Tracking exactly how the organism of global jihad translates such violent impulses into distant actions is critical to grasping how the virulent terrorism that struck the United States on September 11, 2001, has mutated in the past five years. And that knowledge is key to understanding the degree to which the virus is still spreading.

"What happened to Al Qaeda and its affiliates since 9/11 is a very dangerous convergence of terrorism and a mass mobilization that would be traditionally associated with a liberation movement or insurgency, only on a global scale," Mario Mancuso, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for special operations and counter-terrorism, told National Journal. "Quite frankly, we've damaged Al Qaeda the organization significantly, but the threat is much broader. The best way I can describe it is that the global insurgency reacts to Osama bin Laden's radical ideology almost like distant and seemingly disconnected light particles respond in unison to an unseen wave.

Over the long term, halting the spread of that extremist ideology will be our most important metric of success."

Take the audiotape that bin Laden released in fall 2003, one of many such sermons delivered by the Qaeda leader and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In fact, the pace of pronouncements from these leaders to the greater Islamic jihad, presumably issued from hideaways in the ungoverned tribal regions of Pakistan, has increased markedly in the past year. On October 19, 2003, however, bin Laden had a very specific intent: to intimidate nations participating in the United States' "unjust war" in Iraq. He singled out Australia, Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland, and, for the first time, Spain.

The very next day, a Moroccan named Youssef Belhadj, who had shadowy ties to Al Qaeda, purchased a cellphone in Belgium. On the application, a knowledgeable source says, Belhadj falsely noted his birthday as "3/11." A few weeks later, Spanish intelligence services reported to authorities in Madrid that the remnants of a Qaeda cell in Spain, whose leaders had been imprisoned for assisting the 9/11 hijackers, were reassembling.

On December 10, 2003, a treatise titled "Jihadi Iraq, Hopes, and Dangers" was posted on the Global Islamic Media Front Web site, one of nearly 5,000 jihadi sites that have sprung up on the Internet since 9/11 and now constitute a cyberspace sanctuary for the Islamic terrorist movement. "Jihadi Iraq" laid out a cogent and detailed strategy for shifting the entire burden of the Iraq war onto the shoulders of the United States by pressuring European forces to withdraw from the coalition. Given that 90 percent of Spaniards opposed the decision by Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to send troops to Iraq, the tract fingered Spain as the weakest link in the Iraqi coalition. In rallying the faithful, "Jihadi Iraq" invoked in closing the name of Abu Dujana, a legendary warrior who fought alongside the prophet Mohammed.

On March 11, 2004 -- or 3/11 -- Islamic extremists planted 13 backpack bombs on Madrid's commuter rail system in a nearly simultaneous attack that bore all the hallmarks of a Qaeda operation. The bombs were carefully timed to explode as the trains pulled into crowded stations, to maximize the carnage. The attack killed 191 people and wounded 1,741. With the exception of the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988, it was the most devastating terrorist attack in Europe since World War II.

The Madrid bombings were also spectacularly successful on a political level. Just days later, Spanish voters went to the polls and defeated the Aznar government; new Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero quickly announced the withdrawal of all Spanish troops from Iraq. Such successes never go unnoticed in the surprisingly close-knit community of Islamic extremists.

"There is a tremendous discourse in the jihadist community, as they talk about what attacks worked and which did not, and they definitely believe the Madrid bombing was significant for leading to the change of government in Spain," said Daniel Byman, a counter-terrorism expert at Georgetown University and a former staff member of the 9/11 commission. Madrid also showed, he said, that even as the U.S. coalition continued to chase Al Qaeda from its safe haven in Afghanistan, increased agitation and radicalization in the Muslim world were strengthening local and regional networks.

"Wherever there is a broad Muslim community such as in Europe, we've seen these pockets of angry young men arise," Byman said. "The good news is, they may not be sophisticated enough to carry off a 9/11 attack. The bad news is, they are eager to die and certainly capable of mounting the types of bombings we've seen in Madrid, London, or Istanbul."

An Unseen Hand

Were the Madrid bombings really the work of a homegrown "self-starter" cell of Muslim immigrants, as many newspapers initially reported? The answer to that question goes a long way toward explaining the evolving nature of Islamic terrorism. And it is critical for assessing just how successful the United States, now marking the fifth anniversary of its "global war on terror," has been in destroying its chief enemy.

