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While the Twitter account was undoubtedly nothing more than some ill-considered posing, it points to the future. If the ranks of radicalized Muslims in America continue to grow at the current pace or even faster, prodded by political events or a surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric in the United States, could they achieve enough critical mass to create a genuine al Qaeda franchise worthy of the name in North America?

Most al Qaeda franchises and close allies overseas count their membership in the hundreds or higher. Assembling such a team in the United States without being discovered by law enforcement would have been difficult in 1990. The dozens of jihadists in Brooklyn and New Jersey certainly didn’t manage it. They were discovered by law enforcement—more than once—before arrests were made. But agents and officers at street level were dealing with a Washington, D.C., culture that had little appetite for investigating religious extremism.

That culture has obviously changed. With rare exceptions, domestic terrorist cells broken up since September 11 have consisted of six or fewer members, mostly with little or no support from overseas. Mosques have become much less hospitable to extremists, and the online forums where would-be terrorists congregate have been profoundly compromised by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

While at least thousands of Muslims in the United States are engaged to a greater or lesser extent in jihadist chatter online and in the real world, they remain a very small percentage of the American Muslim population. Very few of these talkers are anywhere close to action. With a caveat for inadequate data, the number of American Muslims who have picked up a gun, a knife, or a bomb with the intention of using it against another human being under the heading of jihad is almost certainly less than 1 percent of the total American Muslim population.

Those most prone to act are also most likely to have attracted law enforcement scrutiny. Simply gathering a dozen aspiring amateurs in one place for a terrorist operation is tempting fate. In the short-term future, it is likely that these conditions will continue to make major coordinated terrorist activity by homegrown American terrorists extremely difficult, but something short of impossible.

Because of all these factors, the new breed of American jihadists has almost uniformly failed to execute mass-casualty terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Unfortunately, that is nearly certain to change, perhaps by the time this book reaches print, perhaps a few months or years into the future. Whether by learning from failure or by simple luck, it is highly likely that the American jihadist movement will eventually succeed in a spectacular attack and cost hundreds or more American lives in the process.

There is also a greatly heightened threat of less conceptually ambitious terrorist attacks that can be staged by individuals or very small groups with little or no preparation or training, such as Nidal Hassan’s shooting rampage. Anwar Awlaki and his followers are actively pursuing this tactic. While there are serious questions about the strategy’s long-term viability, the prospects are unfortunately strong for near-term chaos caused by such small-scale attacks.

Evolution is the greatest danger and the biggest wild card. The history of American jihadists is one of constant, dynamic change. The jihadists of today are profoundly different from those of yesterday. They are younger and wilder, less predictable, and faster to act.

The American jihadists of the future will learn from their predecessors. Some will learn patience, and others will learn the tradecraft of terrorism. Some will be trained and receive money from terrorist networks abroad. Some will become extraordinarily dangerous. They may find ways to unify their efforts. Will there ever be a viable “al Qaeda in North America”? Forming a cohesive and capable organization would be a big challenge, but it’s not impossible.

As the players change, their methods will change, and the rules will change. The most immediate