Having seen the intelligence threat reporting since joining the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003, I am confident that terrorists have wanted to and tried to attack us in the homeland, but have not been successful because of the numerous policies, programs, and changes put in place by the Bush Administration and by Congress. Those who say al-Qaeda and its associates are only interested in an attack more spectacular than 9/11 are ignoring the fact that our Intelligence Community has disrupted planned attacks at home, including an attack on the New York City subway system, and the fact that our friends and allies abroad have suffered numerous, less spectacular attacks at the hands of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

There were numerous programs and policies that led to the President’s success against terrorism, but one of the most important was the Terrorist Surveillance Program. I have seen, firsthand, evidence of how vital that program was in uncovering and disrupting terrorist plots, which is why I made it my priority in the last Congress to ensure the passage of legislation that would enable the program to continue. The FISA Amendments Act, signed into law on July 10, 2008, preserved the President’s program and gave our dedicated intelligence professionals the tools and authorities they need to stay one step ahead of the terrorists, which on a good day, is an incredibly difficult job. The FISA Amendments Act received almost 70 votes in the Senate, including the vote of then-Senator Obama, and a strong majority in the House, so the Legislative branch has spoken on this issue.

President Obama should ensure that the programs in place under the FISA Amendments Act remain active and that nothing is done to undermine them, including the withdrawal of the Attorney General certifications allowing for the dismissal of lawsuits against telecommunications providers who assisted with the Terrorist Surveillance Program. The participation of third parties is essential to our intelligence collection efforts, particularly in the area of electronic surveillance. If these frivolous lawsuits against the providers are not dismissed, we risk jeopardizing future cooperation. Simply put, without this cooperation, there is no surveillance program. At a time when our economy is in crisis and the terrorist threat to our country remains high, it would be particularly irresponsible to allow frivolous lawsuits to financially threaten these companies and cause them to cease cooperation with the intelligence community. The fact that the courts have recognized the President’s constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance exposes these lawsuits as all the more frivolous.

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 Want to stop doing something stupid. Here is a thought. Why has Congress mandated 100 percent scanning of every container coming into the United States, when every serious analyst thinks that is the stupidest idea ever. Sure, terrorists could build a "moveable" nuclear bomb and stick it in a container and send it to America without a return address. But while this sounds like a cool idea for a Tom Clancy novel (In Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears,” terrorists obtain a nuclear bomb, ship it to Baltimore and detonate it), in reality it would be a lot harder to accomplish. Certainly, no semi-intelligent terrorist would put a bomb in a shipping container and send it to New York. Containers, after all, are routinely lost, pilfered, crushed or otherwise waylaid. Moving a nuclear weapon would likely require 100 percent success "guaranteed." And that would require a sophisticated smuggling operation -- one far more effective than drug and arms smugglers routinely use. Criminal smugglers expect to lose some of their product along the way (so they ship more to keep the profit margin up). Nuclear smugglers, by contrast, couldn't afford even one mistake.

What’s more 100 percent scanning is wholly impractical idea. Before Congress mandated scanning, they mandated a test called the “Secure Freight Initiative.” Then before waiting for the results—they mandated 100 percent scanning. When the results of “SFI” came back—guess what? While the SFI demonstrated that 100 percent scanning of containers bound for the United States from low-volume, “high risk” ports such as Qasim in Pakistan was feasible, the assessment raised serious questions about the costs and delays that would be caused by implementing the measure at larger ports. Translation—stupid idea won’t work. When the Government Accountability Office, which works for Congress, looked at the mandate they concluded pretty much the same raising nine major problems. 

So here is the bottom line: (1) It won’t work, (2) It will cost a lot of money, (3) It is a crummy way to fight terrorism. So if the new administration wants to stop doing something stupid—this should be high on the list.

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There is no way, specifically, of knowing what terrorist attempts were stopped, short of access to highly classified information.  The nul hypothesis is that there was little or no effort, so far, to follow up on the 9-11 attacks. 

Underlying the question is the major contribution of the Bush administration in this effort: an overstatement of the threat, as part of a strategy of fear.  the greatest contribution President Obama could make is to replace the message of fear with one of hope.  And a major, multilateral investment in bringing the reality of that message to the many countries and areas where terrorists might create bases of operation.

I have a slightly different take on the question.

It is, indeed, a fact that we have not been struck at home by terrorists since 9/11.  And it is indeed a fact that many fine American men and women in many agencies have worked tirelessly, creatively, and unselfishly in making the lives of Americans more secure.  We can all salute them.