A few days after the Madrid bombing, for instance, a Spanish television station aired a videotape in which a man wearing Muslim burial robes and holding a submachine gun called himself "Abu Dujana al-Afghani." His words and nom de guerre suggested that he was familiar with the "Jihadi Iraq" tract and had ties to the Afghan mujahedeen. Acting as the military spokesman for Al Qaeda in Europe, Abu Dujana claimed full responsibility for the bombings, calling them a response to the killing of women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan by "Bush and his allies."

Spanish authorities believe that the man on the tape is none other than Youssef Belhadj, the Moroccan they now have in custody.

"The fact that Belhadj wrote '3/11' as his birth date the very day after bin Laden first targeted Spain strongly suggests that the date of the Madrid attacks on March 11 was fixed back in October 2003, and that he was following Qaeda orders to initiate operations," said Fernando Reinares, a senior analyst on international terrorism at the Elcano Royal Institute for International and Strategic Studies in Madrid. Similarly, the terrorist attacks in London in 2005 and Mumbai in 2006, as well as the recently foiled plot in Britain to bomb as many as 10 U.S.-bound airliners over the Atlantic, all had major threads leading back to Pakistan and almost certainly to Al Qaeda.

"I disagree with this myth depicting Al Qaeda as just an ideology or political movement at this point," Reinares said. "Yes, it has become far more decentralized as the global jihadi movement has adapted itself to an increasingly hostile environment following 9/11, but in many ways Al Qaeda today is what bin Laden and Zawahiri originally envisioned: a base from which terrorist operations are still planned and initiated but carried out by far-flung jihadi groups and cells around the world."

Madrid As Microcosm

The Madrid attack serves as a microcosm of the global Islamic jihad life-cycle, including its organic reliance on cells that are formed, linked, split, destroyed, and then re-formed in a process of perpetual reinvention and mutation.

Tracing just a few threads of connective tissue, for instance, investigators have tied the individuals at the center of the Madrid bombings to a plot to bomb a hotel in Jordan during millennium celebrations in 2000; to multiple suicide car bombings in Casablanca in 2003; to the suicide attacks in London in 2005; to a foiled plot to bomb Spain's National High Court; to a European network formed to funnel jihadists to Iraq to fight the U.S.-led coalition; and, of course, to the 9/11 plot.

Madrid cell members have been connected not only to Qaeda central but to concentric and interconnected circles of affiliates, such as Ansar al-Islam, Salafia Jihadia, Algerian and Moroccan Salafist groups, and "Al Qaeda in Iraq" (formerly led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). Salafists follow a very fundamentalist form of Islam.

The Madrid plot highlights the global jihadi movement's increased reliance on cyberspace for propaganda, communications, and strategy, and it indicates the continued centrality of radical imams and mosques to the extremist Islamist movement. The intersection of terror and criminal networks that increasingly defines the terrorist threat was also evident in Madrid, as was the ascendance of homegrown cells that arise to embrace bin Laden's ideology and do Al Qaeda's bidding.

Madrid goes a long way toward explaining why many counter-terrorism experts believe that the greatest threat from Islamic terrorism emanates not from the battlefields of the Middle East or the ungoverned spaces in Africa, but from the restive Muslim diaspora in Europe.

"When you realize that a female baker's assistant from Belgium conducted a suicide operation in Iraq, and recall that Mohamed Atta and the Hamburg cell were educated in Germany, and note that the number of Muslims in Europe has grown from just 1 million in 1945 to 20 million in 2006, then you start to understand why the future of Al Qaeda is not going to be decided in Pakistan but in Europe," said terrorism expert Peter Bergen, speaking recently at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington on his new book, "The Osama Bin Laden I Know." Europe has done a poor job of integrating its Muslim populations, Bergen said, and "because Europeans can come to the United States without a visa, that represents a potentially devastating vulnerability for us."

The Strategist

When Mustafa Setmarian Nasar returned to his adopted home in Spain in 1992 after fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, he was a dangerous combination of seasoned jihadist, religious ideologue, and visionary with a plan. Along his journey of jihad, he had met and befriended Osama bin Laden. For a time, Nasar was an instructor at a Qaeda training camp. He had also been named to Al Qaeda's ruling council.

