Sadly, the most recent data points suggest that the U.S.’s understanding of al-Qaeda remains limited. The intelligence community had for years believed that Osama bin Laden could be found in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas — and not in Abbottabad, where he was actually located. Moreover, the dominant view in the intelligence community was that bin Laden had been only a figurehead in al-Qaeda, whereas the early reports of the information unearthed in the Abbottabad raid suggest that he was in fact far more involved in running the network than analysts believed. (There has been pushback against these findings by way of selective leaks to the media, but I am quite skeptical of the claims that bin Laden wasn’t actually running al-Qaeda at the time of his death.)

Further, other recent evidence suggests that we continue to underestimate the strength of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. During the chaos that has gripped Yemen this year, for example, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was able to “seize control over swaths of hundreds of kilometers from Lodar city of Yemen’s southern Abyan province to southeast Shabwa province’s city of Rodhom.” Tribal chieftains told Xinhua that AQAP had established checkpoints as well as military camps in that area. This is not meant to suggest that al-Qaeda will hold this territory for a significant length of time. But the fact that the group was able to make such territorial gains suggests that previous estimates of the group’s military power in Yemen did not capture its full strength.