comes from Simon Fraser University (in Burnaby, BC, a suburb of Vancouver, across the metro area from where we used to live); as that doughty and perceptive observer Fareed Zakaria noticed (and most of the rest of the American media haven’t), if you drop the practice of counting civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan as deaths from terrorism—which is to say, if you count them as what they are, which is civilian deaths in a war zone, which aren’t counted as terrorist acts anywhere else—the international death toll from terrorist acts has gone through the floor (and that despite Israel, which has seen a rise in deaths from Palestinian terrorism since the withdrawal from Gaza). As regards the US, organized terror groups haven’t managed a successful attack on us since October 2003. There are a number of reasons for this;

the most significant, in the study’s view, is the “extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years.” These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists’ tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. “This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world,” writes Mack. “Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated.”

In other words, going into Iraq and Afghanistan has been critically important to defeating al’Qaeda in that, by taking the war to them, we’ve provoked them to terrorist attacks not in the Western world but in Muslim countries, among Muslims, with Muslim victims; what their fellow Muslims could support or at least tolerate when it was out of sight, out of mind, with victims they didn’t know or particularly care about, becomes intolerable when it’s down the street and the victims are friends, neighbors, and relatives. (As a prominent Saudi cleric wrote last September, “Who benefits from turning countries like Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon or Saudi Arabia into places where fear spreads and no one can feel safe?” [emphasis mine]) Which is no criticism of Muslims—that’s very human, and exactly what we see in Americans and Europeans as well. But it appears to be something that never occurred to al’Qaeda.It might be worth noting one other reason why al’Qaeda specifically has lost a great deal of support: if you publicly declare, “Iraq is the most important of these fields,” then get your butt kicked in Iraq, you’re going to have a hard time convincing people you’re worth supporting. As bin Laden himself said, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” At this point, al’Qaeda is pretty clearly the weak horse.