Much like bin Laden and other Afghan mujahedeen who were returning to their homes in the Middle East and Asia in the early 1990s, Nasar was determined to expand the jihadist franchise. What set him apart was that he planted his jihadi seeds in the surprisingly receptive soil of Europe, which had displayed a lax attitude toward the Islamic extremist threat during the 1980s and 1990s. An August 2004 article in The New Yorker on the Madrid bombings quotes Spanish police officials confirming that at the time of the attack, the country had not a single Arabic-speaking intelligence agent.

Nasar, a Syrian and a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, had originally immigrated to Spain in the mid-1980s to escape Syria's brutal crackdown on the fundamentalist Islamist movement. With his pale skin, red hair, and close-cropped beard, Nasar blended in easily in Europe, and he quickly gained citizenship by marrying a Spanish woman, who was a convert to Islam.

Putting into practice what he had learned in Afghanistan, Nasar began building an infrastructure by organizing the extremist fringe of Europe's restless Muslim population into autonomous cells. He operated from a home in the Spanish city of Grenada, the jewel in the crown of "Al Andalus" (the Arab term for Spain under Moorish rule). The Islamic Moors ruled this area of the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth century to the 15th century, until the Catholic Spaniards drove them out -- a parable for paradise lost that bin Laden has repeatedly cited.

Working with a Qaeda associate who went by the name Cheij Salah, Nasar established the organization's first Spanish sleeper cell. To lead the enterprise, he chose a fellow Syrian and former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a burly man named Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, also known as Abu Dahdah. Dahdah and Salah began their recruiting drive by proselytizing young Muslims and distributing extremist pamphlets outside the Abu Bakr mosque in Madrid. They eventually formed a cell of roughly 20 men, mostly of Syrian and Moroccan origin. The recruits called themselves the "Soldiers of Allah," and in many respects they would become the mother of all Qaeda cells in Europe.

Using money acquired from a variety of petty criminal activities that included auto theft and credit card and bank fraud, Dahdah seasoned his young adherents by sending them to train in Qaeda terrorist camps in Afghanistan or to wage holy war on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya. According to Spanish authorities, Nasar expanded the franchise by traveling widely to set up cells in Belgium, France, Italy, and elsewhere, before moving to London in the mid-1990s.

In England, Nasar blossomed into a chief strategist of the jihad, joining forces with the radical imam Abu Qatada. Qatada was a leading intellectual light of London's Islamic extremist movement that earned that city the sobriquet "Londonistan."

Together, Qatada and Nasar edited the ultra-radical Al Ansar magazine, a broadsheet for Islamic terrorist groups. Under their editorial leadership, Al Ansar notably issued a "fatwa," or religious edict, justifying the killing of women and children in Algeria by the Algerian Islamic terrorist group GIA; the jihadis put the policy into practice by slaughtering whole villages in their fight to establish Islamic rule in that country. Thus did Nasar reveal an early penchant for bloodletting, even against "apostate" Muslims of rival sects. His murderous practices would eventually be embraced by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Sunni who justified slaughtering Shiite Muslims in an attempt to foment civil war in Iraq and who was killed by U.S. forces in June.

The Preacher

Described by a Spanish judge as Al Qaeda's spiritual leader in Europe, and by British authorities as the most significant Islamic extremist preacher in Europe, Abu Qatada is representative of the central role that radical imams continue to play in spreading Islamic extremism. Authorities found 18 tapes of Qatada sermons in the Hamburg apartment of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta. Failed shoe bomber Richard Reid and potential hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui reportedly sought advice from Qatada.

According to the 2004 New Yorker article, written by Lawrence Wright, when police eventually surrounded the Madrid bombers several weeks after the attack, the terrorists attempted to call Abu Qatada in London's Belmarsh prison, seeking a fatwa that would justify their committing suicide.

Qatada spent time in British prisons after 9/11, and he was again arrested in August 2005. He awaits extradition to Jordan, where he has been sentenced in absentia to life in prison for his role in a terrorist bombing plot there.

The symbiotic relationship between radical imams and the solar system of terrorist cells that revolve around them was revealed at the trial of Abu Dahdah. Evidence indicated that he made as many as 20 trips to London to pass along to Abu Qatada money that had been raised from Arab business owners in Spain. Upon one of Qatada's arrests, British police found him with the equivalent of more than $300,000 in cash, including an envelope labeled "For the Mujahedeen in Chechnya." Another member of the Dahdah cell in Spain had visited Morocco and offered to help raise money for Mohammed Fazazi, a Moroccan imam and spiritual leader of the Salafia Jihadia terror group, who was later imprisoned for his role in the 2003 terrorist bombings in Casablanca.

