AL-QAEDA remains “more insidious and just as dangerous” as it was before the September 11 attacks, a London-based academic institute said yesterday.

The terrorist group had been “reconstituted” since the US-led campaign against it in Afghanistan and was still a powerful network that could take “a generation to dismantle”, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said.

In its annual report, Strategic Survey, published yesterday, the institute estimated that the group, led by Osama bin Laden, had 18,000 operatives in 90 countries.

About 2,700 known or suspected members had been arrested, including Abu Zubeida, the operations chief, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected “orchestrator” of the September 11 attacks. Since then, military and law enforcement efforts had resulted in the death or detention of perhaps a third of al-Qaeda’s senior leaders.

However, the institute said: “The counter-terrorism effort perversely impelled an already highly decentralised and elusive trans-national terrorist network to become even harder to identify and neutralise.”

Recruitment turned on bin Laden’s ability “to sell the cultural humiliation of Islam and the malfeasance of the ‘near enemies’ — Egypt in making peace with Israel, Saudi Arabia in allowing US soldiers near the two most holy sites of Islam — as the basis for apocalyptic violence against the US and the West”. The group’s surviving leadership had “blended into the frenetic cities of Pakistan, Karachi in particular, where sympathisers abounded”. The only physical infrastructure al-Qaeda required was “safe houses to assemble bombs and weapons caches”, the report said.

The organisation was now believed to have mid-level co-ordinators who had trained in Afghanistan and were living in dozens of countries, providing their followers with logistical and financial support. Al-Qaeda’s leadership could leave “the heavy operational lifting to the local foot soldiers”.

The report said: “If the minions were killed or caught, their spectacular demise . . . had moved others to take their place. The process was, in theory, self-perpetuating.”

While al-Qaeda developed “new angles of approach to mass casualty terrorism” to penetrate improved US and European defences, “it could also content itself with softer high-value targets over a wider geographical range that fully symbolised the group’s non-negotiable enmity to Western Christians and Jews”.

Although financial institutions had seized or frozen about $125 million (£77 million) in suspected terrorist assets, al-Qaeda was also still able to draw on “a stream of essentially unregulated cash” in donations from sympathisers.

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