How is online jihad to be stopped? Can al Qaeda be driven from its virtual haven in cyberspace? The United States has played a leading role in strategy formulation, focusing primarily on efforts to present and disseminate a more moderate view of Islam, as well as to highlight the heinous acts of the terrorists. The simple problem with each of these efforts is that neither works. Over 95 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims already reject al Qaeda and other extremists — but the jihadists don’t need massive popular support to fill their ranks, just a sliver of Islamic society, still numbering in the many tens of millions, from which to draw recruits. Our moderate messaging won’t sway them. With regard to highlighting acts of terror, the jihadist rebuttal — featuring scathing indictments of the invasion of Iraq, abuse at Abu Ghraib, the killings of innocents by drones, and more — has proved quite effective.

As to attempts to disrupt or shut down jihadist websites, these too are ineffective, perhaps even counterproductive, undertakings. It is all too easy for material on sites that have been shut down to pop up again quickly on new sites. This sort of cat-and-mouse game has been going on for many years, with all too little to show for the effort. Besides, many intelligence professionals make the point that there is more to be learned from keeping these sites up and monitoring them than from taking them down. Clearly, though, not enough is being learned about al Qaeda’s intentions, about the identities of potential recruits, or even, after all these years, about money flows. If intelligence gleaned from cyberspace had given the counterterrorist coalition anything like the “information edge” enjoyed by the Allies against the Axis powers in World War II, the age of terror would already be over.