Prediction: India, China will be economic giants

USATODAY.com: "By the year 2020, China and India will be vying with the United States for global economic supremacy, the nation's top intelligence analysts predict, and al-Qaeda will have withered away � only to be replaced by smaller, more splintered but equally deadly groups of terrorists.

Headquartered at the CIA in Langley, Va., but independent of the spy agency, the council coordinates the production of intelligence reports that combine the views of all 15 of the nation's intelligence agencies. In 2002, the council, then with a different membership, concluded in a National Intelligence Estimate, now largely discredited, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Rather than locking itself into a single prediction of what the world will look like in 2020, the council considered four hypothetical scenarios:

• A world dominated by Asian economic expansion;

• A world in which the United States shapes and organizes global change;

• The rise of a new Islamic Caliphate — an international Islamic authority capable of challenging Western norms and values;

• A "cycle of fear" scenario in which aggressive responses to terror threats lead to increasingly intrusive security measures, "possibly introducing an Orwellian world."

Much of the council's outlook for the world in 15 years is optimistic, however. The world economy will likely be 80% larger in 2020 than it was in 2000, and average income will be 50% higher. While the United States will retain its role as the world's dominant economy and military power, China and India, the world's two most populous countries, will see their clout grow substantially, the council predicts.

The council, whose members have access to the most sensitive intelligence data, predicts that by 2020, al-Qaeda will be superseded by smaller but equally violent Islamic groups. The same information-technology boom contributing to growth in China and India will help spread radical Islamic ideology, the council warns, and "enable the terrorist threat to become increasingly decentralized."