Opinion: 9/11 and Al Qaeda: The price of victory

A few weeks after [Osama] bin Laden was killed in Pakistan during a raid by U.S. Navy SEALs, some analysts suggested that Rahman, a Libyan, had emerged as Al Qaeda’s leader. That didn’t turn out to be the case -- the leadership spot went to Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri -- but it underscored how central a role Rahman has played.

Rahman’s death is likely to lend credence to a view in some U.S. policymaking circles that Al Qaeda’s defeat is within reach. Recent events ‘hold the prospect of a strategic defeat, if you will, a strategic dismantling of Al Qaeda,’ incoming CIA Director David H. Petraeus said last month. Also in July, Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who oversees Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy at the National Security Council, said the U.S. was ‘doubling down’ on its strategy of covert targeted missile strikes in Pakistan since Bin Laden’s death, believing that Al Qaeda is susceptible to a decisive blow. ‘I think there are three to five senior leaders that, if they’re removed from the battlefield, would jeopardize Al Qaeda’s capacity to regenerate,’ Lute said. He declined to name them, other than Zawahiri. But clearly Rahman would have been on that list.

A decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, federal and state governments are spending about $75 billion a year on domestic security, setting up sophisticated radio networks, upgrading emergency medical response equipment, installing surveillance cameras and bombproof walls, and outfitting airport screeners to detect an ever-evolving list of mobile explosives.

‘The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,’ said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism. ‘So if your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is 1 in 3.5 million, the question is, how much do you want to spend to get that down to 1 in 4.5 million?’ he said.

One effect is certain: Homeland Security spending has been a pump-primer for local governments starved by the recession, and has dramatically improved emergency response networks across the country. An entire industry has sprung up to sell an array of products, including high-tech motion sensors and fully outfitted emergency operations trailers. The market is expected to grow to $31 billion by 2014.

Like the military-industrial complex that became a permanent and powerful part of the American landscape during the Cold War, the vast network of Homeland Security spyware, concrete barricades and high-tech identity screening is here to stay. The Department of Homeland Security, a collection of agencies ranging from border control to airport security sewn quickly together after Sept. 11, is the third-largest Cabinet department and -- with almost no lawmaker willing to render the U.S. less prepared for a terrorist attack -- one of those least to fall victim to budget cuts.