We are finding fewer al Qaeda targets in Pakistan

Washington Post:

The leadership ranks of the main al-Qaeda terrorist network, once expansive enough to supervise the plot for Sept. 11, 2001, have been reduced to just two figures whose demise would mean the group’s defeat, U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials said. 

Aymen al-Zawahiri and his second in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi, are the last remaining “high-value” targets of the CIA’s drone campaign against al-Qaeda in Pakistan, U.S. officials said, although lower-level fighters and other insurgent groups remain a focus of Predator surveillance and strikes. 

Al-Qaeda’s contraction comes amid indications that the group has considered relocating in recent years but that it ruled out other destinations as either unreachable or offering no greater security than their missile-pocked territory in Pakistan, U.S. officials said. 

The group’s weakened condition has raised questions for the CIA about its deployment of personnel and resources. The agency’s station in Islamabad remains one of its largest in the world, and the bulk of the CIA’s drone fleet continues to patrol Pakistan’s tribal region, even though U.S. counterterrorism officials now assess al-Qaeda's offshoot in Yemen as a significantly greater threat. 

The CIA has so far resisted moving operatives, drones or other resources away from Pakistan more than temporarily, largely because CIA Director David H. Petraeus and other senior officials — mindful that al-Qaeda has regrouped in the past — think their unfinished priority is to extinguish the network’s base. 

“Now is not the time to let up the pressure,” said a U.S. official familiar with drone operations, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “We’ve got an opportunity to keep them down, and letting up now could allow them to regenerate.”

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We are also attacking al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia.  The shrinking target list of al Qaeda in Pakistan is a result of attrition.  But, the organization is not dead yet.  We should continue the hunt for Zawahiri and Libi until they are brought to justice.