Are we winning the battle against terrorism?

• Position: Debate

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks killed almost 3,000 people in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, President George W. Bush declared that the United States was launching a "war on terror." The primary target of this war was Al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Within a month, U.S. troops were fighting in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was based.

Fifteen years later, Al Qaeda has been scattered and weakened, but it's still a threat. And the U.S. is now battling ISIS (the Islamic State of Irag and Syria) and homegrown terrorists inspired by ISIS. Two experts weigh in on whether or not we're making progress in the fight against terrorism.

YES Because of the political and media hype surrounding terrorism, many Americans think we're losing the battle. Politicians have pointed to the attacks in Orlando, Florida, last June and San Bernardino, California, in December 2015-both conducted by homegrown terrorists inspired by ISIS--as signs of a growing terrorist threat. But despite these few high-profile incidents, the evidence suggests that the U.S. and its allies are defeating ISIS, today's most significant terrorist threat.

During the past two years, ISIS has been losing ground. An international coalition has been steadily wearing it down. In October, the Iraqi army, supported by American air power and U.S. special forces, began an offensive to recapture the Iraqi city of Mosul, which ISIS has controlled since 2014. Raqqa, the city in Syria that serves as ISIS's capital, will eventually be captured, probably within the next year. At that point, ISIS will have lost so much territory that it will effectively cease to exist as a rogue state.

In addition to recapturing territory, the U.S. and its allies have killed top ISIS leaders and reduced the overall number of ISIS followers. As of July 2016, the U.S. military had killed approximately 45,000 ISIS fighters with air strikes.

The increase in terrorist attacks over the past year may, in fact, be a sign of weakness rather than strength. As ISIS is squeezed in its heartland, it lashes out farther abroad in a vain attempt to intimidate the United States and its allies. The global network of ISIS terrorist cells will be around longer than the group itself, but those too can and will be worn down. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies, rather than the military, will take the lead in combating them. This is the approach we took in fighting Al Qaeda, and we...