"The common theme we continue to see in the radicalization of these homegrown terrorist cells is a radical preacher that somehow gains influence over them," said Grant Wardlaw, national manager of intelligence for the Australian Federal Police. Wardlaw said that Australian authorities recently broke up two such start-up cells of second-generation Muslim immigrants in Melbourne and Sydney that were connected only by their association with a single radical imam.

"Mirroring the trend in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, we also increasingly see these imams moving from radical mosques to prayer halls, social groups, and informal meetings in homes in order to escape detection," he said. "More broadly, we're worried about what is happening in the broader environment that is making second-generation Muslim immigrants quickly turn from being not particularly interested in Islam to suddenly being quite radical and willing to blow people up."

Mother Of Cells

Phoning the month before the 9/11 attacks, the caller had a cryptic message for Abu Dahdah, whose phone was being monitored by Spanish intelligence authorities.

"Everything is going to be fine. I have entered into the aviation sector," said the caller, a suspected Qaeda operative named Farid Hilali. "I slit the throat of the bird."

After Western intelligence agencies began closely conferring in the weeks after September 11, Spanish authorities noted other disturbing connections between Abu Dahdah's Spanish cell and the Qaeda cell in Hamburg that carried out the hijackings. On June 21, 2001, for instance, an Algerian with suspected ties to Al Qaeda phoned Abu Dahdah with another pointed message.

"You should obtain the things soon," he said. "The brothers are in a hurry."

Less than a month later, in July 2001, 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and his chief Qaeda go-between, Ramzi Binalshibh, arrived in Tarragona on their second trip to Spain that year. Spanish intelligence officials are convinced that they were the "brothers" referred to in the intercepted call, and that they met in the resort town of Salou with Abu Dahdah and one of his right-hand lieutenants, a Moroccan named Amer Azizi, to finalize details of the 9/11 attacks. Officials found Abu Dahdah's phone number in the apartment of one of the Hamburg cell members, and Zacarias Moussaoui had Azizi's phone number in his address book.

On November 13, 2001, Spanish authorities moved in to destroy the cell, arresting Abu Dahdah and 10 other senior members of the "Soldiers of Allah" for complicity in the 9/11 attacks. In September 2005, Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas -- aka Abu Dahdah -- was sentenced to 27 years by Spain's National Court for his part in the plot. On appeal, the Spanish Supreme Court reduced his sentence to 12 years.

Many of the details of the arrests and of the Madrid bombing plot in general were first reported by Jose Maria Irujo, a writer for the Spanish newspaper El Pais and the author of "The Black Hole: Spain Invaded by Jihad."

Terror Regenerates

Scarcely reported at the time was the story of a "Soldier of Allah" who was not arrested: Amer Azizi, a Moroccan immigrant and, like Yarkas, a jihadist globe-trotter who had fought in Bosnia and had gained Spanish citizenship by marriage. A step ahead of a police raid on his apartment, Azizi escaped to Iran through Milan, and he eventually resurfaced in his native Morocco. Exploiting Azizi's computer hard drive, police reportedly learned that he had spent many hours on the Internet downloading Islamic jihadi tracts and pamphlets from various terror groups, as well as videos of bin Laden.

In Morocco, Azizi reportedly reconnected with the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, a Qaeda-affiliated terror group whose core members trained together in the same Afghanistan camp in the 1990s. Almost immediately, the neural networks of Islamic extremism began repairing the damage from the crackdown in Spain, reconstituting the cell that was destroyed.

Azizi made contact with Mustafa Maymouni, a fellow Moroccan and a former close associate of Abu Dahdah who headed the radical group Salafia Jihadia in Madrid. According to a 2005 Spanish indictment, Azizi instructed Maymouni to reconstitute Dahdah's cell in Spain by reaching out to the young members who had escaped the 2001 dragnet. They included Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, Maymouni's brother-in-law.

Fakhet stepped up to lead the new cell. Following in his mentor's footsteps, he recruited members among his circle of radicalized acquaintances at Madrid's M-30 mosque (named for a nearby motorway). Maymouni was later arrested and imprisoned in Morocco for his role in the May 16, 2003, Casablanca attacks in which 12 suicide bombers killed 45 people.

