'Al-Qaeda on brink of defeat'

AL-QAEDA is essentially beaten in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive elsewhere, including the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the head of the CIA said today.

CIA director Michael Hayden said major gains have been made against Al-Qaeda's allies in the Middle East, while a campaign to destabilise the network's core leadership has been increasingly successful.

Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is also losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world and has largely lost his ability to exploit the Iraq war to recruit new members, he said in an interview with the Washington Post.

"On balance, we are doing pretty well,'' Mr Hayden said, while warning that Al-Qaeda remained a serious threat.

The list of accomplishments, he said, included: "Near strategic defeat of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for Al-Qaeda 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.''

The upbeat assessment comes less than a year after a US intelligence report last August found that Al-Qaeda had regrouped in a safe haven in Pakistan's lawless border region with Afghanistan and was determined new attacks on the United States.

But Mr Hayden said gains have been made against Al-Qaeda even in the lawless region and that US intelligence agencies have carried out several attacks there since January, using unmanned aircraft to strike safe houses.

"The ability to kill and capture key members of Al-Qaeda continues, and keeps them off balance -- even in their best safe haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,'' Mr Hayden told the Post.

In Iraq, he said he was encouraged by US success against Al-Qaeda's affiliates and by what he described as the steadily rising competence of the Iraqi military and a growing popular antipathy toward jihadism.

"Despite this 'cause celebre' phenomenon, fundamentally no one really liked Al-Qaeda's vision of the future,'' Mr Hayden said, adding that the insurgency was viewed by Iraqis as "more and more a war of Al-Qaeda against Iraqis".

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