Illustration by Tom Bachtell

In the summer of 1988, in the University Town neighborhood of Peshawar, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden founded Al Qaeda, which means “the Base,” in Arabic. As a calling card for terror or revolution, the name lacked pizzazz. Bases are safe places, not threatening ones. We can infer from the historical record that bin Laden’s comrades either couldn’t come up with a better idea or didn’t want to annoy him by questioning his brainstorm.

A decade later, Al Qaeda announced itself as a global menace by bombing two American Embassies in Africa. The group’s ambitions escalated until the apex of September 11th. That day’s mass murder assured Al Qaeda’s notoriety, but the Bush Administration raised its profile further by embarking on a Global War on Terror, in which Al Qaeda figured centrally. For a time, bin Laden’s brand thrived.

When President Obama came to office, he scuttled the Global War on Terror—he objected to its Orwellian tone and its imprecision. He has framed, instead, a more prosaic-sounding war, against Al Qaeda and “associated forces.” Obama’s reasoning is that Al Qaeda and its allies distinguish themselves from other terrorist groups with their intent to attack the United States, and that they remain cohesive enough to jointly qualify as an enemy force under the laws of war. Worldwide drone strikes, indefinite detention in Guantánamo and elsewhere, and military trials are some of the policies that flow from this logic.

Since U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden, in May, 2011, the President’s aides have trumpeted success in their campaign. Last September, Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testified to Congress that “core Al Qaeda”—the original, Arab-led group, whose surviving members, hiding mainly in Pakistan, are thought to number in the dozens or low hundreds—is at “its weakest point in the last ten years.” Yet, to explain the White House’s policy, he and many other counterterrorism analysts warn of a resilient threat posed by Al Qaeda “franchises”: regional offspring of varying provenance which have lately overtaken the parent outfit as fonts of perceived danger.

Experts refer to these groups by their acronyms, such as AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq), AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, mainly in Yemen), and AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the North African group that has recently been attacked by French forces in Mali). Each group has a distinctive local history and a mostly local membership. None have strong ties to “core Al Qaeda,” which is now led by bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, although some of the groups have maintained contact with its operatives. What’s in a name? Of the several wars that Obama inherited, the war against Al Qaeda is the only one that he has not promised to end. The conflict presents a problem of definition: as long as there are bands of violent Islamic radicals anywhere in the world who find it attractive to call themselves Al Qaeda, a formal state of war may exist between Al Qaeda and America. The Hundred Years War could seem a brief skirmish in comparison.

There is no question that some of these groups pose a serious threat to the United States. Jabhat al-Nusra, an AQI spinoff that has lately blossomed in the bloody fields of Syria’s civil war, is worryingly ascendant among the opposition forces seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad. If a group as radical and as hardened as that one were to acquire some of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile or seized power after Assad’s fall, the results might be disastrous. And AQAP in Yemen attempted to blow up an American airliner landing in Detroit three years ago, on Christmas Day.

But there are derivative groups whose lines of work are hard to differentiate from those of Somali pirate gangs or the Sicilian Mafia. AQIM, for example, is a shabby network that includes kidnappers and drug racketeers, whose main income in recent years has come from ransom payments and the smuggling of Colombian cocaine and Moroccan hashish through the Sahara. AQIM and its splinters enforced a brutal Islamist ideology when they captured territory in Mali last year, and a breakaway unit attacked a remote gas field in eastern Algeria in January. These groups, however, lack a demonstrated capacity to strike in Europe or across the Atlantic. Lumping them in with more potent jihadist groups, on scant evidence of their connections, is a prescription for ascribing indefinite and elastic war powers to the White House.

Bin Laden himself may have been reconsidering the Al Qaeda brand. A document by an unidentified author recovered from bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, laments the name’s vagueness and its lack of religious content. The author mused about alternatives, such as Muslim Unity Group. If bin Laden had renamed Al Qaeda, he would have succeeded, at least, in irritating Obama’s speechwriters by forsaking the brand they have used while defining the President’s war against terrorists.

Late last year, the Pentagon’s departing general counsel, Jeh Johnson, delivered a speech before the Oxford Union entitled “The Conflict Against Al Qaeda and Its Affiliates: How Will It End?” No time soon, he reported. He said that he could imagine a “tipping point” when Al Qaeda and its affiliates were so decrepit that policing and intelligence activity might supplant the current state of war, a change that would reduce the scope for drone attacks and might end detention without trial. But a V-AQ Day is not yet in sight, Johnson concluded. “There is still danger,” he said, because Al Qaeda has become “more decentralized,” with “most terrorist activity now conducted by local franchises.”

This March marks ten years since the United States led an invasion of Iraq based on bad intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. That dark anniversary offers a reminder, if one is required, that in any conflict where a President claims war powers the Chief Executive’s analytical precision in describing the enemy is a grave responsibility. A franchise is a business that typically operates under strict rules laid down by a parent corporation; to apply that label to Al Qaeda’s derivative groups today is false. If Al Qaeda is not coherent enough to justify a formal state of war, the war should end; if the Administration wishes to argue that some derivative groups justify emergency measures, it should identify that enemy accurately.

Jihadist violence presents an enduring danger. Its proponents will rise and ebb; the amorphous threats that they pose will require adaptive security policies and, occasionally, military action. Yet the empirical case for a worldwide state of war against a corporeal thing called Al Qaeda looks increasingly threadbare. A war against a name is a war in name only. ♦