Yesterday the State Department released a discouraging report about the environment of terrorism in the world today.

A new report released by the U.S. State Department analyzing terrorist attacks reveals a sharp rise in both the number of attacks worldwide and the effectiveness of terror groups to inflict mass casualties.
According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), the number of terrorist attacks in 2014 increased by 35 percent, while total fatalities increased 81 percent.

That's an awfully poor short-term trend, but it actually is just a continuation of a horrible long-term trend.

More than 32,700 people were killed worldwide in a total of 13,463 terrorist attacks, with more than 34,700 reported injuries. 20 percent of those killed, however, are designated as the perpetrators of the attacks either by suicide or being killed by security forces responding to an attack.

In addition, the State Department accused Iran of 'continuing its “terrorist-related” activity' and said that Turkey was a 'main transit hub' for terrorists travelling to war zones.
The State Department when asked if the increased terrorism reflected a failure of our anti-terror strategy said, "The numbers don’t tell the whole story.”

My response to that is "the whole story is actually much worse."

We've been 'decapitating' terrorist leaders for nearly 14 years now. If the GWOT was like a game of Call of Duty then we would be winning. But if Vietnam has taught us anything, body counts do not equal victory.

Many officials and experts in the U.S. counterterrorism community now see the destruction of al-Qaeda and its progeny as a more distant goal than at any time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

I did a search and found the Defense Department's Strategic Plan for the GWOT from 2006. A quick reading shows how laughably vague our ideas are for fighting and winning this war. It contains a reference to "metrics" and "tracking progress to determine the effects".
However, all the way back in 2003 Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had this to say:

"Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?

We lacked those metrics in 2003, and we still lack them today. Without a way to measure if we are winning or losing there is no way for us to ever declare victory.
Even our definition of the people we are fighting is so vague that it is almost useless, except for cracking down on political dissent.

Without an official way of measuring I will attempt to use the more traditional ways.
In 2001, the CIA-FBI estimated that there were between 500-1,000 al-Qaeda members worldwide.
In 2011 the government estimate was 3,000-4,000 al-Qaeda members.
Today, because of the rise of Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affilliate in Syria, and the civil war in Yemen allowing AQAP to rebuild, the number of al-Qaeda jihadists globally now numbers in the tens of thousands.

After 14 years and trillions of dollars, al-Qaeda is now many times more numorous and larger than ever before.
But like the State Department says, that doesn't tell the whole story. It's much worse than that for two reasons.

The most obvious reason is that al-Qaeda gave birth to a monstrosity called ISIS that has eclipsed al-Qaeda is size, brutality, and ambition. Their caliphate is roughly the size of Italy, although the population is a tiny fraction.

The second reason is that al-Qaeda, after losing its war with ISIS in 2014, changed tactics and began seizing territory in the same way as ISIS. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are openly supporting al-Qaeda, while Qatar is trying to rebrand al-Qaeda as the "moderate alternative" to ISIS.
Thus al-Qaeda now has more allies than ever before.

Outside of the occassional headline about how we killed x number of terrorists, there is nothing but bad news here.
Terror attacks are going up. Terrorists are more numorous, more well-armed, and have more allies than ever before.
How can anyone deny that we are losing?

It is long past time to reassess our strategy and objectives. The first place to start is to actually define exactly who are enemies are. The next step is to define exactly what we hope to achieve.
Then and only then can we create a strategy that will achieve victory. Otherwise we continue to waste resources, create enemies, and make our nation less safe.