WASHINGTON

RECENTLY, CIA Director Michael Hayden set off a debate with provocative statements about the progress he saw in the fight against al-Qaida. The Journal’s June 4 editorial “Shifting sands of war” quoted his claims. One of the great challenges in assessing progress in the “war on terror” is scope of the concept. When considering the impact of developments in Iraq on the terrorist threat, it helps to start off with some definition of the problem.

Throughout the 1990s, the United States faced an increasing threat from radical Islamist groups. Al-Qaida was the most prominent and globally focused of these groups, though anti-American radicals operated in many parts of the world holding at risk American interests and lives. On Sept.11, 2001, that threat came home to us with devastating attacks on the American homeland.

The key challenge in assessing whether we are making progress in the war on terror is whether the core threat ultimately came from those who attacked us or whether it came from other radicals who might choose to attack us in the future. Iraq was a country with terrorist ties, but Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Iran is a country with terrorist ties, but it also had nothing to do with 9/11.

We are seeing clear progress in Iraq right now in defeating radical Islamist groups who have used violence against American forces. But does this translate into a victory against al-Qaida? And if so, a victory compared to what?

A challenge with declaring victory is that prior to 2003, there was no al-Qaida threat from Iraq. Returning to that status quo ante is not a victory. It is simply cleaning up a mess. Worse, what happened in Iraq was not a defeat for al-Qaida, it was a defeat of a rogue movement affiliated with al-Qaida late in the game.

Al-Qaida sought to take advantage of a growing insurgency in Iraq, but unfortunately for them they affiliated themselves with a psychopath in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a man who was not carrying out al-Qaida’s strategy, but was actively rejecting the advice of al-Qaida number 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri to refrain from attacks against fellow Muslims.

In short, our defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq is a setback for our enemies, but it has little significance on the broader movement, which never relied on support from Iraq in the first place. What’s more, there is no good evidence to suggest that Iraq is any less of a recruiting tool for al-Qaida globally, regardless of the current orientation of Iraqi Sunnis.

In the broader war on terror, the trends are notably worse. Al-Qaida has a safe haven in Pakistan, and the new Pakistani government is pursuing peace accords with the radicals rather than seeking to root them out. We may be carrying out more Predator strikes now than in the past, but ultimately, absent some presence on the ground, al-Qaida will continue to operate with relative impunity along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

We have cut off access to traditional sources of funding for terrorists through better financial controls, but the dramatic explosion of poppy production in Afghanistan has probably replaced that lost revenue. There is some debate among radical intellectuals about the legitimacy of terror, but there is still no shortage of violent radical media and there is clear evidence of an increasing number of terrorist freelancers self-organizing to perpetrate acts of violence.

Given this mix of positive and negative trends, how do we assess whether the threat is diminishing? One useful measure is the number of terrorist incidents by Islamist groups. Even if we ignore attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan and those related to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, we see that though the number of attacks annually has stabilized, it has unfortunately stabilized at a level that is more than twice what is was before the Iraq war and roughly 10 times the level it was in the late 1990s.

The problem with our “war on terror” is that instead of focusing on the people who actually attacked us, we are constantly being distracted by trying to prevent attacks by others. Is it possible that, absent the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein might have launched a global terrorist campaign that dwarfed the efforts of al-Qaida? Is it possible that even today Iran poses a greater threat than Osama bin Laden? Certainly, that is possible. But we should not confuse victories over potential threats with progress against actual ones.

We are increasingly undoing the damage the Iraq war caused to our global struggle against violent jihadists. But stanching self-inflicted wounds is not the same as defeating an adversary.

Bernard I. Finel is a senior fellow at the American Security Project (ASP) and a former professor of military strategy and operations at the U.S. National War College. He is the lead author of ASP’s annual study Are We Winning: Measuring Progress in the Struggle Against Violent Jihadism.