Over the past eight years, the signature element of the Obama administration’s conduct of the war on al-Qaeda has been increased drone strikes against the organization’s leaders. These, according to officials, have degraded it to the edge of defeat. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross calls this view into question, citing, among other things, complaints from the U.S. Central Command over political pressure to produce rosy evaluations of the wars against al-Qaeda and Islamic State. (Interview by the Cipher Brief.)

[I]f one looks at the number of countries that violent, non-state actors have brought to ruin or have cleaved apart, it’s rather alarming. They range from Mali to Libya to Yemen, to Iraq and Syria—none of which was on fire in this way at the beginning of President Obama’s watch.

So what went wrong? Obviously, not all of this can be attributed to the president’s policies. . . . But we can reasonably criticize the decision to intervene in Libya. That’s where things really went off the rails. The Libya intervention ended up creating more regional chaos, at a time when there were already governments being overthrown in Egypt and Tunisia. Libya has remained a jihadist hotbed since Muammar Qaddafi’s fall, and the war there directly led to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s (AQIM) takeover of northern Mali, which is of course connected to the jihadist insurgency that exists there today. . . .

[Another] thing I would point to is that the Obama administration’s evaluation of the decline of al-Qaeda’s core was, in my judgment, not correct. Therefore, I believe that counterterrorism policy has often proceeded from a mistaken set of assumptions. . . .

[Al-Qaeda] clearly has been damaged, but the broader question is how much did this damage weaken it overall? Al-Qaeda’s core leadership is meant to be resilient in the face of attrition. Obviously, whenever senior leaders are taken out and someone like bin Laden is killed, there is a degree of weakening. But I’m skeptical that it was weakened as much as popular conception holds.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.