Lesson Three: One Bad Operation Can Undo Ten Good Ones

“Terrorism,” as the American analyst Brian Jenkins remarked many years ago, “is theater.” The show terrorists put on, however, can alienate as well as impress. In Saudi Arabia, the al Qaeda franchise initially slaughtered Muslim civilians as well as Westerners. That’s bad for business. They learned their lesson and became more focused in their attacks, but their early mistakes enabled the regime to paint the jihadists as murderous thugs, not holy warriors. The Saudi people turned against them after these strikes.

The American military has a concept called the “strategic corporal” — in American wars, even a low-level soldier can, through a mishap, cause a disaster that, magnified by the media, discredits an entire operation. Terrorists have a different audience, but they too have a sense of what is right and wrong, and terrorists forget that at their peril.