Despite errors, drone strikes batter al-Qaida's Pakistani core

LONDON - Revelations of new high-level losses among al-Qaida's top leadership in Pakistan's tribal belt have underscored how years of U.S. drone strikes have diminished and dispersed the militant group's upper ranks and forced them to cede prominence and influence to more aggressive offshoots in Yemen and Somalia.

While the CIA drone strike that killed two Western hostages has led to intense criticism of the drone program and potentially a reassessment of it, the U.S. successes over the years in targeting and killing senior al-Qaida operatives in their home base has left the militant group's leadership diminished and facing difficult choices, counterterrorism officials and analysts say.

That process of attrition has been accelerated by the emergence of the Islamic State, whose arresting brutality and superior propaganda have sucked up funding and recruits. In the tribal belt, a Pakistani military drive that started last summer has forced al-Qaida commanders into ever more remote areas like the Shawal Valley, where two of them were killed alongside Warren Weinstein, an American hostage, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian hostage, on Jan. 15.

"Core al-Qaida is a rump of its former self," said a U.S. counterterrorism official, in an assessment echoed by several European and Pakistani officials.

The Pakistanis estimate that al-Qaida has lost 40 loyalists, of all ranks, to U.S. drone strikes in the past six months - a higher toll than other sources have tracked but indicative of a broader trend. Now, they say, al-Qaida commanders are moving back to the relative safety, and isolation, of locations they once fled.

Yet militancy experts caution that is too early to sound the death knell for al-Qaida's leaders, for whom patience and adaptability are hallmarks, and who remain the principal jihadi group focused on attacking the West.

"People always want to know when the job will be finished," said Michael Semple, a militancy expert at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. "I don't think we can talk about that. They're on the back foot, rather than being eliminated."

The group had put hope for new leadership on al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent, a local franchise begun in September by the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri, ostensibly to counter Islamic State recruitment efforts.

For now, al-Qaida's top leadership will probably be preoccupied with its survival rather than plotting attacks on the West, Semple said.