U.S. winning battles but ‘losing the war’ against global jihad, think tank concludes

The U.S. has been effective in battling specific extremist outfits like al Qaeda and Islamic State, but has failed to implement a long-term strategy to crush the deeper global jihadist movement, which is evolving and resurgent even after individual terrorist groups have been defeated.

That was the core finding of a report this week by a conservative Washington think tank warning of a languishing overall U.S. approach to the war on terror nearly two decades after the attacks of September11, 2001.

U.S. officials and agencies have “innovated rapidly and effectively on battlefields in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere,” according to the report by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).”However, American strategy and the intellectual and legal framework shaping it have stagnated.”

Overall, the strategy “misses” that groups like al Qaeda and IslamicState are “part of a global movement that persists beyond the defeat of specific organizations or death of a set of individuals,” wrote the report’s author, Katherine Zimmerman, research manager of the think tank’s “Critical Threats Project.”

“The Salafi-jihadi movement of which [such groups] are part continuously adapts at all levels of war to changing circumstances on the ground, defeats, and new opportunities. It is an agile learning and adaptive organism,” Ms. Zimmerman wrote, asserting that “the U.S. is not keeping pace with the strategic and operational transformations of the enemy, potentially putting America on the road to winning all the battles and losing the war.”

Ms. Zimmerman went on to argue the current strategic approach to defeating al Qaeda and other like-minded terrorist groups was developed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and has “changed little since then.”

“It identifies specific groups and individuals responsible for planning or attacking American interests and attacks, usually with armed force, to capture or kill them,” the AEI report said, asserting that the “oversimplification of the enemy into a series of discrete groups is the crack in the foundation of U.S. counterterrorism strategy.”

“America’s view of the enemy still centers on the terrorist threats that specific Salafi-jihadi groups pose to the United States homeland or American interests,” the 40-page document said. “It largely ignores the fact that the movement seeks to replace the governance systems of the Muslim-majority world, not primarily to attack America or Europe.”

It concluded that the current U.S. approach “will continue to yield short-lived victories at the expense of winning the long war.”

“Only by adapting to the new reality of the enemy and orienting on the full breadth of the Salafi-jihadi movement will the United States achieve any lasting success,” the report said.