But when the usual GOP politics kicked in over the last year or so, the facts and the sacrifices were degraded into just another just another deception by the Bush administration.  When challenged on any aspect of homeland security, the standard collection of administration acolytes and strategists instantly dredged up the dog-eared list of interdicted attacks against us.  There were the slapstick operations as with the Lackawanna Six and the the Liberty Seven.  There was the strange as with  Lyman Faris and his blowtorch attack on the Brooklyn Bridge.  And there was the just plain weird as with the case of Attorney General Ashcroft’s dark Moscow announcement of the wrap up of Jose Padilla and his dirty bomb plot. All of this was interspersed with the raising and lowering of the color-coded warning flags by the homeland security secretary. It was enough to interrupt Americans from the shopping spree their president had sent them on.

But when pressed for something a little more real there was usually a hasty retreat behind the screen of protecting sources and methods.  It’s secret.  Trust us.

I’ve always been troubled by the hints that there were real and present dangers to the homeland thwarted by the administration, but that they must forever remain cloaked in secrecy.  I never understood how any responsible leaders could steadfastly stick to the protection of sources and methods while that very position accounted for a weakening not only of this nation’s alliances, but potentially strengthened our adversaries.  I cannot imagine a source or a method so sacred that it should be protected at those costs.  And I cannot imagine that had there been any real and present danger interdicted by the administration, that the system would not have leaked the story. In a New York minute, it would have leaked it.

We can all recall that before Ronald Reagan even felt a twinge heat from his retaliatory attack against Tripoli following the Libyan attack on the La Belle Disco in Berlin in 1986, he laid his intelligence on the table.  We had busted the Libyan codes solidly implicating the Libyan Peoples’ Bureau in Berlin in the attack.  It was hard fact.  A Smith & Wesson-beats-a-full-house type of fact.  Reagan sailed through the brief storm, and no damage was done to our standing among our friends and many of our adversaries were silenced. Indeed, we gave up a priceless source -- the fact that we had the Libyan codes.  And indeed, there was some whining in the intelligence community.  It was worth it.

If there had been a similar American intelligence coup in the last few years, and if the administration hadn’t used the intelligence as Reagan did, then a new layer of irresponsibility could be added to the Bush legacy.

It’s time to set aside childish things, as the man just said.

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 In the short-term, that is the past 7+ years, there is no doubt that the Bush Administration kept us safe from terrorist attack.  This is unquestionably a towering achievement.  However, the more salient question is whether the Bush Administration’s “war on terrorism” effectively laid the foundation for continuing to prevent future terrorist attacks on the U.S.?   The answer here, unfortunately, is at once less salutary and more alarming.  As with much else in the Bush Administration’s “war on terror,” short-term expediency was sacrificed for long-term progress.  This is not a matter of debate but rather was the conclusion of the seminal May 2006 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which warned that the U.S. invasion and continued, perceived occupation of Iraq has radicalized the Muslim world and potentially generated untold new terrorist recruits, along with the equally important July 2007 NIE that described an al-Qaeda which had successfully re-grouped and re-organized along the lawless frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan and was again capable of attacking the U.S.  The fundamental conclusions of that 2007 NIE have since been validated by public statements made in 2008 by its principle author, Ted Gistaro (then National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats), the DCIA, General Michael V. Hayden, and most recently by the outgoing DNI, Michael McConnell.  Thus, the failure to put in place an effective long-term strategy to diminish the threat of terrorist attack against the U.S. takes its place in the queue of other short-term “fixes” (e.g., Guantanamo, the disdain for our allies and rule of law, the invasion Iraq, neglect of Afghanistan and Pakistan, etc.) that have had the effect of delivering short-term results at the expense of potentially undermining the prospects of long-term security.

