THAT WAS EASY:

It will come as little comfort to the victims of the July 7 bombings in London, whose terrible ordeal was remembered yesterday with quiet dignity in ceremonies marking the atrocity's 10th anniversary. But al-Qaeda, the Islamist terror group that planned and carried out the suicide attacks against the capital's transport system, has today been reduced to a state of near irrelevance as a result of the West's relentless counter-terrorism campaign.

At the time of the suicide bombings in the summer of 2005, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, al-Qaeda had established itself as the world's pre-eminent terrorist organisation. Having masterminded the September 11 attacks against the United States in 2001, it claimed responsibility for a string of other outrages, such as bombings in Bali, Riyadh and Istanbul. [...]

[L]ooking back, the July 7 attacks turned out to be the high point of al-Qaeda's attempts to terrorise the British mainland. Subsequent efforts to carry out similar outrages in the UK, such as blowing up a number of US-bound transatlantic flights in mid air and bombing high-profile shopping malls, were thwarted by the improved intelligence on al-Qaeda's operations available to UK officials.

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