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Terrorist elements in Pakistan remain committed to attacking US targets, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has warned.
The warning was issued by CIA director Porter Goss at the Senate committee on intelligence in Washington. He also said that North Korea continues to pursue a uranium enrichment capability drawing on the assistance it received from disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan before his network was shut down.
Grimly warning that "al-Qaeda is intent on finding ways to circumvent US security enhancements to strike Americans and the homeland," he said, "It may be only a matter of time before al-Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons." Also, the Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists, Goss said.
He said the US and its allies have hit al-Qaeda hard but it is a patient, persistent, imaginative, adaptive and dangerous opponent, though it is vulnerable.
Islamic militant leaders, he said,
sometimes argue that their "struggle justifies the indiscriminate killing
of civilians, even with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons".
Goss said that the development of the Afghan National Army and a National
Police Force is going well, although "neither can yet stand on its own".
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