At a rented farmhouse, the reconstituted Madrid cell met repeatedly with bomb maker Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, a former member of the Dahdah cell who was once an explosives expert in the Egyptian army and a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Another cell member had met a small-town crook in jail whose brother-in-law worked in the mining business. In exchange for 25 kilograms of hashish, the brother-in-law handed over the explosives used in the devastating Madrid bombings.

The role of prisons as hotbeds of radicalization and as convenient crossroads for the intersection of Islamic extremist terror and organized crime is still another aspect of the Madrid bombing plot that worries counter-terrorism experts.

"In some ways, the problem of Salafi extremists converting fellow inmates to radical Islam in prison is worse than the issue of radical mosques, because they literally have a captive audience of men already predisposed to illegal behavior," said Xavier Raufer, a counter-terrorism specialist at the Paris Institute of Criminology. "In France, we're already seeing the Islamic equivalent of prison gangs -- and more and more hybrids that are a combination of terrorist and criminal organizations."

When Spanish police surrounded a safe house in a Madrid suburb on April 3, 2004, where seven of the train bombers -- including the cell leader Fakhet -- had taken refuge, the authorities recorded the jihadis' calls to their mothers to say goodbye. The terrorists then strapped on explosive belts and died in a suicide detonation that also killed a police officer. Thus, even in their last act, the Madrid terrorists presaged the trend toward "martyrdom" operations, including the London bombings of July 2005, which were the first organized suicide attacks in Europe, and the planned suicide attack on trans-Atlantic jetliners foiled this summer.

No wonder the Madrid model continues to haunt counter-terrorism experts, who see a self-perpetuating virus, with no apparent antidote on the horizon.

"The Madrid cell shows how Islamic jihadist networks continue to replenish themselves -- not by horizontal recruiting of strangers that might make them easier to penetrate but rather by recruitment within vertical clusters of family, friends, clan, and acquaintances that in many cases stretch beyond Western countries," said Reinares of the Elcano Royal Institute. "The London bombers formed the same way. That suggests to me an increased level of radicalization among new generations of Muslims in Europe, meaning that this phenomenon of Islamic extremist terrorism is likely to threaten us for decades. It's not a pretty picture."

A Global Insurgency

After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Mustafa Setmarian Nasar went into hiding with a $5 million reward on his head. He resurfaced in cyberspace in 2004 as the author, under the pen name Abu Musab al-Suri, of a 1,600-page treatise titled "The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance." As noted in The Washington Post earlier this year, some counter-terrorism analysts consider Nasar's "masterwork" the closest thing to a strategic manifesto for the global Islamic insurgency.

Drawing on his own expertise and critiquing the lessons of failed insurgencies in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Syria, Nasar outlined the shift toward more-autonomous, homegrown terrorist cells. For security's sake, these cells maintain few formal organizational links with each other or with Qaeda central. They are nevertheless willing to act under guidance from roving operatives on behalf of bin Laden and other senior leaders.

Pakistani agents captured Nasar in the border city of Quetta in November 2005, but experts say that the strategic vision he painstakingly laid out has helped to shape the evolution of a sustainable Islamic terrorist movement.

Gijs De Vries is the counter-terrorism coordinator for the European Union. "There's a consensus in Europe at least that, having lost its physical home in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda successfully moved into cyberspace and focused on ideologically tapping into these loose groups and individuals who are willing to act on bin Laden's messages," he told National Journal. "In some ways, that makes Al Qaeda today even more diffuse and complicated than the original organization."

Al Qaeda's evolution has forced European authorities to focus not just on Afghanistan or on their own borders, he said, but also on the threat from within. "Moderate Muslims now hold the key to this conflict, because only if we can persuade the majority of Muslims to disassociate themselves from the radicals who claim to act in the name of Islam can we face down this threat," De Vries said. "Unfortunately, it remains an open question whether we can win the hearts and minds of the moderate Muslims, and in that regard the Iraq war and other conflicts in the Middle East continue to complicate our fight against terrorism. There is no doubt that in the Madrid and London bombings, and in the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, terrorists in each case claimed that Iraq and the humiliation caused by conflicts in the Middle East were a major part of their motivation." Van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker who made a movie critical of Muslims' treatment of women.

