will be difficult to reverse," said a State Department official while speaking Feb. 3 during an event put on by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.Although al Qaeda nonetheless continues to be a threat, activities of al Qaeda affiliates in other parts of the world are where many U.S. concerns lie, said Dan Rosen, director of plans and policy within State'snewly-elevated counterterrorism bureau. The challenge of violent extremism, Rosen said, has not disappeared even despite U.S. counterterrorism successes, since the factors that make some populations susceptible to the al Qaeda worldview are still present in many places. Factors leading to the recruitment of terrorists are present at what Rosen described as a hyper-local level. "Really, the street and the neighborhood. Not the provincial level, not the national level, certainly--really not the international level," he added. As a result, counter measures aren't about public diplomacy or improving the image of the United States abroad, Rosen said. "It's about reaching out to a pretty well-defined, and pretty narrow audience," he added. "Until we address the very specific drives that are going on in very local places, I think we don't have a chance here," he said. Rosen said he agreed with another speaker's assertion that the al Qaeda reached its "high water mark" in 2006 or 2007. Charles Allen, former Homeland Security under secretary for intelligence and analysis, said al Qaeda then appeared to have a strategy of training Western-born volunteers who made their way to it in terrorism techniques. But the director of external operations at the time, Abu Ubaidah al Masri, was killed in 2008. Bin Laden himself was killed in 2011, and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri lacks his predecessor's charisma, Allen said. "He is not a bin Laden, not in any sense. He's a rather dour guy," he added. For more: - watch a webcast of the Feb. 3 Potomac Institute event |
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