On December 10, 2001, after completing his alQaida training in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sajid Badat returned home to Britain. Badat, 22, a Muslim born in Gloucester, had an associate, a gangly man named Richard Reid, and the duo were now ready to carry out their mission: blowing up two separate aircraft travelling from Europe to the United States. On December 22, Reid — now infamous as the “shoe bomber” — was jumped by his fellow passengers when he tried to light his device on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. He got further than Badat, who simply bailed on the plot, leaving his dismantled bomb in his parents’ house.

Badat is now serving a 13-year sentence in a British prison. He told prosecutors that he decided to “get away from danger and introduce some calm in his life.”

Badat’s case sheds some light on a rarely considered question: Why do some terrorists drop out? We rightly think of al-Qaida and other jihadist groups as formidable foes, but the stories of would-be killers who bail give us some intriguing clues about fault lines that counter-terrorism officials should exploit.

It’s become a truism of counter-terrorism that we must understand how and why individuals become jihadists in the first place. But almost nobody is studying the flip side of radicalisation — understanding those who leave terrorist organisations. Understanding the dropouts should make it easier for governments to determine which terrorists might be induced to switch sides and help stop radicalisation. The more we know about why terrorists bail, the better we can fight them.

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