Conventional wisdom — and the Bush administration — holds that the United States’ attack on Afghanistan dislodged and weakened the al-Qaida terrorist organization.

It’s back, a top terrorism expert told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday.

“Today, al-Qaida has not only regrouped, but it is on the march,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. “Al-Qaida is now functioning exactly as its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, envisioned it.”

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The Rand Corp.’s counterterrorism office has been studying captured al-Qaida literature and speeches over the last year — the so-called Harmony documents seized in Afghanistan and dating back to the mid-1980s — and has arrived at a very different conclusion.

“Today, al-Qaida is also frequently spoken of as it if is in retreat: a broken and beaten organization incapable of mounting further attacks on its own and instead having devolved operational authority either to its carious affiliates and associated or to entirely organically produced, homegrown, terrorist entities. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Hoffman told the committee.

The Afghan attack “pulverized” al-Qaida, Hoffman told United Press International Wednesday.

“I think we did do that, but this is a movement with enormous regenerative capacity — its message resonates, and it’s not wanting for volunteers,” Hoffman said. “They’ve adapted and adjusted to even our most consequential countermeasures.”

In the ensuing four years since the attack, the organization has evolved into what bin Laden set out to create: a fractured, worldwide movement inspired by bin Laden and united by a single vision, as well as a central organization that continues to direct the implementation of terrorist attacks.

“To the idea al-Qaida is on the run — how can that be if al-Qaida was directly responsible for the most consequential terrorist incident of the last year? (The London bombings) was not Sept. 11 but it was still a very significant attack,” Hoffman said. “It’s wishful thinking.”

Moreover, it was carried out by an al-Qaida cell British intelligence — one of the best counter-terrorist forces in the world — knew nothing about.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.

I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn’t respond.

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.