Al-Qaeda is losing, but the West isn’t winning

Last July I met a man in Jordan who told me he was an al-Qaeda recruiter. "What do you want?" I asked him. "God willing that the whole world should be an Islamic state," he replied. "So can you foresee a day when you kill all non-Muslims?" I asked. He held my gaze. "God willing, yes."

Al-Qaeda has killed so many civilians that even its most ardent supporters are beginning to have doubts. The real damage has been done by the sectarian violence in Iraq. Morale amongst al-Qaeda fighters there is now so low that they are leaving the field of battle complaining that they are being asked to kill Shias not Americans.

Yet the West has failed to out-argue the organisation. While al-Qaeda is losing its battle for hearts and minds, so too is the United States.

The litany of complaints against America is familiar. The suffering of the Palestinian

people, the double standard of insisting on democracy and supporting autocracy, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, water-boarding, and the gargantuan civilian death toll in Iraq, Afghanistan and increasingly Pakistan. With each deployment of US troops in Muslim lands, the Pentagon feeds al-Qaeda's narrative of victimisation by modern-day crusaders.

Nevertheless in May this year the CIA chief Michael Hayden claimed al-Qaeda had suffered "near strategic defeat". And the British government in its March 2008 National Security Strategy said terrorism did not at present pose a "strategic threat".

Those confident statements were based on the Western progress in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The very considerable resources of the Saudi royal family have been used to target al-Qaeda. Having pulled off the remarkable achievement of forcing the Americans out of their Saudi bases in 2003, al-Qaeda has been on the slide there ever since.

In Iraq too, al-Qaeda is on the run. America has gained the upper hand by holding talks, reaching alliances and paying off tribal