But more critically in terms of long-strategy, in addition to asking whether the security measures adopted by the Bush Administration have kept us safe, we must also ask whether those measures have also effectively deterred al-Qaeda from attempting to attack the U.S.?  Here the answer, equally unfortunately, is even less positive.  We would not be having this discussion had, for instance, al-Qaeda’s plot to simultaneously bomb and crash multiple American and Canadian aircraft departing from London’s Heathrow Airport over their North American destinations not been disrupted in August 2006.  What remains even more worrisome is not only the fact that this plot was planned, orchestrated and directed from a still active and functioning al-Qaeda Central command in Pakistan, but that any pretensions about our ability to deter al-Qaeda from attacking the U.S. were shattered.  At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that a supposedly de-graded and diminished al-Qaeda (because of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror”) was only capable of striking at “softer,” more accessible targets like subway and commuter trains, banks and synagogues, and hotels and other tourist destinations.  Yet that plot was directed against arguably the most internationally hardened target set against terrorism—commercial aviation, a target set moreover on which the lion’s share of America’s transportation security funds had been lavished.  The fact that all the security improvements that attended U.S. (and U.K.) commercial aviation had failed to deter al-Qaeda is fundamentally disquieting.  Still more disquieting, however, is the fact that this was a plot where the U.S. had unprecedented “actionable” intelligence.  In June 2005, we captured the original al-Qaeda commander assigned to oversee the operation, Abu Faraj al-Libi, and six months later we killed his successor, Hamza Rabia, in a Predator airstrike.  Yet, despite the capture of one of the operation’s commanders and the killing of the other, al-Qaeda did not repine.  Instead, undaunted, it reached into its bench of senior operatives and placed a third al-Qaeda field commander, Abu Ubaydah al-Masri, in charge.  The plot which, if successful, could have rivaled the 9/11 attacks, was of course thwarted by excellent intelligence and cooperation with our British and Pakistani allies.  But one is reminded here of the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s famous taunting of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher following its failure to assassinate her at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Brighton in 1984.  “We only have to be lucky once; you have to be lucky all the time.”  That admonition is relevant to the new Obama Administration’s efforts to safeguard the U.S. from terrorist attack—except for one important caveat.  We cannot afford to build our counterterrorism strategy whether on luck or on the short-term “fixes.”  Success in preventing a future terrorist attack on the U.S. will ultimately depend on the development and implementation of a truly comprehensive, integrated counterterrorism strategy that is as focused on long-term consequences as it is on short-term gains.  This will be among the main challenge facing the Obama Administration in terms of securing and safeguarding the U.S. from terrorist attack.

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While 9/11 certainly reflected a “failure of imagination”, it also reflected a failure by the government to do the basic blocking and tackling to keep known threats from assembling in the U.S. in a manner where they could hurt us.  Putting aside the issue of targeting terrorists overseas, the greatest homeland achievement has been to make it considerably harder for terrorists to travel to the U.S. and to enter our physical terrority.  Since 9/11, the Bush Administration deployed a layered and impressive array of programs designed to lock in the identities of travelers, compare them against our databases of known threats, to make it considerably more difficult to obtain and use fraudulent identity documents, and to tie the disparate points of contact with the government together.  While the US-VISIT biometric enrollment program is the most well-known, the State Department’s BioVisa program and CBP’s advanced passenger information system are integral to the task of identifying the literal needles in the haystack.  Once in the country, additional vetting at points of a critical nature (obtaining a U.S. identity document, boarding a plane, accessing a government or sensitive facility) continue the layers a would-be terrorist must surmount.  While no set of defenses is impenetrable, we have come a long way from 9/11, when a terrorist known to the CIA was able to obtain a visa, fly to the U.S., clear immigration processing, obtain U.S. identity documents, obtain flight training, be stopped by local law enforcement, and board a commercial airliner without arousing suspicion.

The homeland security record of the past eight years certainty has other successes, including rebuilding FEMA and upgrading local preparedness, vastly enhancing maritime and cargo security, and developing effective partnerships with foreign governments and international businesses to identify and deter threats.

President Obama and his team should not make the mistake of responding to the hypothetical fears of privacy advocates seeking to dismantle valuable programs such as REAL ID, Secure Flight, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and CBP’s border search authority.  And the new administration needs to work with the first responder and local law enforcement communities to develop reasonable expectations about the threats they face and the capabilities they need fulfilled via federal funding.  Under the broadest definition of homeland security, we could spend nearly every dime in the Treasury to counter a plausible threat and target.  At some point, we have to accept that an open society cannot eliminate the risk in boarding a bus in Des Moines and cannot attempt to have the government screen every package or person moving within our elaborate domestic transportation systems.

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Many of the respondents have already identified the Bush Administration initiatives that made a difference, including the attack on Afghanistan, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, most notably the TSA (remember when contract employees doing the inspections at airports were often from the countries that spawned terrorists and themselves had not been vetted?) a more focused intelligence effort, cooperation with Allies.

Nothing in the aforementioned list needs to be reversed by the Obama Administration, but some of the Bush initiatives should  be strenghened. In particular, we still do not have a good way to prosecute terrorists. The Nation clearly does not support the Bush Administration's aproach, and President Obaama in any event will reverse it. In favor of what, however? We cannot treat terrorists as ordinary criminals, even as "ordinary" serial killers. They do require special courts to judge them, by means of special rules, with guaranteed punishments, including, perhaps especially, the death penalty. In other words, we should treat them along the lines that  we once treated anarchists who, after all, were responsible for many murders, including that of President McKinley.

There is also a crying need to increase the effectiveness of the Department of Homeland Security. It remains a melange of different agency culture and is too highly bureaucratized. As a result, it seeks the easy answers to hard questions--making millions of people take their shoes off at airports because of the shoe bomber incident being a prime example. Europeans do not require passengers to shed their shoes; no terrorist incident has resulted from this more lenient practice. More generally, Governor Janet Napolitano definitely has her work cut out for her; her Department needs to be as pro-active as the Department of Defense has been over the past seven years.

