(It’s breaking my heart that no one’s uploaded Ted Leo’s “Version: To Decline” to YouTube so I can embed it for this post. Ted’s first solo record is criminally slept-on and/or disliked, which is crazy. Don’t make the mistakes your peers make. Anyway.)

In the latest (and not-yet-online) CTC Sentinel, Philip Mudd, formerly a counterterrorism analyst at CIA and the FBI, takes a tour d’horizon of the state of al-Qaeda. It’s a good piece, but here he goes a bit rudderless:

The rise of the ideologically inspired means that even as the strategic threat from al-Qai’da declines — the likelihood of a 9/11 inspired attack has dropped markedly as the result of security operations worldwide — the number of people absorbing the ideology has broadened the threat, both operationally and geographically. As the core group suffers — and eventually dies off — the broader movement is alive and well, and the sheer numbers of like-mindeds suggests that one of the plots against the United States will succeed.

But here’s the thing. Not all plots are created equal. If Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had succeeded, several hundred people would have died. If Faisal Shahzad had succeeded… I actually don’t know how many would have died, but let’s be generous and say a few dozens. If you want to include him here, Nidal Malik Hasan did succeed, and 13 people died. By contrast, on 9/11, 3000 people died in multiple locations in a coordinated attack that exploited numerous U.S. civilian vulnerabilities.

In other words, if the strategic threat from al-Qaeda really is declining, then we’re looking at the very happy situation where al-Qaeda has to suit up the waterboys to show that it can still field a team. That requires two things on our part. First, vigilance to detect what they’re planning and to guard against them getting either better or lucky. And second, proportion in terms of our preemptive measures and our responses. Blowback can reinvigorate the movement. Mudd writes that the bin Ladenist cult “suffers, perhaps irreparably, from its own missteps” — most notably, killing a lot of Muslims. We should, as Napoleon counseled, not do anything to get in the way of that dynamic. That will inevitably mean winding down the wars.