(CNN) -- Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and now Syria and Iraq. The decade-plus duration of America's confrontation with al Qaedism offers lessons not only on how we battle extremist ideology but also how we should calibrate our expectations. The traditional goal in warfare is simple: Defeat the adversary by destroying its will and capability to pose a threat. Force the adversary to capitulate. With a nontraditional foe, it's not clear that we need to limit ourselves to traditional measures of victory. Containment could work. We know by now that in no cases have the adversary's radical ideology been defeated. The most striking successes, such as Indonesia's evisceration of the Jemaah Islamiya organization and African forces' push against Al-Shabaab in Somalia, have only limited the reach of al Qaedism but failed to fully stem the flow of recruits to al Qaeda affiliates or squelch the ideology that underpins its festering.
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Andrew Liepman, Philip Mudd: Ideology-driven adversaries are hard to eliminate
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Liepman, Mudd: Our confrontation with al Qaeda offers strategies on fighting ISIS
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They say we need an achievable definition of victory, such as confining ISIS gains
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Liepman, Mudd: Fight against ISIS will take patience and careful intelligence work
Despite counterterrorism successes, @placeholder in Indonesia still lies dormant and remains potentially dangerous, as recent Indonesian arrests show.
Gains against the entrenched @placeholder network there didn't come overnight.