US Edition 
US 'approaching tipping point when military conflict with al-Qaeda should end'
The United States is approaching a "tipping point" in its war with al-Qaeda beyond which it will no longer be regarded as a military conflict, the Defense Department's top lawyer has said.
In a speech to the Oxford Union on Friday night, Jeh Johnson predicted that the terror network would become so "effectively destroyed" that it would no longer have any capacity to be able to launch another attack on America.
"There will come a tipping point," he said in the speech, "a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States."
When that time comes, Mr Johnson said, the responsibility for tackling al-Qaeda should pass to the police and other law enforcement agencies.
The US government points to the existence of an armed conflict as the legal justification for practices such as indefinite detention of al-Qaeda’s members and allies.
Mr Johnson said that it was time to consider how the conflict could be concluded. “Now that efforts by the US military against al-Qaeda are in their 12th year, we must also ask ourselves: how will this conflict end?” he said.
Mr Johnson was appointed by President Barack Obama and is tipped as a potential successor to US Attorney General Eric Holder.
An "open end" to the conflict has been a defining feature of what then-president George W. Bush called the "War on Terror" that began after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, which killed 3,000 people.
Three days after the attacks, Congress authorised force against all "nations, organisations or persons" who planned them or who aided the planners.
In the past two years, the US has registered several major blows on al-Qaeda, most significantly the assassination of its founder and leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May last year.
In September last year the group's leading propagandist and senior commander of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in a drone strike in Yemen.
Mr Obama's controversial policy of launching over 300 drone strikes, mainly along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians, but also killed dozens of lower level al-Qaeda operatives.
US intelligence and counterterrorism officials believe the terror network, now led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, is incapable of launching an attack of anything like the scale of 9/11.
However, US officials, with rare exceptions, speak of a conflict as one with no obvious end point.
"I think one day they will be defeated, but it's not going to happen any time soon," said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, earlier this week.
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in on Nov 20 that US forces had decimated al-Qaeda's core and made progress in Yemen and Somalia but needed to avert militant gains in Mali and Nigeria.
Mr Johnson proposed that, once the military conflict ends, law enforcement and intelligence agents would go on pursuing individual militants or groups with the military in a reserve role.
"'War' must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs," he said. "We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the 'new normal'. Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives."
However, the problem of what to do with detainees not charged with crimes – such as some of those held at the Guantánamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba – might still be a slow process, Johnson said.
In one of 25 footnotes to the written remarks, Johnson cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 1948 that allowed the detention of German nationals for six years after fighting with Germany ended.