Do You Remember al Qaeda? They Remember You

With attention focused on the Islamic State, it's sometimes easy to forget that United States military forces are still deeply engaged with al Qaeda. And despite repeated claims from the US government that the group is teetering on the brink of defeat, it's becoming increasingly clear that al Qaeda's not dead yet — and that the fight against it is far from over.

In October alone, the US military helped disrupt a huge al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and killed, via drone strike, a senior al Qaeda leader living in Syria. The Pentagon announced both counterterrorism victories with little fanfare, and the stories received relatively little media attention.

But both events raise serious questions about the actual progress the US has made against the group responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The US is still hunting al Qaeda across the globe despite years of war costing more than $2 trillion. Even though al Qaeda has taken quite a licking — with its top leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan dead, and spin-off groups in Yemen and Somalia getting pounded flat — it just keeps on ticking.

One of the major accomplishments of the George W. Bush administration listed on the White House's website is that “more than three-quarters of al Qaeda's known leaders and associates [were] detained or killed.”

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Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an editor of The Long War Journal, said this has always been a bad measure of the group's strength. “US intelligence never told us how many top leaders they had to begin with … they're giving us a numerator without a denominator.”

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