Amorphous but alive

摘要

The world's security specialists are al-most unanimously gloomy. They say it is no longer a question of if but when al-Qaeda will hit a western city again. Many expect it to explode a "dirty bomb"-a device that scatters radioactive material. It is widely agreed that the war in Iraq, compounded by the recent scandal over the torture of prisoners, is likely to expand al-Qaeda's pool of recruits and make it harder for America to win its war on terror. Since September 11th 2001, attacks by terrorists linked to al-Qaeda have killed more than 1,000 people in more than a dozen countries. Jason Burke, an expert on the group, reckons that Mr bin Laden is "closer to achieving his goals than the West is to deterring him". The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London says that the only way to "depress recruitment and motivation" for al-Qaeda would be to find "currently elusive" solutions to messes such as Iraq and Palestine. It guesses that 18,ooo-odd people, who were trained in terrorist tactics by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan but escaped after the American attack two-and-a-half years ago, may be floating around the world, ready to help al-Qaeda.