We must also recognize that all the criticism of Mr. Bush's seeming unwillingness to demand sacrifices of the Nation overlooks the massive sacrifices that ordinary people were prepared to make in terms of government survelliance and intrusion into their daily lives. The fulmination of liberal pundits and columnists notwithstanding, most people have understood that government intrusion is a relatively small, if significant, price to pay for security. Why should sacifice only be measured in tax dollars? The Obama Administration should proceed cautiously when considering any rollback of the surveillance initiatives that its predecessor undertook. 

Finally, as Fred Ikle has pointed out in a recent article in the Washington Times, we need to recognize that piracy and terrorism can produce a lethal mix, and that the West is responding feebly to the predations of of the Indian Ocean pirates. European states send their navies off the coast of Somalia, but do little to capture or prosecute the pirates. For their part, the pirates continue to fill their coffers with ransom money, which, as Ikle points out, could finance new terrorist attacks, just as Bin Laden's funds financed 9/11. The Western response to piracy is eerily reminiscent of the Clinton Administration's response to al-Qaeda in the 1990s; the new administration must take the lead in changing Europe's attitudes and, together with those allies, take a harsh stand aginst the pirates so that their enterprise can be shut down once and for all.

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It is difficult to successfully analyze things that happen, but impossible with any certainty to analyze things that did not take place.  That said, the demands of reality often causes us to go beyond the strictures of social science methodology and enter the field of creative speculation, which is what all answers to this week's topic are.

If pushed to speculate, I would treat all of these explanations as plausible hypothesis to explain why we have not had a terrorist attack on our soil:  Better homeland security; increased domestic intelligence gathering; better coalition intelligence and information sharing; and great police work.  We are a much harder target today than we were in 2001, and AQAM is under much more pressure.  We have killed so many of the top cadres, and even the supply of top-notch terror managers is low.

I would put most emphasis on the fact that when it comes to military action, the United States has gone from the "object" to the "subject' of operations.  As the "doer," we have seized the initiative and forced the leadership of Al Qaeda, "the receiver," to live in caves.  We have taken the battle to them. We have severely restricted their ability to freely communicate and to train new cadres.  We have dealt them a severe blow in Iraq, an area that they had declared to be the key front on the war against the crusaders.  Moreover, in many areas, its excesses have alienated even fellow radical salafists (Compare all of this to AQAM's situation in Afghanistan in 2001, before 9-11)

In all, however, we must not be complacent.  Recent activities in the FATA are troubling and could provide the smokescreen needed for AQAM to once again become a coherent organization, actively carrying out it own operations.   Drug monies and charity continue to fuel terrorist efforts.  Finally, we are in a unique period.  AQAM will seek to test the Obama administration. Vice President Biden is not alone in thinking that.  And then ... there is the associated issue of Shiite radical groups and the growing tentacles of  Iranian-backed mayhem.   Lots of work for the new team. JJC

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The Bush administration made two key advances that helped prevent additional attacks on U.S. soil. First, the United States worked with allies around the world to arrest and disrupt terrorist groups. This cooperation was often done through local police and intelligence services and was usually quiet. But it made things far harder for al- Qa’ida to do even basic operations. Previous administrations had also worked with allies to fight terrorists, but the scale and scope of this cooperation were stepped up after 9/11. The second advance was the overthrow of the Taliban, removing the base al-Qa’ida enjoyed in Afghanistan since 1996. Even though the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated rapidly, from al-Qa’ida’s perspective it is less able to plan terrorist operations than when it enjoyed the haven the Taliban offered.

 Even together, these measures are not a surefire guarantee of security, but they did mitigate the risk of an attack. While the Obama administration should (and almost certainly will) continue and try to improve international counterterrorism cooperation, it will also need to address the new haven al-Qa’ida has established in Pakistan that has become much more extensive in the last few years.

I am perhaps most inclined toward Paul Pillar's overall contribution.  Since the U.S. remains somewhat vulnerable to terrorist intrusion and attack despite the disruption of overseas networks by direct U.S. action (whether cost-efficient, well-advised or hyped as to its effectiveness), greater vigilance on the part of other friendly governments inside and outside the Middle East/South Asia region, and measures taken within the U.S. itself, one cannot simply credit the outgoing Administration for the absence of such attacks.

Additionally, although more difficult to carry out than prior to measures taken in the wake of 9/11, I agree that, unfortunately, additional terrorist attacks on U.S. soil may well take place in the coming years.  We pose a more formidable challenge to such attackers now than earlier in this decade, but our capabilities certainly have not rendered us omniscent.

