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What Statistics Don't Tell UsThe bad news about the good news about terrorism.

By Daniel BenjaminPosted Friday, May 30, 2008, at 3:27 PM ET

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Numbers tell you about the plots that succeeded, but to gauge the threat, we also need a sense of the jihadists' ambition. In the last two years, serious terrorist conspiracies have been uncovered in Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom, among other places. The Heathrow plot, whose alleged conspirators are now on trial in London, involved an effort to blow up seven widebody planes flying trans-Atlantic routes. Had it succeeded, there would likely have been quadruple-digit fatalities, and commercial aviation would have been severely disrupted. In all these cases, the possession of a sanctuary in the tribal areas gave al-Qaida the opportunity to play a critical role in setting events in motion. This is not a group that is thinking small.

Numbers are deceiving in other ways. Zakaria and others also rely on public-opinion statistics to suggest that al-Qaida and its allies are on the run. In many countries, support for the group is down, sometimes dramatically so, because of revulsion at tactics that have killed thousands of Muslims. What happened in Iraq seems now to have happened in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, where, apparently because of disgust at the killing of Bhutto, "support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008." That is clearly good news, though some researchers, like my colleague Shibley Telhami, still find surprisingly strong support for al-Qaida, with 30 percent of those polled in eight Arab countries saying that they sympathize with the group for standing up to the United States.

More important, though, is the relative unimportance of numbers. It has been clear—and somewhat reassuring—since the immediate post-9/11 period that al-Qaida was not going to mobilize vast numbers of Muslims to take up arms against us. What matters, instead, is that it continues to accrete—intelligence services around the world report that the group is consistently picking up recruits. Since terrorism is a problem of small numbers and large consequences, this is the bad news. Indeed, one could go further and say that tragic as the fatalities are in these statistics, almost all were strategically insignificant. What matters are the strategically significant ones—the catastrophic attacks that may happen two, five, or 10 years apart. And that threat isn't going away.

What is scary about statistically based arguments is that they tend to be an invitation to complacency, and we have been there before. In July 2001, former CIA and State Department official Larry C. Johnson published an op-ed in the New York Times that looked at the most recent statistics about terrorism and concluded that the threat had been wildly hyped. Despite the fascination politicians and the media had with radical Islam, he concluded, "The greatest risk is clear: if you are drilling for oil in Colombia—or in nations like Ecuador, Nigeria or Indonesia—you should take appropriate precautions; otherwise, Americans have little to fear." In response, Steven Simon and I submitted an op-ed that month to the Los Angeles Times making arguments along the lines of the ones in this article. It was still awaiting publication on 9/11.

The United States and its allies have done well at thwarting terrorist attacks and dismantling cells, as CIA Director Michael Hayden tells the Washington Post, but we're kidding ourselves if we think the statistics show a vanishing threat. We'll be making real progress when ordinary Muslims are not just repelled by al-Qaida's tactics but are turning on its followers and helping eliminate safe havens, not just in the most traumatized countries like Iraq but around the world. We're a long way from making that happen.

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Daniel Benjamin is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He served as director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff in 1998-99 and is the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror and The Next Attack.

Photograph of Fareed Zakaria by Chris Hondros/Getty Images.

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