• Al-Qaeda are weaker than they were

  It is, cross fingers, unlikely that al-Qaeda are currently able to inflict any attack on the symbolic and spectacular scale of 9/11 or the Madrid bombings or the 7/7 bombings in London. As 'Assessing the Threat', the Bipartisan Policy Center's September 2010 report said, the group have not been able to get their hands on chemical, biological, or radiological weapons of any degree of sophistication. It seems as though future attacks will be carried out by lone operatives who don't have the support networks which, for instance, the 9/11 terrorists relied upon. Al-Qaeda are now veering towards a strategy of “diversification”, designed to damage the US economy and distract security services by employing insurgents from differing nationalities so that security services are unable to 'profile' a typical terrorist. So while Islamic extremists may still be able to create widespread disruption, the likelihood that they will kill hundreds of innocent civilians in the US and Europe has diminished.

               
• The dangers have changed. They haven't disappeared

  Just because the threat of a huge, symbolic strike has receded doesn't mean that Islamic fundamentalism poses any less of a risk. The will to cause destruction on a huge scale is still there and inevitably, terrorists will adapt to heightened security by changing their methods and targets. This involves targeting individual politicians who have offended Islamic sensitivities; just look at how Roshonara Choudhry attempted to stab MP Stephen Timms after she was radicalised by watching online sermons. It may involve targeting Western hotels – there have been attacks on a Sheraton, Marriott, Hilton, Grand Hyatt and Radisson in non-Western countries in recent years. Then there's the chance of 'fedayeen' attacks, in imitation of the devastating 2008 Mumbai siege. And there is very little we can do to stop a suicide bomber.

                 

               
• This is an evolving menace

  We know that however much we beef up our security restrictions, terrorists will evolve. And they will always be one step ahead of the security measures in place to stop them; measures such as shoe checks at airports or the ban on taking containers of water through the bag check were responses to terrorist attempts which almost worked. Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, was the explosive placed inside a printer in the recent cargo plane plot. A leading ingredient of Semtex, it's cheap, colourless (and therefore fiendishly hard to detect) and you only need 100g of it to blow a car up. Their methods are getting more sophisticated. 

               
• The core of al-Qaeda is weaker

  In Afghanistan and Pakistan, where al-Qaeda have been targeted by drone attacks and forced into the mountainous badlands, the organisation's structure has declined dramatically, even to the point where they are no longer able to provide adequate training to aspiring jihadis. From the little we know, their command structure has been reduced to between six and eight men, including bin Laden, his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, several other Egyptians, a Libyan and a Mauritanian. Leon Pannetta, the director of the CIA, estimated that al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan were now “relatively small…I think at most, we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100.” What this means is that they're no longer able to provide adequate training to aspiring jihadis. In scenes reminiscent of Chris Morris's satire Four Lions, disaffected European Muslims who recently travelled to Waziristan to join al-Qaeda have reported back that their handlers had been so fearful of capture that they'd spent most of their time telling volunteers to quietly read their Koran. So at their core, al-Qaeda are now a fragmented, fearful collection of amateurs.

               
• But their franchises are growing in influence

  Al-Qaeda may have fragmented and bin Laden may no longer pose the threat he once did, but their 'franchises' in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa have been growing. The recent cargo plane plot shows that the threat from Yemen, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, is very real. According to the country's foreign ministry, the group has expanded to number around 400 militants, and part of the country is a lawless war zone. There, al-Qaeda is led by Anwar al-Awlaki, a cleric who has frequently appeared over video link to meetings in the UK. With unemployment rising up to 35%, the country is fertile ground for radicalisation. Across the Gulf of Aden, failed state Somalia is no better. There, an Islamist insurgent group called al-Shabab which commands some 1,200 fighters and controls much of the country, has pledged their allegiance to bin Laden. Furthermore, there are worries that al-Qaeda influence in North Africa could spread to northern Nigeria. The nightmare scenario is that their solutions to discontent could one day entice the Muslims of impoverished sub-Saharan Africa.

                 

               
• Let's put this threat into perspective

  It's too easy for hysterical media coverage of foiled plots to translate into public paranoia and exaggerated responses from security organisations. We need to put the threat of Islamic terrorism into perspective, and the fact is that the risk of dying from terrorism in Britain is less than it was when the IRA were campaigning during the Troubles. Julian Glover writes of "the symmetry of self-interest between the would-be bombers and the security services assembled to stop them", and how "both have a tendency to magnify serious but isolated incidents into one great interconnected global battle." Since 9/11, the only notable attack on American soil was when an army phychiatrist killed 13 people during a shooting rampage in Fort Hood, a military base in Texas. So, looked at in the cold light of risk analysis, Islamic terrorism simply doesn't pose the 'existential threat' which so many blowhards have attributed to it. Vastly more people die in road accidents, hospital errors or occupational accidents such as construction, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, forestry and fishing. The proportion of people killed by terrorists is comparable to those killed by bathtub drownings or hunting accidents. Yet these deaths will never change us or our policies to the extent which terrorist attacks will. 

               
• They only have to succeed once

  “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always." This was the chilling warning which the IRA gave Margaret Thatcher after their bomb at the 1984 Tory Party Conference narrowly failed to kill her. And the same applies today. Even if al-Qaeda are no longer able to carry out the coordinated attacks with highly trained operatives that they managed to do five years ago, there are still enough terrorists trying to cause mass destruction – shoe bomber Richard Reid, underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who tried to blow up a transatlantic jet, the attempt to blow up Times Square, the attack on Glasgow airport – that one day, one of them will succeed.

                 

               
• Declining numbers don't reduce the threat

  The fact that a terrorist organisation doesn't have many members doesn't mean that it will be less effective. The Baader-Meinhof Gang kept the West German public in a permanent sense of unease from 1970 to 1998, despite never having more than twenty or so members of their inner circle. So the decline of al-Qaeda's leadership structure won't necessarily reduce their effectiveness.

                 

Ideology

               
• Al-Qaeda is losing the battle of ideas

  Even Osama bin Laden himself has admitted that 90% of his struggle is waged in the media, and all the evidence suggests that he's losing this battle for hearts and minds. The vast majority of Muslims find al-Qaeda's methods abhorrent, don't want to endure a sharia-style theocracy and have not taken up his cause – for an Umma or Islamic caliphate – in anything approaching the way that jihadist leaders envisaged after 9/11. Polling statistics show that in countries such as Indonesia and Jordan, the support for suicide bombing has declined significantly in recent years, and with his video messages coming further and further apart, even Bin Laden has been criticised for his inactivity. Al-Qaeda thought that they were going to take hold in Saudi Arabia, but, through a mixture of thoughtful deradicalisation (silencing militant preachers, launching strong public information initiatives) and repression (mass arrests and terrorist executions), they've done nothing of the sort. Now, the majority of intelligence on jihadists there comes from relatives, friends and neighbours.

               
• Grievance doesn't disappear so easily. Britain still faces domestic discontent

  With 400,000 people travelling between Britain and Pakistan every year, there are plenty of possibilities for young Muslims to come into contact with jihadi recruiters. And 'Terrorism: The New Wave', a recent report from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), has warned of the escalating problem of Muslim inmates in British prisons, especially high-security institutions. It says that out of the 8,000 Muslim prisoners in British jails, as many as 800 may have been turned into 'potentially violent radicals' while serving time. There are endless opportunities for grievance to be leveraged into violence through radicalising ideologies.