Al-Qaeda got lucky once – it’s just an outlier.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has suggested that “the fear of terrorism isn’t motivated solely by what terrorist have done, but what terrorists hope to do.” Bathtubs are simply not “engaged in a conspiracy with other bathtubs to murder ever-larger numbers of Americans.” However, terrorists “in the Islamist orbit,” he insists, “seek unconventional weapons that would allow them to kill a far-larger number of Americans than died on Sept. 11.”6 Or as Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times puts it, “Bathroom deaths could multiply by 50 without a threat to civil order. The incidence of terror could not.”7 Thus far, 9/11 stands out as an extreme outlier: scarcely any terrorist act, before or after, in war zones or outside them, has inflicted even one-tenth as much total destruction. That is, contrary to common expectations, the attack has this far been an aberration, not a harbinger.8 And al-Qaeda central, the group responsible for the attack, has, in some respects at least, proved to resemble President John Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald—an entity of almost trivial proportions that got horribly lucky once. The tiny group of perhaps 100 or so does appear to have served as something of an inspiration to some Muslim extremists. They may have done some training, may have contributed a bit to the Taliban’s far larger insurgency in Afghanistan, and may have participated in a few terrorist acts in Pakistan. In his examination of the major terrorist plots against the West since 9/11, Mitchell Silber finds only two—the shoe bomber attempt of 2001 and the effort to blow up transatlantic airliners with liquid bombs in 2006—that could be said to be under the “command and control” of al-Qaeda Central (as opposed to ones suggested, endorsed, or inspired by the organization), and there are questions about how full its control was even in these two instances, both of which, as it happens, failed miserably.9 Even under siege, it is difficult to see why al-Qaeda could not have organized attacks at least as costly and shocking as the shooting rampages (organized by other groups) that took place in Mumbai in 2008 or at a shopping center in Kenya in 2013. Neither took huge resources, presented major logistical challenges, required the organization of a large number of perpetrators, or needed extensive planning.