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PETER BERGEN, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST (voice-over): It is the Bush administration’s greatest fear: Today’s Pakistan will become tomorrow’s pre-9/11 Afghanistan, a lawless home base for extremists, where al Qaeda can regroup to plot and prepare future large-scale terrorist attacks.

A gathering threat from Iraq, a safe haven for Al Qaeda; stockpiles of chemical weapons in the hands of forces deeply hostile to the United States; Iraqi terrorist groups capable of attacking American allies and even, perhaps, the homeland itself. That was the utterly false portrait of Iraq that the Bush administration painted in constructing a rationale to invade the country in March 2003

A gathering threat from Iraq, a safe haven for Al Qaeda; stockpiles of chemical weapons in the hands of forces hostile to the United States; Iraqi terrorist groups capable of attacking American allies and even, perhaps, the homeland itself.

BERGEN (voice-over): Back from eight years in exile, back into the fury of Pakistani politics, Benazir Bhutto is a national icon here, loved by millions, despised by many.

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last month, Bhutto made it clear she knew the risks of returning, and she accepted them.

Omar bin Laden, the fourth son of the Al Qaeda leader, cuts a striking figure. In one photo, he stares out from beneath an Adidas baseball cap, his beard closely trimmed–an entirely different look from his father’s seventh-century aesthetic. He wears jeans and sits next to his much older wife, a pale-faced British woman with pig tails, whom he divorced a mere five months into their marriage. While his father would not approve of his lifestyle choices, few men know the terrorist mastermind so well. When the Sudanese government exiled bin Laden in 1996, Omar was part of the small contingent that flew in a jet to Al Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary. He spent nearly five years living in the notorious training camps that bin Laden assembled.

So much attention is being paid, of course, to Iraq and to Afghanistan. But one of the next great places where potential threats is Pakistan. There was a suicide attack there today.

And a new poll out shows just how popular Osama bin Laden is in some parts of Pakistan, a country which is, in many ways, an ally of the United States in this so-called war on terror

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf — a key U.S. ally — is less popular in his own country than al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to a poll of Pakistanis conducted last month by an anti-terrorism organization.

One of the most bitter ironies of the Iraq tragedy is that our occupation has been a godsend to Al Qaeda and its affiliates, drawing thousands of foreign fighters to the country over the past four years. As a result, jihadist terrorists have, for the first time, secured a substantial presence in a country at the heart of the Middle East. The Iraq war has also inspired a rising wave of terrorist attacks, from London to Kabul, and it has helped to spread militant ideas among Iraq’s Sunnis, who were previously more secular than most other Muslims in the region

Stepping onto the balcony of the governor’s mansion in Uruzgan in southern Afghanistan, you quickly grasp the scale of the drug problem gripping the country. Beginning at the walls of the mansion and stretching as far as the eye can see are hundreds of acres of poppy fields ready for harvesting for opium sap, pretty much the only way to earn a living in poverty-stricken Uruzgan.

The last thing that seven Iraqi policemen at a checkpoint in Ramadi in late July saw was a woman approaching them. Seconds later, she detonated her explosives vest, killing herself and everybody else at the site. Just two weeks earlier in Pakistan, some would-be female suicide bombers were less successful in martyring themselves. When government forces stormed Islamabad’s Red Mosque, several women were among the die-hards hoping to make a stand. “We wanted to carry out suicide attacks . . . but we didn’t have sufficient explosives,” one woman later regretfully told the BBC.