A tattered flag from Sept. 11, 2001 is brought to a stage near the footprint of the World Trade Center
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Where does al-Qaeda get its residual strength? Some of its fighters defiantly remain in Afghanistan--"They haven't entirely left," a U.S. official tells TIME--and operatives elsewhere are trying to develop chemical and biological weapons. U.S. officials late last week disclosed the recent arrest of two men believed to have been planning surveillance on possible targets inside the U.S. In the past 18 months, terrorists have struck from the Philippines to Tunisia, and suspected attackers have been detained everywhere from Rome to Chicago. Determining whether the West is gaining in the fight against terrorism requires interpreting shadowy, shapeless data. Yet this much can be safely said: international terrorism existed long before 9/11 and will continue long after it.
--WHERE'S BIN LADEN?
For most Americans, "winning" the war on terrorism means a clear victory over al-Qaeda. On the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, Bush said, "Nearly one-half of al-Qaeda's senior operatives have been captured or killed." That's probably accurate. The arrests on April 29 in Pakistan of Walid bin Attash, suspected of organizing the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole at the Yemeni port of Aden, and Ali Abd al-Aziz, an alleged paymaster of the Sept. 11 team, were just the latest in an impressive series of arrests of leading al-Qaeda figures.
But al-Qaeda clearly remains capable of organizing sophisticated attacks. U.S. officials believe some al-Qaeda leaders have regrouped in Iran. The government in Tehran denies that al-Qaeda is using the country as a new operations base. But according to a Western diplomat in Tehran, members of al-Qaeda's executive council, or shura, have convened several times in the parched borderlands where Iran meets Pakistan and Afghanistan and where the writ of the Tehran government is less powerful than the local traditions of smuggling and lawlessness.
As for bin Laden himself, analysts generally believe he is still alive and probably capable of getting messages to his followers, if only by the slow means of personal courier. Both CIA and FBI counterterrorism officials think he is hiding somewhere in the mountains along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Capturing bin Laden--whose name Bush has not publicly uttered unprompted since February 2002--would be hugely satisfying to Americans. But it is not clear what effect taking bin Laden "dead or alive" would actually have on terrorism today. Many analysts feel strongly that measuring success against al-Qaeda by the number of leaders captured is mistaken. Lopping off the beast's head may not kill its body. "They keep likening [al-Qaeda] to a snake," says an intelligence officer in the Pentagon, "but it's more like a deadly mold."