CIA Chief Leon Panetta: Al-Qaida 'Scrambling'

(March 17) -- CIA Director Leon Panetta believes the current U.S. strategy against the al-Qaida terrorist network is showing major signs of success.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Panetta characterized his department's efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the most aggressive operation that the CIA has been involved in in our history."

As a result of the effort, Panetta said, the U.S. campaign is succeeding in impeding the group led by Osama bin Laden.

Leon Panetta, director of Central Intelligence Agency

Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images

CIA Director Leon Panetta said the U.S. strategy against al-Qaida has been successful in seriously disrupting the terrorist network's command.

"Those operations are seriously disrupting al-Qaida," Panetta told the Post. "It's pretty clear from all the intelligence we are getting that they are having a very difficult time putting together any kind of command and control, that they are scrambling. And that we really do have them on the run."

Panetta's predecessor, Michael Hayden, gave a similarly upbeat assessment to the Post in 2008. Since that time, the United States has redeployed tens of thousands of troops from Iraq into Afghanistan and launched major offensives in Helmand province as well as in the mountainous border region with Pakistan.

Recent high-profile arrests of al-Qaida commanders in Pakistan show a heightened level of coordination with the Pakistani government, Panetta told the Post. In recent weeks, U.S. drone attacks inside Pakistan have killed scores of people, many of them said to be members of al-Qaida, according to American military officials.

To bolster his claims, Panetta said that U.S. forces recently intercepted a message made from an al-Qaida lieutenant to bin Laden himself, in which the former man "pleaded" for bin Laden's leadership and help.

Panetta's remarks come one day after Attorney General Eric Holder told members of Congress that he did not believe it was likely that the United States would ever capture bin Laden alive.

"Either he will be killed by us or he will be killed by his own people so that he is not captured by us," Holder said Tuesday.

In a message released to Al Jazeera on Jan. 24, bin Laden said he endorsed the Christmas Day bomb plot of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian man who is accused of having tried to set off an explosive device on a U.S. airliner over Detroit.