It is a generally accepted view that the US is losing the war on terror. However, how far is this actually true?

Muhammad Atef, Osama bin Laden's military commander, was killed by a missile strike on the outskirts of Kabul in November 2001. Anas al-Liby, a senior figure linked to the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, was almost certainly killed on the Shomali plains around the same time.

Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a Yemeni linked to the strike on the USS Cole, was killed by a missile attack in his homeland in November 2002.

In March 2002, Abu Zubaydah, the master logistician in charge of al-Qaeda's training camps, was seized in a safe house in Faisalabad (east Pakistan). In September 2002, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was captured after a gun battle in Karachi.

In March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's career ended when US and Pakistani intelligence burst into the house in Rawalpandi where he was sleeping. Five months later Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali), the main liason between al-Qaeda and Islamic militants in Southeast Asia, was arrested in Bangkok.

The claim by US officials that two-thirds of al-Qaeda's leadership has been eliminated is not without justification. This is a major achievement.

The physical damage to al-Qaeda has also been considerable. Their system of training camps in Afghanistan, built up over two decades, has been entirely lost. So has much hardware and research.

Afghanistan provided a unique haven from which to plan and organise, and no replacement has yet been found.

There are reports of small training camps in east and west Africa, along the Afghan-Pakistani border, in remote parts of Bangladesh, in Saudi Arabia, or on islands in Southeast Asian waters.

However, even if they exist, there is nothing even remotely comparable to the terrorist infrastructure that existed in the Taliban's Afghanistan.

The US is now monitoring, or has troops in places like Yemen, Somalia, Central Asia and Borneo. Wherever semi-anarchy once made life easy for militants, there is a contingent of US military advisors or satellite surveillance.

Saif al-Adel, the Egyptian ex-special operations colonel who ran al-Qaeda's Afghan camps, has been reduced to posting training programmes on the Internet. With no physical locations available for the instruction sessions he has been running for a decade, the only place left for him is cyberspace.

Al-Adel, along with Saad, Osama bin Laden's son, and Suleiman Abu Gaith, the Kuwaiti-born spokesman for al-Qaeda, are suspected by US intelligence of being in Iran, one of the few places where al-Qaeda hardcore might have somewhere to hide.

However, such locations are rare and very risky. Senior al-Qaeda members now have to work under the constant fear of arrest or surveillance. Coordinating and planning attacks is vastly more

difficult.

In short, US counter-terrorist operations since late 2001 has put an end to the concentration of Islamic militants, volunteers and infrastructure in Afghanistan that came about in the late 1990s.

By the beginning of 2002, al-Qaeda's physical assets had already been almost completely destroyed and its personnel scattered.

To conclude, the missile strike which killed al-Harethi was a good indication of what the future holds for the remaining members of al-Qaeda.