NEW YORK, Nov 26: Pakistan has replaced Iraq as Al Qaeda’s main focus, and the group has stepped up its efforts to destabilise the nuclear-armed South Asian nation, the Wall Street Journal quoted a senior US military commander as saying on Wednesday.

“Iraq is now a rear-guard action on the part of Al Qaeda,” Gen James Conway, the head of the Marine Corps and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview with the newspaper.

“They’ve changed their strategic focus not to Afghanistan but to Pakistan, because Pakistan is the closest place where you have the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons.”

Gen Conway also offered a stark assessment of the Afghan situation, saying the Taliban had built a rudimentary command-and-control network that enabled the group’s leadership to launch direct attacks across the country.

“They move troops around. They resupply. They provide money,” he said. “It’s effective and it’s real. It’s not just happenstance that these guys know where to go and what to do.”

The newspaper observed that senior US military and civilian officials had grown increasingly pessimistic about Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last month, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told lawmakers he was planning to develop a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan that would for the first time focus on both countries which, he said, were “inextricably linked in a common insurgency that crosses the border between them”.

Gen Conway told the paper that Pakistan’s best troops were deployed along its border with India and weren’t being used in the fight against the militants.

Pakistan’s failure to take concerted action against the militants, he said, had led the CIA and the US military’s secretive Special Operations Command to launch a wave of missile strikes against insurgent targets inside Pakistan.

Gen Conway said the attacks had killed Al Qaeda figures involved in planning attacks on targets in Europe and the US. “It is important that we keep them on the run,” he said.