Despite quietly dropping the phrase "war on terror", when it comes to battling worldwide militant networks the success of theUnited States and its allies goes well beyond the killing of Osama bin Laden.
With Britain deploying surface to air missiles, fighter jets and warships around London ahead of the Olympic Games, the threat of devastating attacks on Western nations has not gone away -- and few believe it can ever be eliminated.

Some security experts fear it may still only be a matter of time until an individual or small group use a chemical, biological or nuclear weapons -- or perhaps a cyber attack -- to inflict a death toll to dwarf that of September 11, 2001
But in the decade since the attacks on New York and Washington killed nearly 3,000, much has changed. Quietly, many of the tactics adopted by governments have made it much harder for large, complex organisations such as Al Qaeda to operate.
On Monday, US counterterrorism officials said they had frustrated a plot by al Qaeda on the Arab Peninsula to attack airliners using a redesigned version of an underwear bomb used in previous attack attempts. But they said the plot was thwarted in the early stages and no one airline was ever at risk.
"The initial asymmetric advantage Al Qaeda enjoyed has been eroded," says Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of Britain's SecrIntelligence Service (MI6) and now head of political risk and transnational threats at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. "Governments, intelligence services, police and judiciaries have all learned a great deal about how terrorist organisations work and have all upped their game in dealing with the threat."
By the time US Navy Seals killed bin Laden in his Pakistan compound, security experts say it appears the Al Qaeda leader had much less direct control over the militant group that he had in the pre-2001 era or even the early years that followed.
With its leadership decimated, security experts say Al Qaeda has effectively become a series of franchises and brands operating largely separately across several regions.
Some parts - particularly the largely Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Islamic Peninsula - are still seen as an extremely serious and credible threat. But most security and intelligence experts say the overall movement is now a shadow of its former self.
A selection of letters written by bin Laden and released by the United States on Thursday showed the Al Qaeda leader himself worrying over the future of his organisation, his lack of control and the difficulty of transferring money.
But it is not just Islamist militant networks that have suffered. A range of other groups, from Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers to Colombia's FARC to Basque separatists ETA have all effectively found themselves becoming collateral damage.
The militants Western intelligence agencies fear most now, insiders say, are the "homegrown extremists" -- often radicalised online alone late at night, planning attacks sometimes guided by distant leaders and sometimes entirely independent -- and therefore almost entirely impossible to detect.
As last year's attacks in Norway by Anders Breivik, who killed 77 in an apparently solo gun and bomb attack, show, such attackers are not always Islamic and can still conduct highly destructive actions.
But security experts believe it would generally be much harder to conduct a truly coordinated spectacular such as 9/11 -- although the 2005 London underground and bus attacks showed what a small largely homegrown group could do, killing 56 including the bombers.
High-tech data crunching
Key to Western success against terror groups, experts say, is the much greater computing power and more sophisticated analytical tools available to intelligence services -- coupled with the much greater volume of data and clues that militants themselves often leave behind them in the information age.
"Technology has played a major role here, particularly in the arena of modern communications," says Inkster. "The "electronic exhaust" left by terrorists when they communicate has made them easier to track and sophisticated relational software has made it much easier to identify connections between people who don't want to appear connected."
On a tour of its facilities on the outskirts of the English university town of Cambridge last year, British-American technology firm i2 - which provides software to leading spy agencies and law enforcement organisations around the world - showed how that worked.
From the telephone banking records of two or three suspects - contained in spreadsheets with thousands of points of individual data - the software swiftly draws out patterns, points to shared contacts and so potential new avenues for investigation.