There are, as some already have pointed out, various other explanations well beyond the general points noted immediately above that have been put forward to explain why a terrorist attack in the U.S. has not occurred since 9/11.  One, for example, suggests that Bin Laden and portions of the remaining assets affiliated in some way with al-Qaeda was, at least for a time, more interested in another rather spectacular attack instead of a smaller, easier one that most likely could have been carried out with a higher likelihood of success by capitalizing on remaining, albeit reduced, American vulnerabilities.

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There is a paradox embedded in the Bush-era experience with terrorism.  On the one hand, the failure of Islamic terrorists to mount a successful reprise of the 9-11 atrocities indicates that they were not as capable as we initially feared.  On the other hand, the methods they and others have employed to launch later acts of violence reveals that new technology has empowered extremists of every stripe.

The latter trend portends increasing danger for civilization during the Obama years, because disaffected, even suicidal elements in our society now have access to tools that can cause suffering on a vast scale.  Not just nuclear weapons -- they are still very hard to come by -- but gene-splicing technology for creating virulent diseases, cyber technology suitable for subverting the internet, and any number of other mechanisms of mass destruction are readily available in global commerce.  At present, we have no real framework for controlling access to these technologies, and it is possible that no workable framework can be devised in a world of autonoumous actors and borderless connectivity.

It is clear that the Bush Administration succeeded in squashing Al Qaeda through a combination of domestic lockdown and taking the fight to the enemy.  But Al Qaeda was a small collection of zealots determined to take credit for their attacks, so finding a focus for U.S. counter-terror efforts was not hard.  A more clever (and humble) terrorist movement could achieve much greater damage without even revealing its identity to the world, amplifying the psychological effect of its actions while mitigating the success of our responses.  Bush never had to deal with the worst case, and therefore Obama will be on his own in crafting responses to the existential danger that arises at the intersection of human nature with revolutionary technology.

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Amidst the pomp, splendor and saccharin nonsense of this inaugural event, it is wise to take the opportunity to consider the merits and demerits of the Bush era.

It seems only fair to give the stringent domestic security measures adopted after 9/11 some credit for blocking what might have been further attacks.  Surely the regime of random searches at airports of grandmothers and other likely takfiri jihadis must have had some effect?  Surely, the unification of all those agencies and activities into the Department of Homeland Security has made them more able?

Surely the re-structuring and "reform" of the intelligence community has had a beneficial effect in the production of the information with which to hunt down the enemies of the Republic?  You say that President Bush strongly resisted the creation of the office of Director of National Intelligence?  Well, it all came right in the end.  The world wide hunt for takfiri jihadis has gone well.  The enemies of the United States have been badly damaged in a steady process of engagment centered on; liaison with foreign police and intelligence services, the use of SOF troops as needed, and much improved intelligence analysis and collection.  The Bush Administration should be given credit for that.  It happened on their watch.

President Bush et all took us to war in Iraq in order to make the United States a place safe from Iraqi nuclear weapons that did not exist.   When faced with that awkwardness, George Bush told Jim Lehrer that the absence of these weapons was a "great disappointment."  That must be true for him, but he can comfort himself with the fact that many of his most devout followers still think those weapons are buried somewhere, somewhere.  We just have not found them yet.  Shimon Peres told George W. recently that his courageous stand against Saddam's Iraq was analogous to Churchill's stand against Hitler.  The absurdity of such a comparison should not be allowed to obscure the insight provided into the kind of thinking that led to the obsession of the Bush Administration with Iraq.  It will be interesting to see if the Iraq that emerges from provincial elections at the end of January will be a country that Bush and Peres are happy with.

And then there is Afghanistan.  Like most Americans I think that the decision to invade that distant place was a correct one.  The men who had attacked us were present there in concentrations that made retribution inevitable.   Sadly, there is little doubt that preparations for the invasion and occupation of Iraq shifted both resources and attention away from Afghanistan.   Over several years that has produced a marked deterioration in the situation there.

President Obama rejected the Iraq War as a futile venture from its inception.   He seems to have favored the Afghanistan War in compensation and in contrast.  Now he says that he intends to fight it out there against ...?  And for what?   Perhaps he should ask himself and his new best friend David Petraeus, just what it is that the United States should seek in Afghanistan.   Is it to make Afghanistan a new best friend for the United States or is it merely to make the place useless for our enemies?  These are two different things.

The greater menace lurks in Pakistan where an existing nuclear force de frappe is in the hands of armed forces of ambiguous and unpredictable orientation.  One might say (ungenerously) that this is also part of the Bush legacy.

