Image Credit: redjar

Now that some of the initial media furor has died down and some actual evidence come to light about Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, who apparently attempted to spectacularly incompetently bomb a flight into Detroit, some interesting facts have come to light that illustrate some of the magnificent failures of the government in trying to prevent terrorism.

Two things in particular stand out:

(1) His Father Warned The United States Government About Him

This is particularly infuriating:

The terror suspect who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane is the son of a Nigerian banker who alerted U.S. authorities to his “extreme religious views” months ago, it was reported Saturday.

The father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, a former minister and chairman of First Bank in Nigeria, is shocked that his son was even was allowed to fly to the U.S., family members told the Nigerian newspaper This Day.

(2) British Authorities Had Him Tagged And Barred Him From Entry Into Britain

This is also quite baffling.

The son of a prominent Nigerian banker, who allegedly attempted to blow up a transatlantic flight over America, was barred from returning to Britain earlier this year.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, graduated from a university in London last year but his visa request was refused in May when he attempted to apply for a new course at a bogus college.

Both of these things show what a drastic strategic blunder the United States made post-9/11. Despite being faced with a threat of a loosely organized threat of terrorist cells with different nationalities and no one base of operations, the United States decided to treat counter-terrorism as a “war.” And so we attempted to fight this threat militarily.

To no avail.

The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have clearly hindered some of al-Qaeda’s operational ability, but not enough to stop them from carrying out major attacks in Bali, London, and Madrid. And al-Qaeda has successfully carried off successful attacks against American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite American occupation.

While the invasion of Afghanistan and the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did disrupt the original top-down hierarchy of al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda has now morphed into something like a brand name with individual franchisees, united by social networking and a common cause to use terrorist attacks to kill westerners.

Over Christmas, we here in the United States were spared another disastrous terrorist attack by the incompetence of the perpetrator and the quick thinking of one of the passengers. However, this incident, like the recent shootings in Fort Hood, should never have come close to coming to fruition. Even though both Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab and Major Nidal Malik Hasan did not appear to be members of any organized group as of this writing, there were clear warning signs from both of them that the government was well aware of and apparently did nothing about.

Why?

I’d hypothesize that the answer has to do with the fact that through rhetoric and cultural assimilation–largely by the Republican Party though the Democratic Party shares a healthy portion of the blame–Americans both in and out of government have picked up the idea that we are in a “War on Terror” that has to be handled like a “war” rather than through traditional law enforcement. This has been a major mistake.

Think of it this way–during the heydey of the Italian-American Mafia, when organized criminals had infiltrated labor unions, legislatures, and the judiciary, either directly or by buying people off and assassinated government officials who got in their way, we did not respond with a “war on the Mafia” and invade Sicily. We developed procedures and law enforcement tools to take them down. We found different families with divergent interests and played them against each other. We embedded Italian-American law enforcement agents undercover to take down gangs from the inside. And it worked. After decades of consistent effort, the Italian-American Mafia is a shadow of its former self, and the techniques used to cripple it are now being successfully employed against other organized crime syndicates.

We could have done that with organized terror groups. Re-doubled our surveillance. Recruited Muslim-Americans to infiltrate terrorist cells. Placed an emphasis on intelligence gathering on the ground and working with cooperative governments to find judges, soldiers and police who had been bought off by terrorists. Differences between different terror groups could have been exploited to gather informants and get more information about upcoming plots.

More pertinent to the Detroit and Fort Hood incidents, we should have streamlined domestic anti-terrorist activities so that people like those involve would have bright red flags and be properly investigated, using up-to-date techniques. Individuals who show themselves to be a clear danger can be arrested and tried. Others can be removed from consideration because of a lack of any evidence–allowing resources to go elsewhere, instead of just putting random names on “no-fly lists” and calling the job done.

Why didn’t we focus attention and resources on these people? Because our counterterrorist resources are not focused towards finding individual terrorists. They are focused towards military operations.

Because we chose to treat counter-terrorist operations as a “war”, we completely botched our ability to take down terrorist networks. We focused our intelligence resources on preparing for two invasions, not taking down terrorist groups. We focused on the Sisyphean task of “securing our borders” and the promoted useless security theater at the airports instead of focusing on finding individuals and groups that actually pose threats.

Because we chose to treat counter-terrorist operations as a “war”, we handicapped our intelligence officers by torturing terror suspects, which led to a ton of false information and helped terrorists recruit people. Because we chose to ignore the rule of law and instead detained terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, and other places, we lost our ability to “flip” minor terror suspects and get them to inform on the bigger fish or even re-integrate them into their organizations so we could track their movements.

In short, because we decided to wage a “war on terror”–we cut ourselves off from the best counter-terrorism tools we have.

This is not to slight the efforts or sacrifices of our soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq. Under the circumstances, they have performed to the utmost of their ability and they have my admiration. My frustration isn’t with them–it’s with the politicians who are sacrificing them for no purpose.

Among lots of pundits and bloggers, using traditional law enforcement and intelligence tools has been deemed a “pre-9/11 mentality” to fighting terrorism, indicating a lack of “seriousness.” And I’ll admit that for a year or two back around 2001-2002, I would probably have been in that crowd. But after eight years of a botched military solution that has cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of lives and no appreciable decrease in adherents to terrorist organizations, I think it’s well past time that we closed the book on the “post-9/11 mentality.”