Sam Heller

There are plenty of instances where the U.S. defines its interests in terms of those of its regional allies, as a sort of derivative – which is fine, that’s normal. Doesn’t mean it makes sense to get all spun backward about who’s doing a favor for whom.

16. So are these numbers then a verdict on the “War on Terror”? Or on something bigger – on the U.S./Western approach to foreign policy, on interventionism broadly, and on the willingness to disrupt local patterns and systems we often don’t understand?

15. Jihadists themselves admit they were in dire straits before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. If these big numbers can be traced to that and something like dumping weapons into a state-destroying rebellion in Syria – were those policy decisions grounded in CT, or largely unrelated?

14. Basically, jihadism’s numerical explosion is mostly because of the Iraq invasion and then the Arab Spring and its aftermath, on which jihadists were able to capitalize. More broadly, you can attribute it largely to state failure, which provides space for jihadist opportunism.

13. On what numbers tell us, in big picture terms: I don’t think this is a useful report card for counterterrorism efforts per se.

12. If we have both simultaneously – a few big organizations and more little whatevers – then counting each one as “one group” is not helpful. Anyway, number of groups is a measure of fragmentation, not overall strength.

11. Is it more or less dangerous to have more groups? Are we worried more about a single intra-movement hegemon, or dozens of little groups that can’t benefit from the same networks and economies of scale but might be harder targets – or which are incapable or dubiously real?)

10. Number of groups is even less useful, or even reliably knowable in a context like Syria. If we count HTS (which is real, with thousands of members) and Ansar al-Furqan (which is , with members) as two groups, what does that tell us?

9. Manpower doesn’t *not* matter – big numbers can suggest jihadists’ broadened appeal or progress towards toppling regional states, or provide raw material for future dispersed networks and mobilizations. But the numbers have limited worth without further interrogation.