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Because I am a bear of little brain, the answer seems simple to me. Why would al-Qaeda bother to attack inside the United States again? For less than $500,000 and 19 fighters killed-in-action, al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks set America firmly and so far unrelentingly on the road to defeat. Bin Laden’s three goals are: (a) bleed America to bankruptcy; (b) spread U.S. and military forces to the breaking point; and, (c) on the model of Ho Chi Minh, try to promote as much political disunity among Americans as possible. Each of these goals is on the way to accomplishment, with, of course, the indispensable help of U.S. government foreign and economic policies. It does not seem possible that bin Laden and his senior lieutenants could have expected Allah to look with such favor on al-Qaeda’s single inside-the-U.S. strike, but He did. Only professional strategists, politicians looking for votes, and others with no contact points with reality believe that al-Qaeda has been prevented from striking again in America. Readers may have noticed, for example, that entry to the United States is simple because our borders are wide open and, to our south, Mexico is withering away as an effective nation-state. For bin Laden and his Islamist allies, then -- at least between 9/11 and mid-2008 -- it would have been silly to hit America at home a second time and risk reuniting Americans and having their leaders, for the first time in 60 -plus years, unleash the full fury of American military power.

Since mid-2008, I tend to think al-Qaeda’s calculus has shifted. The deepening disaster engulfing the U.S. economy is a golden -- God-given? -- opportunity for bin Laden and his fellows to do their bit to shove us into bankruptcy. Indeed, it would be unprofessional and negligent for them to refrain from an attack that would so clearly advance each of their strategic goals.  And, sadly for Americans, they are neither unprofessional nor negligent folks.

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No modern nation wass as vulnerable to terrorism as was the United States prior to 9/11. Yet, since 9/11 none has been as successful in thwarting such attacks. The list of countries that have suffered from Al Qaeda since 9/11 is an extraordinary one: Great Britain, France, Spain, Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Eygpt, Jordon, Israel, and Indonesia. Many more attempted terrorist attacks have been foiled. So, if terrorists are so active globally and the United States is so vulnerable, why have we not been attacked since 9/11?

There are three reasons for this success, all attributable to the policies and programs in initiated by the Bush Administration. First, there was the aggressive counter-terrorism campaign conducted overseas. This led to the disruption of Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and the killing or capturing of dozens of senior leaders. Second, there were the efforts to manage better the influx of people into the country and secure the borders. One successful program is U.S. VISIT to screen visitors and immigrants. TSA passenger and baggage screening is equally important. Efforts to improve cargo monitoring and screening such as the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) and the Container Security Initiative (CSI) are also important. Border fencing and the deployment of SBINet – an electronic sensor system – have begun to make the crossing of the Nation’s frontiers more problematic. Third, there was the electronic eavesdropping campaign. President Bush is to be commended for pushing the legal envelope with respect to electronic intelligence collection. Many of the initiatives he okayed for national security purposes were already allowed in criminal investigations.

Ironically, the war in Iraq may have made the homeland safer, although the war was not fought for this reason. The insurgency in Iraq, although primarily conducted by indigenous personnel, still absorbed foreign fighters and resources that otherwise might have been directed at the United States. We know from captured communications that the Iraq conflict absorbed the attention and energies of Al Qaeda’s leadership. Also, the behavior of Al Qaeda in Iraq served to undermine the credibility of the organization worldwide, something noted in communications from Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman Zawahiri to the former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarkawi.

If President Obama wants to maintain his predecessor’s record of success, he will find it difficult to go back on the latter’s initiatives. It is already clear that President Obama will have trouble making good on his commitment to close the Guantanamo detention facility. Ordering it closed and making it happen are two different things. The most effective intelligence tool available in the war on international terrorism is electronic surveillance. The new President would be mad to diminish the effectiveness of this capability. The possibility that terrorists may attempt to bring nuclear materials or biological agents into the country means increased border security. One program initiated by the Bush Administration, called BIOWATCH, is intended to detect the presence of biological weapons. A limited number of relatively primitive sensor systems have been deployed in a few critical locations. The new Administration should move aggressively to deploy widely the next generation of improved biological detection sensors. The same is true for the advanced radiation monitors now being developed by the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office at the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, the new Administration should complete the effort begun by his predecessor to provide the National Guard with sufficient modern vehicles to enable them to provide assistance to civil authorities in the event of a major terrorist incident.

George W. Bush pressed the pedal to the metal and got this nation moving on homeland security. It is amazing what he was able to achieve (with considerable help from Congress) in a few short years. If the country is to remain safe, the new President would be smart to see through to completion the initiatives begum by his predecessor.

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 I think the claim by the Bush Administration is exaggerated, at best.  Measuring success or failure by no attacks on US soil is the equivalent of doing "body counts" to measure success in Vietnam.  This is a long struggle and quiet on the field or number of terrorists killed is not success.

