Al Qaeda's inability to hit the United States in the 10 years since September 11 attacks shows the war on terrorism has been effective, even as the US government still struggles to streamline management of the counter-terrorism effort, experts say.
The US-led international war on terrorism has rendered the late Osama bin Laden's organisation sufficiently unable to repeat the scale of the 2001 attacks, and hasn't been able to mount a major attack on a Western target in years. "We are evidently doing something right," said John Pike, an analyst at Globalsecurity.org near Washington.
"We got bin Laden, there hasn't been a significant - certainly not a spectacular attack - on America since 9-11, and there hasn't been any spectacular attacks in over six years."
Attacks in the West had been bin Laden's top goal. The last two major terrorist attacks on the West took place in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. After September 11, 2001, the then president George W Bush ordered the largest restructuring of the US national security apparatus since World War II. He created the Department of Homeland Security to consolidate domestic security.
Bush also established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to co-ordinate the work of more than a dozen intelligence agencies. A failure to share information across the government was cited as a key reason for failing to detect and prevent the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
While progress has been made to improve the flow of information, it is still well short of the standards needed to keep the country safe, said Steven Weber, a professor of politics and foreign policy at the University of California, Berkeley. "In some cases, information sharing doesn't work as well as it ought to," Weber said, adding that the intelligence community remains "fragmented."
Even as the US builds bigger walls to prevent terrorist attacks, some terrorist attempts have slipped through the cracks and - if successful - could have been disastrous. Three months after 9/11, Richard Reid, who had been living in London, tried to blow up a flight bound for the US by detonating explosives stuffed in his shoes. It didn't work by the time he was subdued by other passengers. He was sentenced by a US court to life in prison.
On Christmas 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian with suspected ties to al Qaeda in Yemen, allegedly boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with explosives in his underwear. These also failed to go off and Abdulmutallab remains in US custody awaiting trial.
And in May of last year, a Pakistani-born US citizen, Faisal Shahzad, tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in New York. The bomb malfunctioned and Shahzad, whom US authorities suggested was operating on al Qaeda's behalf, was captured trying to flee the US. He pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence. The attacks show that terrorists are still able to penetrate defences and evade law enforcement long enough to execute a plot, but al Qaeda so far as proven incapable of carrying out a major operation anywhere near the level of 9/11.
They also show the organisation has been so severely weakened it has had to resort to individuals acting alone with crudely made explosives that fail to work. "It is not much to write home about, if the best they can do is set their underwear on fire," Pike said. Still, al Qaeda is still active. Even the US-led coalition has decimated its ranks along the Afghan-Pakistan border, the group has sprung up in Yemen. The US has since stepped up efforts to pressure al Qaeda operatives there, concerned they could get a strong foothold there by taking advantage of a government weakened by protests.
"We and our international partners have put considerable pressure on al Qaeda and degraded much of its abilities, its capabilities, including its capacity to train and raise money, train recruits, plan attacks outside the region. That said, it still remains a threat," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said on July 27. Most of the attention in the fight against terrorism has focused on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes in Pakistan and the capturing or killing of al Qaeda's top leadership, including bin Laden, who died at the hands of US commandos in May.
But the US and other countries have worked quietly behind the scenes to cut off al Qaeda's access to financial institutions, making it hard for the network to move money around to support global operations. "We have captured and killed a large number of al Qaeda's leadership, but the government has been a lot more effective cutting off financing," Weber said. "It's probably even having more of an impact than killing individuals, even though that gets the headline."