JAKARTA, 2 September 2003 — Working less like a corporation with branch offices and more like Mafia-style family groups, militant cells in Asia have shown amazing resilience in the face of global efforts to eliminate terror.

After almost two years of intelligence operations and hundreds of arrests, Asian security forces still stand on high alert against radicals determined to stage deadly attacks. But the only certainty, say analysts and intelligence operatives, is that someone, somewhere is planning attacks and one will inevitably succeed. “I believe there are new operations being planned and some of them may be very severe indeed,” said Ross Babbage, head of the Strategic and Defense Studies Center in Canberra.

Captured militants interrogated by security services have already revealed much larger and less homogenous networks than previously thought — many with only tenuous links and even more disparate goals.

“We have made some progress, damaged some capabilities, but a lot more progress is required before we can start relaxing,” said Babbage, a former senior Australian intelligence officer. Huge progress has been made through hundreds of arrests and enhanced cooperation between Asian security services, but the hunt may also be feeding the violence.

Uday Bhaskar, a former Indian Navy commodore now with the New Delhi-based Institute of Defense Studies and Analysis, said some dormant terror cells had been stirred into action since the deadly attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

The attack on the United Nations’ Iraq headquarters in Baghdad, the blast at a US-run hotel in Indonesia and bombings in India’s commercial hub, Bombay, were the most recent examples of a pattern, he said.

“I say this with great regret, that this is a pattern that is only going to increase or intensify in the next few months.” Despite last month’s arrest of the man suspected of being one of the kingpins of the shadowy Southeast Asian network known as Jemaah Islamiah, analysts say the group remains active and dangerous.

“The information emerging from the interrogation of JI suspects is a bigger organization than previously thought, with a depth of leadership,” said Sidney Jones, Indonesia project director for the International Crisis Group (ICG), in a recent report.

Jemaah Islamiah is believed by many experts to be the regional arm of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.