Intelligence Official Sees Little Progress Before Bush Exits

Kerr began the Jan. 21, 2009, "briefing" with Iraq, where he said al-Qaeda is weakened and violence has diminished. But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government "has had limited success in delivering government services and improving the quality of life for Iraqis," and "political accommodation will continue to be incremental."

In the Middle East peace process, Kerr said, discussions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have continued and have yielded improved security cooperation. But Hamas has remained popular, and "the Palestinian public has not seen tangible positive changes in key areas . . . such as improving freedom of movement and freezing Israeli settlement expansion," he said.

He said that Pakistan remains a valuable partner determined to strengthen its fight against terrorists, even in the midst of domestic political turmoil. But in response to a question, he said that "we don't know enough" about what is happening in Pakistan.

"One of the concerns we have is that as Pakistan looks inward," the western tribal areas "will be more hospitable to those who would strike us and less hospitable to us in trying to root out that problem," Kerr said.

He said that the intelligence community has no reason to change its mid-2007 judgment that Iran had ceased work on designing a nuclear weapon in 2003. "But since the halted activities were part of an unannounced secret program that Iran attempted to hide," he said, "we do not know if it has been restarted."

Designing weapons was easy, he said, compared with producing fissile material with which to arm them, and Iran's uranium enrichment efforts, suspended in 2003 and restarted in 2006, still face "significant technical problems." While it is possible that Iran could produce enough weapons-grade enriched uranium by 2009, "that is very unlikely," Kerr said, although it "probably" could do so "sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame."

"We assess with moderate to high confidence," he said, "that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."

Staff writers Michael D. Shear and Joby Warrick and researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.