The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that terrorist groups require physical sanctuaries to execute catastrophic attacks. These sanctuaries give militants “time, space, and ability to perform competent planning and staff work,” as well as “opportunities and space to recruit, train, and select operatives with the needed skills and dedication.”

Al-Qaeda enjoyed one sanctuary on September 11, 2001, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Today, al-Qaeda affiliates enjoy four: in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and northern Mali. The U.S. has no clear strategy for dislodging the group from these areas, a fact that in itself suggests that it is far too early to declare victory.

But beyond the threat of a catastrophic attack, al-Qaeda’s overarching strategy is working fairly well. The group sees the economy as the United States’ key vulnerability, and the collapse of the financial sector in September 2008 made America seem mortal. As a result, jihadis underwent an adaptation to something they call the “strategy of a thousand cuts.”

The gist of this strategy is to perpetrate smaller, more frequent attacks, some of which are designed to drive up security costs for Western countries. Al-Qaeda operatives have placed three bombs on passenger planes in the past 21 months: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underpants bomb in December 2009, and two bombs hidden in ink cartridges in October 2010.

Abdulmutallab’s detonator failed, and authorities found the ink cartridge bombs before their timers were set to explode, but al-Qaeda doesn’t necessarily view those attacks as failures. Radical Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki explained that the ink cartridge plot confronted al-Qaeda’s foes with a dilemma. “You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package,” he wrote, “or you do nothing and we keep trying.”

Our current levels of security spending are unsustainable, while our defenses remain inefficient. We are moving into an age of austerity, and simply slashing security expenditures will make successful attacks more likely if our officials cannot find ways to do more with less.

The Obama administration now speaks of al-Qaeda being on its death bed—”the brink of collapse,” as the Washington Post put it. Yet there is no reason to think this is any more true than it was in 2003, when President Bush boasted that two-thirds of the group’s known leadership had been captured or killed. Or in 2006, when the intelligence community held that the global jihadi movement was “decentralized, lacks a coherent strategy, and is becoming more diffuse.”

Al-Qaeda had in fact been weakened by losing its Afghanistan sanctuary, but the key question was if its setbacks were permanent, or if the group could recover. Ultimately, President Bush and the U.S. intelligence community underestimated the group’s resiliency. As the U.S. shifted resources away from Afghanistan-Pakistan and toward the Iraq theater, due in part to the belief that victory had been attained over the group, al-Qaeda went about carving out a safe sphere for itself in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

By July 2007, official assessments of the group had shifted radically. The new National Intelligence Estimate released that month concluded that al-Qaeda had “protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability.” Current assurances that al-Qaeda is on its last legs may similarly give too little weight to the organization’s resiliency.

Nor have the anti-regime uprisings of the Arab Spring killed al-Qaeda. Though these revolutions have not been fundamentalist in nature, al-Qaeda likely expects them to result in a more fertile recruiting environment. After all, the Arab Spring is not just about a desire for democracy, but a demand for an answer to unemployment and skyrocketing food prices. Unemployment in Egypt has risen since Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, and Arab states’ economies will probably worsen. Historically, when sky-high expectations go unfulfilled — which may yet be the case for the Arab Spring — extreme ideologies can fill in the void.

To conclude that al-Qaeda no longer poses a threat to the United States is, at best, hubris. If put into action, such an operating assumption could leave us in even greater danger.

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Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization, and author of Bin Laden’s Legacy (Wiley, 2011).