Is world safer a year after bin Laden’s death?

This week marks the first anniversary of the US raid on al-Qaeda’ s Pakistan compound, in which bin Laden was killed in a firefight with US Navy Seals.

Even then, al Qaeda was on the ropes after years of being hunted by the United States and its allies around the world. Several of the group’s leaders had been killed and planners were being eyed too closely to mount any serious operations, let alone one as massive as the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

A year later, the group remains in disarray, and has not found a leader to match the larger-than-life bin Laden’s charisma and vision. All told, that is the least of its problems.

“We have been saying for years that operationally they are basically irrelevant,” said Scott Stewart, analyst at global intelligence company Stratfor.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, White House top Counter-terrorism Adviser John Brennan said the United States has “degraded the organisation significantly over the past decade and over the past several years in particular as we’ ve taken off the battlefield the founding leader”.

“We’re determined to destroy that organisation,” he said. “But that’s going to continue to require us to maintain this pressure on al-Qaeda, whether it be in Pakistan, Afghanistan as well as in Yemen.”

But while al Qaeda proper was rendered ineffective even before the death of its founder, some of the extremist group’s franchises remain dangerous. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen, controls large swaths of the embattled country, and al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s affiliate group in Somalia, remains a threat there, experts said.

Stewart noted AQAP has shown the ability to strike outside of Yemen’ s borders, pointing to the 2009 Christmas Day bombing attempt in which a terror operative tried to detonate a bomb hidden in his underwear over Detroit. The US federal authorities said Nigerian Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab was assisted by AQAP leaders.

Stewart said the United States is likely to keep up the pressure on al Qaeda in the long run, as it could regenerate if given enough slack.

That is because the ideology is still there, and the United States is unable to combat radical jihadist dogma. “The US just doesn’t have any legitimacy in the theological battlefield,” he said. “That’s something Muslims will have to do.”

As al Qaeda’s core declines, the threat to the United States, in particular, has in recent years taken the form of homegrown radicalism.

These are al Qaeda-inspired groups or lone wolves who organise through social media, are influenced by jihadist dogma, and may or may not have contact with professional terrorists.

Richard Fadden, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, last week told a Canadian Senate committee that it is difficult to identify lone wolf terror operatives, as they operate in isolation and often have no ties to known extremists.

“These individuals seem to be a mix of terrorists and people who simply have very big personal problems,” he said.

Jessica Zuckerman, a research associate for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, noted that since 9/11 there have been 50 thwarted terror plots against the United States.

Of those, 42 were homegrown. Among those groups, some work together but a large chunk operate independently of other any group or affiliation, with the level of connection to global terror networks lessening in recent years, she said.

Much debate centres around whether lone wolves present a greater threat because they are difficult to track and can strike without warning. However, they often lack bomb making or other weapons skills to mount large — or even small — terror attacks, she said.

That is why terror experts say the most likely future scenario would be a small arms attack similar to the 2009 Fort Hood attacks, in which Nidal Malik Hasan, a US Army psychiatrist, allegedly went on a shooting spree that left 13 dead. — Xinhua.