Effort to cripple al-Qaeda not working

The experts call into question many of the basic assumptions in the war on terror, including efforts to cut off the flow of money to would-be terrorists even though all but the most spectacular attacks, such as September 11, can be carried out at little cost.

Meanwhile al-Qaeda and its supporters are making effective use of |he media to drum up support in the Muslilm world, capitalising on anger over the war in Iraq and continuing to try for a potentially devastating chemical or biological bomb attack, the report said.

Drafted by a panel of outside experts, it paints a bleak picture of countries either languishing several steps behind international terrorists or unwilling to go beyond the basic paperwork required to demonstrate a good-faith effort to crack down on terror.

"The threat from al-Qaeda related terrorism remains as great as ever, but the nature of the threat has changed," said the report to the UN Security Council, which put in place the monitoring mechanism being evaluated by the high-level panel.

"There i{ no prospect of an early end to attacks from al-Qaeda associated terrorists," it said. "Using minimal resources and exploiting worldwide publicity, they have managed to create an international sense of crisis."

Efforts to block the sale of weapons and the movement of terror suspects -- cornerstones of the UN sanctions regime against al-Qaeda and Afghanistan's former Taliban rulers -- have not been effective, the study said.

It recalled that the Security Council first determined that al-Qaeda merited a united world response in October 1999 -- two years before the 2001 attacks on the United States that brought down the World Trade Center.

After September 11, the council then passed a resolution requiring all UN member nations to freeze the assets, block arms sales and restrict the travel of any person or gro}p believed to be linked to terrorism.

But the experts found that not even one nation had reported stopping either the travel or the sale of weapons to anyone on the UN list of those suspected of links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban.