[Infowarrior] - Don't panic. Fear is al-Qaeda's real goal.

[Richard Forno]

(Good commentary --- rick)

Don't panic. Fear is al-Qaeda's real goal.
By Fareed Zakaria
Monday, January 11, 2010

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/10/AR2010011002143.html

In responding to the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas  
Day, Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced the feelings of many when she said  
that to prevent such situations, "I'd rather overreact than  
underreact." This appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but  
it is quite wrong. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an  
overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people  
directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population.  
Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the  
response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack  
didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well.
The attempted bombing says more about al-Qaeda's weakened state than  
its strength. In the eight years before Sept. 11, al-Qaeda was able to  
launch large-scale terrorist attacks on several continents. It  
targeted important symbols of American power -- embassies in Africa; a  
naval destroyer, the USS Cole; and, of course, the World Trade Center.  
The operations were complex -- a simultaneous bombing of two embassies  
in different countries -- and involved dozens of people of different  
nationalities who trained around the world, moved significant sums of  
money and coordinated their efforts over months, sometimes years.

On Christmas an al-Qaeda affiliate launched an operation using one  
person, with no special target, and a failed technique tried eight  
years ago by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The plot seems to have been  
an opportunity that the group seized rather than the result of a well- 
considered strategic plan. A Nigerian fanatic with (what appeared to  
be) a clean background volunteered for service; he was wired up with a  
makeshift explosive and put on a plane. His mission failed entirely,  
killing not a single person. The suicide bomber was not even able to  
commit suicide. But al-Qaeda succeeded in its real aim, which was to  
throw the American system into turmoil. That's why the terror group  
proudly boasted about the success of its mission.

Is there some sensible reaction between panic and passivity? Philip  
Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and later a  
senior State Department official in the Bush administration, suggests  
that we should try to analyze failures in homeland security the way we  
do airplane catastrophes. When an airliner suffers an accident, major  
or minor, the National Transportation Safety Board convenes a group of  
nonpartisan experts who methodically examine what went wrong and then  
issue recommendations to improve the situation. "We approach airline  
security with the understanding that it's a complex problem, that we  
have a pretty good system, but that there will be failures -- caused  
by human beings, technology, or other factors. The point is to  
constantly fix what's broken and keep improving the design and  
execution," says Zelikow.

Imagine if that were the process after a lapse in homeland security.  
The public would know that any attack, successful or not, would  
trigger an automatic, serious process to analyze the problem and fix  
it. Politicians might find it harder to use every such event for  
political advantage. The people on the front lines of homeland  
security would not get demoralized as they watched politicians and the  
media bash them and grandstand with little knowledge.

Overreacting to terrorist attacks plays into al-Qaeda's hands. It also  
provokes responses that are likely to be large-scale, expensive,  
ineffective and possibly counterproductive. More screening for every  
passenger makes no sense. When searching for needles in haystacks,  
adding hay doesn't help. What's needed is a larger, more robust watch  
list that is instantly available to all relevant government agencies.  
Almost 2 million people travel on planes in the United States every  
day. We need to isolate the tiny percentage of suspicious characters  
and search them, not cause needless fear in everyone else.

As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant,  
torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it.  
But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from  
the boy's father. If that father had believed that the United States  
was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without  
any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this  
country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and  
colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn  
in the terrorist next door.

Fareed Zakaria is editor of Newsweek International. His e-mail address  
is comments at fareedzakaria.com.