A Proper USA Response to Foreign and Domestic Terrorism

From The New Yorker -- May 8, 2010:

May 2, 2010

TERRORISM
By Steve Coll

A few years ago, I was at an event with New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. The conversation turned to why terrorist groups, particularly those associated with Al Qaeda, had not carried out any attacks inside the United States since September 11th. Kelly noted that terrorist groups have a limited amount of talent and resources. They know that it can be very difficult for the United States to locate them in advance of an attack. But they also know that the strength of American counterterrorism operations lies in its forensic and investigative abilities after an attack takes place. In effect, when a terrorist group, large or small, sets off a bomb, it temporarily lights up its own network by exposing the forensic trail leading back from the event.

About the only thing that can be said at this stage about the car bomb, or incendiary device, placed in Times Square last night is that the police will almost certainly figure out where it came from and who was involved. Everything about the circumstantial evidence—particularly the device itself—suggests amateurism. I’m not especially expert in bomb making, but I do know that in the realm of homemade car bombs, propane and fireworks are not very sophisticated materials. The description of the Dr. Seuss-inspired contraption in the back of the S.U.V. offered by the police suggests someone who tried to go to school on the Internet but didn’t have the patience to complete too many classes.

No matter who turns out to have been responsible, the Obama Administration has an opportunity to atone here for some of the botched communication that followed the more serious Christmas Day attack. Like the oil spill in the Gulf, this is a teachable moment—but it requires leaders to rise to the occasion.

Anyone who tries to set a vehicle on fire in Times Square on a warm Saturday night is going to make news in a big way. Presumably that was the primary goal of the perpetrators—to attract attention, to spawn fear. The very amateurishness of the attack—unlike the Christmas Day attack, for example, it does not immediately call into question the competence of the government’s defenses—offers President Obama the opportunity to start talking back to terrorists everywhere in a more resilient, sustainable language than he has yet discovered. By which I mean: They intend to frighten us; we are not frightened. They intend to kill and maim; we will bring them to justice. They intend to attract attention for their extremist views; the indiscriminate nature of their violence only discredits and isolates them. They intend to disrupt us and throw us into fits of media-saturated hysteria; we will remain vigilant, but we will also keep their unsuccessful attempted murder in perspective. Something like that.

There will be more of this sort of low-level terrorism in the United States in the years ahead, not only from self-styled jihadis but possibly also from the extreme right. Domestic terrorism constitutes a persistent and serious threat, but not a strategic or existential one. The country’s vulnerability arises not so much from the damage terrorists will cause but from American society’s self-defeating inability to see such violence in perspective and to find leadership and language to define national resilience.