Word: al-qaeda
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Here's a fact about the underwear attack that you might have missed in the media shoutfest: it failed. It failed, first of all, because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was just one terrorist. Once upon a time, al-Qaeda's modus operandi was to launch multiple, simultaneous attacks. That way, even if one attack failed, the entire operation wouldn't. On 9/11, the network deployed 19 hijackers on four planes; on 12/25, by contrast, it managed only one. Second, the underwear attack failed because Abdulmutallab wasn't particularly well trained. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were personally selected by Osama...
...fact, terrorists have not pulled off another attack on the scale of 9/11 anywhere in the world. A 2007 study by Canada's Simon Fraser University found the global death toll from terrorist attacks has substantially decreased since 2001. While al-Qaeda plots do sometimes succeed - like the double-agent operation that killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan last month - they have become, Rand terrorism expert Brian Jenkins points out, less frequent and less potent...
...al-Qaeda no longer pull off the big one? For one thing, it's under more pressure. In preparing the 9/11 attacks, the hijackers and their bosses took dozens of international flights and repeatedly opened U.S. bank accounts under their own names. Al-Qaeda operated a document center at the Kandahar airport. All that would be virtually impossible today, as hordes of counterterrorism officials scrutinize financial transactions and cell-phone calls, and drones track al-Qaeda leaders around the clock. And while government no-fly lists remain flawed, at least they exist. Today, the number of suspected terrorists prohibited from...
...Al-Qaeda is not just under more pressure from the West. It's also under more pressure from fellow Muslims. Across the greater Middle East, notes Jenkins, governments that once took a passive, or even indulgent, view of al-Qaeda have been frightened into action by jihadist attacks on their soil. Al-Qaeda's butchery has wrecked its image among ordinary Muslims. After jihadists bombed a wedding in Amman in 2005, the percentage of Jordanians who said they trusted bin Laden to "do the right thing" dropped from 25% to less than 1%. In Pakistan, the site of repeated attacks...
...this means that even in places like Pakistan and Yemen where al-Qaeda or its affiliates retain some organizational presence, it is much harder to train lots of would-be terrorists for complex, mass-casualty attacks. In response, al-Qaeda seems to be relying more on solo operators, people like Abdulmutallab, Fort Hood gunman Major Nidal Malik Hasan and Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan American arrested last year for allegedly plotting to blow up buildings in New York. These lone wolves are harder to catch, but they're also less likely to do massive damage. Al-Qaeda's new motto, according...