U.S. assesses post-bin Laden al-Qaida

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- While Osama bin Laden's death put al-Qaida's core on the decline, the activity of its affiliate organizations continues to spread, an analyst said.

Bin laden was killed in May at a compound in Pakistan by U.S. Navy SEALs, roughly 10 years after he helped plan the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks on the United States.

Daniel Benjamin, a U.S. State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism issues, told officials and analysts at the National Press Club in Washington that bin Laden's death was the "most important milestone ever in the fight against al-Qaida."

He cautioned, however, that while the core al-Qaida group was weakened, its affiliates were spreading across the globe.

One U.S. official said during a background briefing in September that "regional nodes" of al-Qaida, such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabaab and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, were "the way of the future."

Benjamin said regional partnerships with countries like Pakistan were integral in the fight against an evolving al-Qaida. In terms of the so-called Arab Spring, he said, Western allies had an opportunity to discredit the extremist argument that only violence can bring about change.

"Should these revolts result, as we hope, in durable, democratically elected, non-autocratic governments, al-Qaida's single-minded focus on terrorism as an instrument of political change would be severely and irretrievably delegitimized," he said.