Iraq As Centerpiece

A close examination of the Madrid bombing plot reveals how central the Iraq war has become to the schemes of the Islamic jihadi movement. The use of the war as an organizing magnet in Islamic extremist propaganda explains how a conflict that began as a U.S. fight against a specific terrorist organization and its affiliates with "global reach" has now morphed into a global counterinsurgency in which the terrorists swim in a sea of an estimated 138 million Muslims around the world who are sympathetic to bin Laden.

"I've seen some pretty good research that suggests that only about 0.02 percent of Muslims could be considered Islamic extremists or Salafists, but given that there are 1.8 billion Muslims, that means I potentially have to worry about 250,000 people scattered around the world," Wade Ishimoto, the senior adviser to the Office of the Secretary of Defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, told National Journal. "People have to realize that one of the really brilliant moves that Al Qaeda made was to train thousands of operatives and then release them around the world to tap into that extremism."

Meanwhile, as clearly shown by the Madrid plot, bin Laden and his followers continue to believe that a U.S. defeat in Iraq will define this latest epoch in the long struggle between Islam and the West, a war that they perceive in terms of centuries and generations yet unborn.

"In its PowerPoint presentations, the Pentagon likes to note that it has killed or captured three-quarters of the pre-9/11 Qaeda leadership and denied it critical sanctuary in Afghanistan. That befits our tendency to look for markers of progress on a map and to regard warfare as a finite undertaking with a clear beginning, middle, and end," said Brian Jenkins, the longtime counter-terrorism analyst at the Rand think tank. "Our enemy looks at jihad as a process that is its own reward, however, and as something that gives them an identity, a sense of worth -- and, ultimately, a ticket to paradise."

Like Reinares, Grant Wardlaw, and Xavier Raufer, Jenkins is a member of the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent group of experts from around the world whose upcoming report traces the spread of the global jihadist insurgency over the past five years. [The council is supported by the Atlantic Monthly Foundation, an affiliate of Atlantic Media, which publishes National Journal. James Kitfield worked on the group's report, but his conclusions here are his own.] Members of the council argue that, from the unique view of the Islamic extremists, America may appear to be losing the "global war on terror."

"From their perspective, the Islamic extremists would say that they have survived the infidel superpower's mightiest blows with their top leadership intact and still able to communicate over the thousands of Web sites devoted to jihadi issues that have sprung up on the Internet since 9/11," Jenkins said. "Certainly there is no question that, within the Muslim world, bin Laden's ideology is more discussed today than at the time of the 9/11 attacks or that it continues to attract recruits."

Partly as a result of that recruiting success, Jenkins said, the pace of terrorist operations and attacks -- the essential coin of the jihadist realm -- continues at roughly one a month. That exceeds the pre-9/11 frequency of plots and attacks, even discounting near-daily suicide bombings and violence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Bin Laden and his affiliates also see our position in Iraq as untenable and view talk in the United States of an early withdrawal as sign of a looming victory," said Jenkins, the author of the recent book "Unconquerable Nation." "In public comments, bin Laden has made clear that he considers Iraq today analogous to what happened to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- namely, a defeat that moves the United States another step toward its ultimate collapse."

Wider Implications

U.S. and international experts will tell you that although individual terrorist organizations have been destroyed in the past, broad counterinsurgencies are almost never won on the battlefield. Victory will have to come in the political arena. Until the world can break the cycle of Islamic radicalization and recruitment, America and its allies are condemned to an endless series of tactical rearguard actions against successive waves of terror plots and attacks that U.S. counter-terrorism figures show to be at a record level.

Certainly we can mark signature successes in that tactical struggle since 9/11. Because of good international cooperation and police work, for instance, thousands of travelers did not die this summer in airliners blasted over the Atlantic. The Canadian Parliament was not held hostage, Ontario power plants were not bombed, and the Canadian prime minister kept his head. New York City's Brooklyn Bridge still connects the borough to Manhattan, and the Holland Tunnel is flooded with cars rather than water. The Sears Tower stands in Chicago, and the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles remains the tallest building west of the Mississippi.

Counter-terrorism successes against each of those terrorist plots have to be measured against a backdrop of tragic failures, however -- failures that didn't begin with New York City and Washington, and certainly will not end with Mumbai, London, and Madrid. Until the fires that stoke bin Laden's fevered dreams of war between Islam and the rest of civilization are finally quelled, the only thing separating the next American city from that sorrowful list is a spoken word and the right sequence of impulses in the global Islamic jihad.