It's weird to see stories like these, suggesting that al-Qaeda may be having a hard time staying afloat.  This piece by the Brookings Institution's Daniel Byman is a nice backgrounder to the campagin that the US and its allies has been waging against al-Qaeda for almost twenty years.  If you push through it to the other pieces it links, you'll find a pretty good recounting of the campaign the US intelligence apparatus, with allies within the US state and outside of it, has mounted against al-Qaeda over this period, both involving direct violence and financial and other means.  Short story is: vilence isn't declining, but maybe al-Qaeda has had its day.

This is not the post of someone who recommends that anyone do a "victory lap."  It's not clear that there is any victory.  Nor even that there was a war with clear sides.  The threat of "Islamic terrorism" has always been misunderstood and mis-addressed.  Boko Haram, ISIS, the war in Syria, the war in Yemen, the Iranian Republican Guard, Hamas--there are real players out there, and many of them continue to threaten civilians and others in the middle east, elsewhere in the Islamic world, and everywhere in the world.  There is a lot of ferment in the Islamic world, and the violence is real, though it may not be something US citizens are as aware of--because the vast, vast majority of "Islamic terrorism" is directed against Muslims, in Muslim-majority countries, overwhelmingly in the middle east.  (Not so much in the most populous Muslim states, like India, Indonesia, and Malaysia, however.  It's always worth noting, in English-language posts anyway, that "Muslim" does not equal "Arab.")  I continue to think that the core issue here is an ongoing struggle between different authority sources in middle-eastern countries, weaponized by ideologues in various forms of radical Islam, other regional ideologues who are not involved in radical Islam, and wholly other ideologues in the West.  Without offering anything in the form of moral equivalence, the exploitation of fear of "Islamic radicalism" will be one of the great shames of American foreign policy over the period from 2001 till, well, we don't know when.  At least for the forseeable future, anyway.

This is a strange moment for me.  In my book The Republic of Grace, published in 2010, I told the story of going into a class on the day Boris Yeltsin died and beginning the lecture with, "Once upon a time, there was a thing called the Soviet Union..."  I said it was inevitable we would say a similar thing about al-Qaeda and also about the "War on Terror."  The question was, what would we do with this knowledge, what would we do with this knowledge now.  We know there will be an end to this war, and we know it won't end with anything like "Sharia law" being proclaimed from Washington DC.  So shouldn't that effect how we conduct ourselves in it now?  Shouldn't this mean that we think of this more in terms of international policing than military campaign?  Above all, shouldn't it mean we try to retain as much of our decency as possible?  These are questions that still seem pertinent to me, and I wish more people were thinking about them.

Another thing.  This spring I watched The Looming Tower, a pretty good miniseries adaptation of the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright.  Unsurprisingly, I thought the book was better.  But the miniseries was good enough, and did a good job of finding a single plot-line in the book and driving the story forward with it.  It was depressing.  It was also fascinating as a depiction of how people, who know something is real, still cannot figure out how to get other people to see the reality that they want them to confront.  This could be climate change.  It could be the 2007/8 financial crisis (brought on, in part, by the housing crisis, which Michael Lewis described in his wonderful The Big Short--another story of the same type).  It could be the campaign of Russia against US legitimacy, via election-wrecking and other means.  It could be any number of challenges we face now.  I wonder how to make us better able to see the real shape of our world.  

The US apparatus developed against al-Qaeda, over the past several decades, is a formidable success.  If only we could figure out how such apparatuses wouldn't be needed in the future.