ALEX COHEN: On MORNING EDITION today, Steve Inskeep spoke with President Bush's media adviser and friend, Karen Hughes. She is leaving her state department job promoting this country to the world. Karen Hughes acknowledged the standing of the U.S. has slipped. But she said the terrorist leadership of al-Qaida is even more reviled.

CHADWICK: She is missing the point - that's what journalist Peter Bergen argues in The New Republic magazine. He writes frequently about terrorism. Last year, he published the book, "The Osama bin Laden I Know," based on interviews he conducted with the al-Qaida founder a decade ago. We spoke earlier about this new article, titled "War of Error." Peter Bergen, the subtitle of your article in The New Republic is "How Osama bin Laden Beat George Bush." Defend that.

Mr. PETER BERGEN (Journalist): If we had this conversation in 2002, I think it would have been safe to say that al-Qaida, by its own account, was on the run. Most of its leaders were captured or killed. Some of the documents we picked up in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban were quite critical of bin Laden's decision to do the 9/11 attacks because they basically, you know, led to the fall of the Taliban, the destruction of their safe haven in Afghanistan. And basically the organization, you know, been taking a huge hit.

Now of course, five years later, the situation looks very different, where al-Qaida has been - is resurgent on the Afghan-Pakistan border, has conducted significant terrorist attacks in places like London, has exerted a great deal of influence strategically about what's going on in Iraq, getting United Nations to pull out, getting much of the international community to pull out because of suicide attacks. And then, of course, sparking civil war and amplifying it with the attack on the golden mosque in Samarra in 2006.

Osama bin Laden is still out there influencing the jihadi networks around the world with his video tapes and audio tapes. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's number two, is still out there. GSPC, which is the largest Algerian terrorist group, last year announced it's now part of al-Qaida. People don't join groups that they think are going out of business. And the influence of al-Qaida on the Taliban, both tactically and ideologically, is playing out in the rising levels of violence we're seeing in Afghanistan. ...

To listen to the complete inverview, please follow this link, and visit NPR's website. Peter Bergen is a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.