http://www.unionleader.com/article.a...d-5fae7c7b245a
al-Qaida on ropes: Bin Laden is losing
14 hours, 58 minutes ago
CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week that al-Qaida is losing its war on the West. Skeptics who don't trust any information that emerges from the lips of a Bush administration official do not have to take Hayden's word to believe the truth of his assessment. The evidence is everywhere.
In a Washington Post interview last week, Hayden presented our successes in the War on Terror this way: "Near strategic defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaida globally -- and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' -- as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam."
That might sound like Bush administration puffery. But days earlier, two New York University researchers wrote a strikingly similar appraisal in the liberal magazine The New Republic.
"According to Pew polls, support for Al Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years," wrote Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank. "The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half or more in the last five years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 percent now have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, according to a December poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. Following a wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year, support for suicide operations amongst Pakistanis has dropped to 9 percent (it was 33 percent five years ago), while favorable views of bin Laden in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is believed to be hiding, have plummeted to 4 percent from 70 percent since August 2007."
On Thursday U.S. commanders announced that Iraq's Diyala province, once a stronghold for al-Qaida in Iraq, was under U.S. and Iraqi control.
On May 24 U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said al-Qaida in Iraq was closer to defeat than it has ever been. In mid-May, terrorist attacks in Iraq fell to their lowest level since March 2004.
The evidence worldwide strongly suggests that al-Qaida has been decimated by a combination of aggressive action by the United States and its allies and the terrorist organization's own horrific acts. Not only are ordinary Muslims turning against terrorism in droves, but former al-Qaida supporters and trainees have taken to denouncing the group for murdering innocents, especially Muslim ones.
Still, Hayden cautions against complacency.
"The fact that we have kept [Americans] safe for pushing seven years now has got them back into the state of mind where 'safe' is normal," he said. "Our view is: Safe is hard-won, every 24 hours."
That's a good way to look at this war, which President Bush said from the start would be long and arduous. It isn't over yet, but the evidence shows that so far we are doing better than the enemy.