The underwear bomber failed

An article in Time Magazine by Peter Beinart is worth taking note of:

Here's a fact about the underwear attack that you might have missed in the media shoutfest: it failed. It failed, first of all, because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was just one terrorist. Once upon a time, al-Qaeda's modus operandi was to launch multiple, simultaneous attacks. . . .

Second, the underwear attack failed because Abdulmutallab wasn't particularly well trained. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were personally selected by Osama bin Laden . . . [and] got extensive training on the design of airplanes and the behavior of aircraft crews, even before they enrolled in U.S. flight schools. . . . Abdulmutallab, by contrast, reportedly used a syringe to try to detonate a notoriously hard-to-detonate explosive called PETN. "To make this stuff work," says Van Romero, an explosives expert at New Mexico Tech, "you have to know what you're doing." Abdulmutallab, it appears, did not. . . .

A 2007 study by Canada's Simon Fraser University found the global death toll from terrorist attacks has substantially decreased since 2001. While al-Qaeda plots do sometimes succeed--like the double-agent operation that killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan last month--they have become, Rand terrorism expert Brian Jenkins points out, less frequent and less potent. . . .

All this means that even in places like Pakistan and Yemen where al-Qaeda or its affiliates retain some organizational presence, it is much harder to train lots of would-be terrorists for complex, mass-casualty attacks. In response, al-Qaeda seems to be relying more on solo operators . . . These lone wolves are harder to catch, but they're also less likely to do massive damage. Al-Qaeda's new motto, according to New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly, seems to be "If you can't do the big attacks, do the small attacks." Not exactly cause for celebration, but certainly not cause for the hysteria that has gripped Washington since Christmas Day.

To say that al-Qaeda can't do what it once did is not much comfort when actual damage is done and people are killed. But this perspective is a needed balance from the media hype and the Republicans' glee at pointing out the security failure on Obama's watch.

It's time to sit back, take a deep breath, and realize that we cannot have a perfectly safe country. No one wants to accept even one attack; but hysteria and political posturing do not help. We need to learn from what works for the Israelis: more eyeball scrutiny and more talking to people as they come through checkpoints, looking for behavioral clues and relying on well trained, skilled screeners and selective body searches. And, most of all, for-god's-sake we need to get our act together in the sharing and synthesizing of intelligence information. Stop the inter-agency turf battles and the inefficiency. Make it work.

Ralph