Six years after the attacks on the US al-Qaeda has regrouped and retains its ability to inflict catastrophic damage in the West, an influential think tank said yesterday.

“The bottom line is that for six years the United States and its allies have been struggling to eliminate this threat and it is becoming increasingly clear that they have not succeeded in doing so,” analyst Nigel Inkster said.

Mr Inkster, a former director of MI6, helped write the annual Strategic Survey 2007 by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. The report’s conclusion is that Osama bin Laden’s terror network poses nearly as potent a threat today as it did on September 11, 2001.

The IISS said events earlier this year showed that “core al-Qaeda is proving adaptable and resilient, and has retained the ability to plan and coordinate large-scale attacks in the Western world”.

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Smaller jihadist groups had sworn formal allegiance to al-Qaeda while alleged plots uncovered in Europe, Canada, the Gulf and north Africa “point to a growing trend towards radicalisation within the Islamic world”, it added.

Mr Inkster, an IISS director, said some al-Qaeda leaders had argued that 9/11 was a “tactical error”, prompting US forces to expel it and its Taleban hosts from Afghanistan. However, even if it was now more difficult for al-Qaeda to carry out attacks on the scale of September 11, “the ambition and the capability to stage a spectacular operation is there”. He cited an alleged plot foiled in Britain last year to blow up US-bound planes as an example of al-Qaeda’s continued ability to mount such attacks. He added that al-Qaeda was gaining “strategic reach” in northwest Pakistan where Pakistani extremist groups are aligning themselves with the network.

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