Washington: A US think tank has warned that disarming the al-Qaida network needs as long time as a generation.

International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in its annual survey report has claimed that about 18,000 al-Qaida terrorists are present around the world while more are being recruited.

Al-Qaida remains the greatest threat to global security. Its network is "more insidious and just as dangerous" as when it carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks. "The most resilient global concern is still al-Qaida."

The report also said the US is likely to scale down its grand vision of a democratic Middle East in the post-Saddam era, while the al-Qaida remains the greatest threat to global security.

"Whatever the procedural dispensation, forging unity and democracy in substance in Iraq will be difficult," said the London-based independent think tank. It doubted that the US administration, with the war behind it, would have the staying power to fulfill its goal of setting up a democratic regime in Baghdad that would serve as an example to the rest of the region.

"Overseeing Iraq's rebirth as a pluralistic democracy is likely to require exposure and staying power in the Middle East, and a taste for nation-building generally, that have not distinguished US policy in the past. "Yet these are the prerequisites of the propagation of liberalisation -- the MacArthur decade -- envisaged by the Bush administration for the region, or ever of any lesser facsimile thereof," it said.

US President George Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union address, committed Washington to the goals of bringing the rule of law, respect for women, free speech, equal rights and religious tolerance to the Middle East.

"Realising them, however, will be difficult and fraught with risks," the Institute warned. "Regime change in Iraq ... may encourage democratisation in a few Gulf states, including Iran and Saudi Arabia," the IISS said in its report drawn up before the April 9 fall of Baghdad.

"But, despite the visions of Bush administration 'idealists', the American public's disinclination to expend the resources or energy required to nurture friendly democracies could produce something closer to a 'realist' or 'minimalist' post-Saddam US Middle East policy," it said.

The IISS was also sceptical over the US commitment to help broker a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians with the internationally backed roadmap peace plan, which calls for a Palestinian state by 2005.

"Bush agreed to publish the roadmap only after (Britain's Prime Minister Tony) Blair had exerted intense pressure on him in mid-March," on the eve of the US-led war in Iraq, it said.

"Indications are that the Bush administration will take little domestic political risk for progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front," by leaning on Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon after the war, said the think- tank.

"While there is a chance that the utopians ... will prevail and induce Bush to put pressure on Sharon ... it appeared at least as likely that realist caution would win the day and that another opportunity would be missed."

ANI