The U.S. response to 9/11 was done "on the fly" and now needs to be reviewed in toto.  The attacks on the homeland of America were the result less of anyone's incompetence than a total systemic failure.  America's defenses were developed with a primary focus toward large nation state actors willing to engage in nation state activities like building armed forces and engaging in forms of western oriented diplomacy.  However, we ignored the lessons of Vietnam and the non nation state actions of 1990's where different kinds of actors did not play by our rules and inflicted damage on us almost at will.

I think the Bush Administration old style nation state policy of three layered defense -- abroad, at the border, and internal -- has only temporarily delayed an attack.  We have damaged to some extent those non-state actors who wish to do us harm such as Al Queda in the short term.  Long term is still debatable. Our borders are still porous to an almost laughable extent.  As for internal defense, it ranges from quite good (NYC) to ok (the development of fusion centers for state and federal cooperation) to nearly unconstitutional with various state and local authorities engaging in internal spying.

The Obama Administration needs to engage in a full review of our national defense and diplomatic policy and how we structure it.  There is no domestic and international Al Queda operations.  We need to adapt our systems of defense, homeland security and diplomacy to reflect that reality.  This goes beyond a mere merging of bureaucratic boxes.  A strong NSC, including homeland and national security components, must be developed quickly to initiate policies and actions that reflect the needs to today representing the US interests of today -- both at home and abroad. 

America must also come to grips with something it can do, but dislikes doing -- we are in for a long struggle with people deeply opposed to our beliefs.  Talking to them and picking them off one by one is not going to do the job.  Coordinating our diplomacy, our actions and our security response is key to a consistent long range positive result -- the wearing down and isolation of our enemies.

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There is no single explanation why terrorists dispatched, instructed or inspired by al Qaeda have not carried out another attack in the United States. Instead, there are many hypotheses that analysts debate as to their relative importance. In the spirit of that debate, I have attempted to weigh the contribution of various initiatives based on a total scale of 100 points.

“Fighting them there means not fighting them here.” This assertion was frequently offered as support for the war in Iraq. It implied that American forces were tying down al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq who otherwise would have been available for attacks in the United States. This argument rests largely on the misperception that Iraq was somehow connected with 9/11. In fact, al Qaeda expanded in Iraq as a consequence of the U.S. invasion. But even as the Iraq insurgency escalated between 2003 and 2007, jihadist terrorists were still carrying out attacks across the globe. If anything, the invasion of Iraq galvanized al Qaeda’s target constituency.

The argument can be made that some foreign fighters were attracted to Al Qaeda’s jihad in Iraq, but the vast majority of these fighters came from neighboring Arab countries and were thus not likely candidates for terrorist operations outside of the Middle East. A few did come from Europe and the United States. So if we assume that had there been no war in Iraq, then conceivably some Iraq-bound fanatic might have carried out a terrorist attack here. (2 points)

Heightened security prevented terrorist attacks. Without a doubt, homeland security has improved. Many targets have been hardened. However, since 9/11, terrorists in other parts of the world have attacked hotels, restaurants, night clubs, subways, commuter trains, churches, synagogues—soft targets that are equally vulnerable to terrorist attack in the United States. “Heightened security,” however, includes not only physical measures but perceptions of increased security awareness and greater scrutiny of suspicious activity. A potential terrorist planner could observe (or imagine) that he was under surveillance himself—a possible deterrent to action. (10 points)

Lack of motivation. There is still no evidence of any significant cohort of would-be terrorists in the United States. In fact, years of constant Al Qaeda exhortations to 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide to take up arms have actually produced a meager response. A few groups in the Middle East and North Africa have adopted the Al Qaeda name to bolster their own jihadist credentials. But if you don’t count on-going conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, al Qaeda-inspired terrorists have carried out an average of five or six successful terrorist attacks each year, and that pace of activity has declined since 2006. Overall there have been fewer than fifty major terrorist attacks overall since 2001. Thus Jihadist terrorism is a genuine danger that cannot be ignored, but it is hardly the global uprising sought by Osama bin Laden.

