Twenty-two years after the September 11 attacks, the threat of jihadist terror is not a major concern for most Americans. But it has not gone away. Noah Rothman examines the ongoing dangers of al-Qaeda and other groups based Afghanistan—despite the White House’s insistence that they are not a serious cause for concern. He then turns to a larger problem:

A lot has changed since 9/11. The West has developed a robust counterterrorism apparatus, which has proven proficient at intercepting communications and signals intelligence regarding potential plots and interdicting them either directly or via a global network of state partners. But those capabilities are eroding. Afghanistan has once again become a permissive environment in which terrorist groups operate openly, recruit and train operatives directly, and plot extensively.

Moreover, a sense of complacency has descended over lawmakers in Washington. . . . A similar complacency is evident in the political landscape to which American lawmakers are uniquely attuned. One representative essay published in the Washington Post last week by Jessica Petrow-Cohen, whose formative early-childhood experiences were forged in the wake of 9/11, maintained that the fears of terrorism she grew up with “were valid but misplaced.” The real, acute threats weren’t Islamist radicals bent on mayhem and murder, she argued, but the “environmental toxins released during and after the World Trade Center attacks” and the domestic officials who failed to mitigate that menace.

That would be a comfort, but the global terrorist threat has not degraded all on its own. It has been degraded actively and only as a result of persistent effort. We have become adept at detecting terrorist plots, good at interdicting them, and very lucky in the pursuit of both objectives. “There’s no such thing as perfect security,” George W. Bush said in 9/11’s wake. “To attack us, the terrorists only have to be right once. To stop them, we need to be right 100 percent of the time.” The Islamist terrorist threat hasn’t receded so much as we have grown fatigued with the obligations associated with defending against it. Our enemies are not above exploiting our exhaustion.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].