A senior U.S. intelligence official said last week that U.S. and allied efforts against Al Qaida in Southwest Asia had forced the terrorist group into remote areas of Pakistan but that it still enjoys safehaven there.
Edward Gistaro, a national intelligence officer for transnational threats, told a House hearing that Al Qaida has lost its safehavens in Afghanistan and urban areas of Pakistan.
"We pushed them out of the urban areas of Pakistan to South Waziristan, and then in about March of '04, the Pakistanis went in and pushed them out of South Waziristan," he said.
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"They relocated to North Waziristan and other places in the Pak-Afghan area."
The current operating areas of North Waziristan have made it hard for Pakistani security forces to find them, he said, and as a result the group has used that safehaven to "regenerate the operational leadership that is involved in developing and executing external operations."
"And we also saw indications that the top leadership was able to exploit that — that comfort zone in the tribal areas to exert a little bit more influence on the organization, and then the fourth component is we see their operational tempo of bringing people in to train for Western operations picking up," Gistaro said.
