There has been one constant in the 5 years since the terror attacks of 9/11 – there has been no follow-up attack in the United States. It is the most blessed nonevent in recent American history.

Of course, that could change in an awful instant. It is nonetheless the signal accomplishment in the war on terror. While the smoke was still clearing from downtown Manhattan, no one would have said that the fight against terror should be judged on whether the U.S. is popular abroad or able to spread democracy. The standard was avoiding another attack in the U.S., and by that standard, the war on terror is a tentative success.

There are rival explanations for this success. Critics of President Bush tend to chalk it up to luck or to discount it on grounds that the terror threat was always exaggerated. The first explanation is too fatalistic, implying that our initiative doesn’t matter; it is fate that keeps us safe (or not). The second is circular. Only because we have prevented another attack is it possible to downplay the threat. If terrorists had managed to blow a couple of airliners from the sky a few weeks ago, their threat would look as terrifying as it did immediately after 9/11.

The first important step in thwarting terror was the passage of the Patriot Act. It was a bipartisan accomplishment, although Democrats subsequently obscured this when they realized that smearing the act played well with the Bush-hating left. The Patriot Act tore down the wall that made it difficult for law enforcement and intelligence agents to communicate, and it updated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act so that law enforcement no longer needed a new warrant every time a terror suspect switched phones. The Patriot Act – coupled with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s new prevention-oriented rather than after-the-fact approach to terrorism prosecutions – tightened up the homeland security considerably.

Overseas, the war in Afghanistan – also a bipartisan initiative – destroyed al-Qaida’s base and its training camps. Those camps were so important to indoctrination, to testing a recruit’s commitment and to forging relationships that, as Brian Michael Jenkins of the Rand Corporation points out, “Al-Qaida still relies heavily on these now-dispersed Afghan veterans.” If the Patriot Act and the Afghan War were obvious pieces of the war on terror, many of the others were submerged from view until the last year or so, when leaks to the press and statements from Bush officials revealed and fleshed them out.

The National Security Agency has been running a secret program to monitor terrorist communications; the Treasury Department has been secretly tapping a huge database of financial transactions to track terrorist money transfers; the CIA has been running secret prisons where top al-Qaida officials are held and aggressively interrogated for information to detain their co-conspirators. All of this is controversial, although one suspects that immediately after 9/11, Democrats would have signed onto it too. This is the secret war that has disrupted al-Qaida so badly that in the latest Atlantic Monthly, liberal writer James Fallows calls (prematurely) for declaring the war on terror won.

Fallows quotes Jenkins, “Because of increased intelligence efforts by the United States and its allies, transactions of any type – communications, travel, money transfers – have become dangerous for the jihadists.” Terrorism expert John Robb tells Fallows that in a large-scale attack: “the number of people involved is substantial, the lead time is long, the degree of coordination is great and the specific skills you need are considerable. It’s not realistic for al-Qaida anymore.”

This is the one area where government has recently proved effective. Yes, gobs of federal money have been wasted on homeland security, and the Transportation Security Agency’s blunderbuss approach at the airports is a parody of bureaucratic excess. But the government has done what is most needful – keep us safe. Much work remains to be done – especially in the ideological fight against Islamic extremism, the ultimate source of the terror threat. But this is an anniversary when we should be thankful for nonevents.

Rich Lowry is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached via e-mail at: [email protected].