WASHINGTON (AP) -- Al-Qaida has decentralized, yet it's unclear whether the terrorist network is weaker and less likely to launch a Sept. 11-style attack against the United States, as President Barack Obama says, or remains potent despite the deaths of several leaders.
Obama said in his foreign policy speech last week that the prime threat comes not from al-Qaida's core leadership, but from affiliates and extremists with their sights trained on targets in the Middle East and Africa, where they are based. This lessens the possibility of large-scale 9/11-type attacks against America, the president said.
"But it heightens the danger of U.S. personnel overseas being attacked, as we saw in Benghazi," he said, referring to the September 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
Experts argue that this restructured al-Qaida is perhaps even stronger than it has been in recent years, and that the potential for attacks on U.S. soil endures.
"We have never been on a path to strategically defeat al-Qaida. All we've been able to do is suppress some of its tactical abilities. But strategically, we have never had an effective way of taking it on. That's why it continues to mutate, adapt and evolve to get stronger," said David Sedney, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.
Decentralization does not mean weakness, he said.
"I think Americans think al-Qaida is no longer a threat - that Osama bin Laden's death means al-Qaida is not a big thing anymore," Sedney said.
He believes al-Qaida is gaining strength in Pakistan, is stronger in Iraq than it was three or four years ago and is stronger in Syria than it was a year or two ago.
"This is a fight about ideology. Al-Qaida is not this leader or that leader or this group or that group," he said.
The experts say al-Qaida today looks less like a wheel with spokes and more like a spider web stringing together like-minded groups. But they believe there are several reasons that those who track al-Qaida warn against complacency.
While bin Laden was killed and his leadership team heavily damaged by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, the drawdown of American forces in neighboring Afghanistan will dry up field intelligence and restrict the effectiveness of U.S. counterterrorism operations. There is a worry that a pullback could allow al-Qaida to regroup.
Moreover, they worry about the thousands of foreign fighters flocking to the civil war in Syria, which has emboldened the al-Qaida breakaway group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to expand its cross-border operations into neighboring countries such as Iraq.
U.S. officials also are concerned about Westerners who have joined the Syrian fight because they may be recruited to return home and conduct attacks.
When the U.S. counterterrorism strategy was conceived, it was thought that if al-Qaeda's core leadership was dismantled or killed, then affiliated groups would simply become localized threats, said Katherine Zimmerman of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
