Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Director Robert S Mueller told a meeting in London last week that Al Qaeda would not “go quietly into the night,” having established “new sanctuaries” in “ungoverned spaces, Tribal Areas, and the Frontier province of Pakistan.”Addressing a meeting at Chatham House, Mueller said Al Qaeda is resilient and “its network is now diffuse. And it continues to adjust its strategies and tactics. We now confront a three-tiered threat.” He said the top tier is the core Al Qaeda organisation, which has “established new sanctuaries in Pakistan”, which means that it can “reconstitute its leadership, recruit new operatives, and regenerate its capability to attack.”
The middle tier is perhaps the most complex, he added. “We are finding small groups who have some ties to an established terrorist organisation, but are largely self-directed.” He called them as “Al Qaeda franchises — hybrids of homegrown radicals and more sophisticated operatives.” He said that July 7 London bombers were an example of this middle layer. Two of them trained at camps in Pakistan, but they came back to Britain and lived there while they plotted their attacks. The arrests last September of small terrorist cells in Denmark and Germany were other examples, he added.