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Since the death of Osama bin Laden, the ranks of al-Qaida have dramatically diminished and its leadership ranks diminished to just two figures, U.S. intelligence officials tell The Washington Post, "whose demise would mean the group's defeat."
Their demise could take awhile -- it took us 10 years to get bin Laden -- but we should have the patience to see it through. The remaining "high-value" targets are bin Laden's replacement as leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and his deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi. The CIA's Predator drones, surveillance craft and intelligence operators are concentrated on eliminating them and whatever random bands of al-Qaida terrorists still remain.
Effectively, the rest of the al-Qaida leadership that planned the 9/11 attacks is dead or, like the self-proclaimed mastermind, Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, in prison. The organization should not be allowed to reconstitute itself.
Al-Zawahiri has considered relocating the terrorist group, but the alternative locations are too remote or no safer than where they are now, and then there's the problem of getting there without being detected. And, it's said, al-Zawahiri feels that, at age 60, he's too old to start over again.
However, the CIA is under pressure to move its drone operations and operatives elsewhere, especially to Yemen, now considered the more serious terrorist haven. We would be surprised if Somalia, with its own congeries of terrorist groups and pirates, wasn't on that list.
But the Post reports that CIA Director David Petraeus, the former U.S. commander in Iraq, "and other senior officials -- mindful that al-Qaida has regrouped in the past -- think their unfinished priority is to extinguish the network's base."
The plodding al-Zawahiri is evidently not much of a leader. Al-Libi, thought to be 48, is charismatic, eloquent, well schooled in Islam and has the revolutionary credential of having escaped from U.S. custody at the U.S.-Afghan prison at Bagram in 2006.
Left at large, he could potentially fill the leadership vacuum left by bin Laden and the terrorist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a drone strike in September in Yemen.
In 2001, the CIA, U.S. special forces and their Afghan allies had bin Laden trapped in Afghanistan's remote mountains along the Pakistani border. The Bush administration took its foot off the gas to begin diverting troops and resources to the pending invasion of Iraq.
You'd like to think that we learned our lesson and won't make the same mistake again, but we might -- if Congress persists in massive, automatic cuts in the Pentagon budget in 2013.
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