Al Qaeda regaining strength?

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross at the Counterterrorism Blog examines a NYT article today that reports that American intelligence officials as well as counterterrorism officials believe that Al Qaeda is strengthening. Ross writes:

I spoke with a senior military intelligence officer about the Times article. He reports that the Times’s description that camps in Pakistan have “yet to reach the size and level of sophistication of the Qaeda camps established in Afghanistan under Taliban rule” and its mention of “groups of 10 to 20 men” being trained is only a partial picture of the training camps in Pakistan. The Times article focuses on al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan, camps where militants receive the kind of training that could enable them to carry out terrorist attacks in the West. But there are also larger military training camps — the kind that are used to train Taliban fighters to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan, or to train Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, or other Kashmiri separatist groups. The training required to carry out a terrorist attack in the West is different than what is needed to fight in Afghanistan or Kashmir.

The senior officer also noted that the Times article portrays al-Qaeda as having fragmented in 2005, when “American intelligence assessments described senior leaders of Al Qaeda as cut off from their foot soldiers and able only to provide inspiration for future attacks.” In his estimation, such assessments were essentially intelligence failures: al-Qaeda’s senior leadership was regrouping and gathering force during this period, and Western intelligence wasn’t aware of it. The reason we realize it now, he says, is because the strength of al-Qaeda’s central leadership has become blatantly obvious.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Allah, who has an analysis of this story and a link round-up.