How has global terrorism changed seven years after 9/11?

While there were initial victories against Al Qaeda immediately following the September 11th attacks in the sense that senior Al Qaeda leaders were captured and killed, and they lost their safe haven in Afghanistan, it appears, according to all of the intelligence experts and the U.S. intelligence community, that Al Qaeda has, in fact, regenerated, and is as ever now, seven years later. They have their key leadership intact. They have once again recruited a whole bench of mid-level lieutenant types. They are actively plotting attacks around the world. And again, they have a safe haven. It's just now not in Afghanistan. It's largely in Pakistan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

They also are a more dispersed organization than they were right before September 11th. While they still have their central leadership, they have affiliates all over the world, and that includes Africa, Europe with the Muslin diaspora, and Yemen, Saudia Arabia, and of course, one of their most important affiliates is in Iraq. And then they've increased their collaboration with militant groups in Pakistan.

Another difference since September 11th is that their communications strategy is much more sophisticated than it once was. They are very effective at getting their messages out, and that's through the Internet and through media interviews. They issue press statements. And they are targeting Western audiences more than they used to, so they're doing more in English, and they're also trying to appeal to Western cultural and historical references, whether that be Katrina, or the mortgage crisis, or the war in Iraq. They're tying to appeal to disgruntled U.S. and European citizens.

What do experts believe are the greatest threats facing the United States right now?

The Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine just recently conducted their fourth Terrorism Index, which is a survey of more than 100 terrorism and national security experts from across the ideological spectrum for their views on terrorism and U.S. national security concerns. And these experts show that they had increasing concerns about global terrorist networks. The experts also showed concern about other national security issues apart from growing terrorist networks. They talked about concerns about the war in Iraq, about a nuclear Iran, about failed states, and a U.S. economy in decline. They were increasingly concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, especially that those nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists.

How can we begin to address these emerging national security challenges?

It's clear that the next administration has a whole host of major security challenges it will need to face. And that ranges from Iraq to Iran, and Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Terrorism Index had some interesting insights into this. For Iraq, for example, majorities thought that we needed to begin withdrawing U.S. troops over the next 18 months, and begin redeploying them to Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. They also thought that the current strategy toward Pakistan was having a negative impact on U.S. national security, and that we needed to do a better job at pressuring the Pakistani government to crack down on the militant groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which are actively planning attacks on the United States, and also to encourage the Pakistani government to be much more aggressive at integrating those areas into the rest of Pakistan so that it wasn't sort of this failed state within a state. They also had recommendations on Afghanistan, trying to turn the situation around there. One of the major recommendations there was to increase the international coordination and create a plan by the actors there to turn the situation around.