In a speech closely watched in Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama's top counterterrorism advisor, John O. Brennan, said Thursday that al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups around the world are "under tremendous pressure" from "years of U.S. counterterrorism operations" in cooperation with other countries.
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"[Al Qaeda] is being forced to work harder and harder to raise money, to move its operatives around the world, and to plan attacks," he said, though it remains intent on attacking the United States and its allies.
Brennan's talk came just after Hillary Clinton concluded a meeting with Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed in Kenya, where the secretary of state pointedly warned Eritrea to stop supporting militant groups in neighboring Somalia, an increasingly lawless country that foreign-policy experts are viewing with growing concern.
Brennan, a gruff, flint-eyed former senior CIA official with 25 years of government service, spoke with the clipped diction of a U.S. official. He pronounced the names of "al Qaeda" and "Hezbollah" with a noticeable Arabic lilt, underscoring his years of experience in dealing with the Middle East as a State Department political officer in Saudi Arabia, a top regional analyst, and later a CIA station chief.
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Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton administration, said the likely motive of the speech was to "establish the president's identity on this issue" and rebut criticism from Republicans that Obama is "soft on terror."
U.S. terrorism experts agree that al Qaeda has suffered setbacks, at least in some parts of the world. Peter Bergen, a CNN analyst and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, said the "net effect of the drone attacks" along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, "has been devastating to their planning and training." Polling data also show a loss of public support for al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, Bergen said. "But even if a small percentage of people think that Osama's a great guy, that's still a lot of people" in a country of 170 million. He also pointed to recent al Qaeda activity in Yemen.
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