America's weakened economic position made it seem mortal, and jihadis have since been counting on the U.S. to crumble under the weight of its own security expenditures. "To bring down America we do not need to strike big," Inspire asserted in November 2010. "In such an environment of security phobia that is sweeping America, it is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve less players and less time to launch and thus we may circumvent the security barriers America worked so hard to erect." This strategy of smaller yet more frequent attacks is designed precisely to drive up the burden of U.S. security costs.

Some counterterrorism analysts have suggested that al-Qaeda should now be understood, more than anything else, as an idea. As a 2004 report in the L.A. Times put it, al-Qaeda should perhaps be seen as "more of an ideology than an organization." With its "strategy of a thousand cuts," al-Qaeda the organization is attempting to more effectively harness al-Qaeda the idea by inciting those who share its ideology to lash out on their own. An article in Inspire by Ibrahim al Banna implored in November 2010, for example: "Dear Muslim, hasten to join the ranks of the mujahidin or to form cells to perform operations against the disbelievers in their own land."

Because the key to the success of this strategy is driving up security costs, in this new phase even attacks that do not destroy their target -- such as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to bring down a plane with an explosive hidden in his underwear, or a more recent plot in which bombs hidden in ink cartridges were placed on UPS and FedEx planes -- could be considered successes against America. As the radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al Awlaki has written of the ink cartridge plot, which did not blow up the cargo planes on which the bombs were placed, if the plot had destroyed the planes it "would have made us very pleased but according to our plan and specified objectives it was only a plus." If we take him at his word, then in his view the attack succeeded despite the fact that it killed nobody.

This is the kind of strategy that can maintain a quick operational tempo even after the loss of a leader. In the medium term we can probably expect to see a number of terrorist plots with no apparent connection to al-Qaeda's central leadership. And we can further expect the commentariat to conclude that, because these plots have no apparent connection to the group's leadership, al-Qaeda has been either severely degraded or marginalized.

But we've been down this road before. After al-Qaeda lost its safe haven in Afghanistan as a result of the U.S. invasion, al-Qaeda's central leadership was in disarray. The organization's regional nodes, along with other more localized jihadi groups, took the lead in operations. On October 8, 2002, for example, two gunmen linked to al-Qaeda opened fire on U.S. Marines engaged in training exercises on the island of Failaka off Kuwait's coast, killing one. Just four days later, Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyya executed a series of bomb blasts in the tourist district of Kuta on Indonesia's Bali island, killing 202. And on October 23, Chechen terrorists seized a Moscow theater packed with 850 people. The siege ended only after Russian special forces pumped a fast-acting sleeping gas through holes that had been bored into the theater's auditorium.