NEW YORK - US missile strikes have reduced Al Qaeda's global reach but heightened the threat to Pakistan as the militant group disperses its cells inside the Pakistani territory and fights to maintain its sanctuaries, The New York Times reported Wednesday. Unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials, cited by the newspaper in a dispatch from Islamabad, acknowledge that the strikes and raids by the Pakistani military are proving effective, but they express growing alarm that the drone strikes in particular are having an increasingly destabilizing effect on their country. They also voiced fears that the expected arrival of 17,000 American troops in Afghanistan this spring and summer would add to the stresses by pushing more Taliban fighters into Pakistan. The assessment was provided during a two-hour briefing by senior analysts and officials of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency's policy, the dispatch said. It said the analysis reflected the increasing public pressure on the Pakistani government to oppose the drone attacks, which are deeply unpopular here for the civilian casualties they have inflicted. "But it also underscored ominous signs of Al Qaeda's resilience and pointed to new and unintended dangers for American policy in the region " a rapidly destabilized, nuclear-armed Pakistan, a state with a weak civilian government and a military struggling to fight an expanding insurgency," Times' correspondents Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez wrote in a joint dispatch. The sobering Pakistani assessment was in contrast to the optimism voiced earlier this month by the new American director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair. While the Pakistani analysis, the dispatch said agreed with Blair's conclusion that Al Qaeda's ability to conduct large-scale attacks against the United States was most likely degraded, it also signaled no cessation to the attacks by Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban aimed at undermining akistan's government. The Pakistani officials, according to the dispatch, suggested that Al Qaeda was replenishing killed fighters and midlevel leaders with less experienced but more hard-core militants, who are considered more dangerous because they have fewer allegiances to local Pakistani tribes. Al Qaeda was using sophisticated Web sites and sleeper cells across the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia to enlist young fighters who were less patient or inclined to plan and carry out far-reaching global attacks and who had instead redirected their energies on more immediate targets and on fomenting insurgency in Pakistan, the officials said. Qaeda leaders have also increased their financing and logistical support for the Taliban and other militant groups, having come to see the survival of Qaeda sanctuaries as dependent on the ability of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan to hold territory. It's morphing into a monster and growing uglier," said one senior Pakistani intelligence official.