America’s Muslim population is also less susceptible to radicalization and recruitment to violence than Muslims in other parts of the world because Muslim immigrants to the United States have integrated more successfully. A young Muslim male—al Qaeda’s recruiting target—has greater opportunity to earn money, build a family, and participate politically in the United States than in much of Europe, for instance, and certainly than in most of the Middle East or Muslim South Asia. Successful absorption is one of America’s primary anti-terrorist achievements. Unfortunately, by its very nature terrorism does not require great numbers, only a handful of committed believers. (22 points)

America’s Muslim community discourages terrorist tendencies. This argument suggests that Muslims in the best position to recognize tendencies toward extremism among family and friends have intervened in ways not visible to authorities to dissuade would-be terrorists. Although the evidence is anecdotal, it probably has occurred in some cases. (8 points)

Al Qaeda’s has been weakened. The dispersal of its training camps, removal of key planners, and the continued pursuit of its leaders has undoubtedly reduced al Qaeda’s capabilities. As a consequence of unprecedented cooperation among intelligence services and law enforcement organizations worldwide, the operating environment is also much more hostile for al Qaeda. However, this weakening should not be overestimated. As the recent events in Mumbai demonstrate, other galaxies in the jihadist universe still have a capacity to plan, prepare, and carry out devastating terrorist attacks across national frontiers. (12 points)

Local terrorists have demonstrated little competence. The terrorist plots uncovered in the United States since 9/11 demonstrate intentions, but not much in terms of terrorist capabilities or competence. Few of the plots discovered advanced much beyond reconnaissance. The plotters lacked the critical component that transforms fantasies of violence into operational plans—determined, competent leadership. On the other hand, as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing proved, a tiny conspiracy with one competent leader can lead to an attack of devastating proportions. Terrorist incompetence is certainly an unreliable defense. (16 points)

Domestic intelligence efforts have thwarted terrorist attacks. Under pressure to intervene before terrorist attacks occur, federal investigators and local law enforcement officials have foiled a number of terrorist plots since 9/11. While not every conspiracy uncovered would have led to a terrorist attack had authorities not intervened, it seems likely that at least some would have. (12 points)

Arrests of terrorist plotters have had a deterrent effect. The utility of intelligence efforts goes beyond preventing individual terrorist attacks. Publicized arrests and successful prosecutions create the impression among would-be terrorist plotters that they may well be sharing their scheme with an informant or undercover policeman. Suspicion, intensified by terrorists’ own paranoia, impedes terrorist recruitment and planning. (14 points)

Al Qaeda’s leadership has made the strategic decision not to launch another 9/11-style attack. There are several versions of this argument: (1) Al Qaeda achieved its purpose on 9/11, drawing the United States into its killing fields— making further attacks unnecessary. (2) Anything less than another 9/11-scale attack would signal al Qaeda weakness and complicate its plans for another spectacular event. (3) Al Qaeda’s large-scale indiscriminate violence has provoked a backlash among Muslims. Maintaining their sympathy and support requires keeping the United States in the role of aggressor, not victim. (4) Al Qaeda remains committed to building a network of operatives that will eventually enable it to extend its jihad to the United , and another attack now would provoke a crackdown before Al Qaeda was ready. There is, however, little evidence of constraint in al Qaeda propaganda.. All of these arguments also assume that al Qaeda leaders still exercise a high degree of command and control over the jihadist enterprise, which I think is debatable. (4 points)

So there you have it. My own scoring postulates lack of motivation and hostility in the American Muslim community as the most important explanation for a lack of another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland, with a combined 30 points. Lack of terrorist capabilities, especially at the local level, gets 28 points combined. Intensified intelligence efforts and their disruptive as well as deterrent effect get 26 points combined, with security measures scoring 10 points.

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The topic at hand is related to the more general and frequently posed question, “Why hasn’t the United States been hit again?” That question is both difficult to answer and misleading. It is difficult to answer because there are multiple variables that contribute to terrorist attacks occurring or not occurring—many of which are matters of luck or accident—and because we will never have the detailed knowledge of the calculations of would-be terrorists that would enable us to answer the question precisely. (If we did have that kind of knowledge, terrorism would be far less of a problem than it is.)

The question is misleading because it suggests that the occurrence or nonoccurrence of terrorist incidents in the recent past can be equated with a higher or lower level of threat from terrorism, or with a higher or lower chance that a terrorist attack will hit us tomorrow. It cannot. On September 10, 2001, the terrorist threat to the United States was not low, notwithstanding the nonoccurrence of major terrorism within the United States during the preceding several years.

The more than seven years that have passed since 9/11 may seem like a substantial enough time to draw conclusions about threat levels from the pattern of incidents occurring or not occurring, but it is not. That is the case even if you examine how close some attempted attacks may have come to succeeding during that period, a topic on which others may wish to comment. In fact, seven years is short compared to the time- horizons of many terrorists, especially the transnational jihadists who constitute our main concern. Consider that more than eight years separated the first attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993 from the second one in 2001. Consider also that the impact on international terrorism of the jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s is still being felt, just as the impact of the more recent jihad against the United States in Iraq will be felt for many years.

All of these factors make it hard to evaluate counterterrorist policies and measures based on the track record of terrorism over the last several years. We don’t know about the luck or accidents that would make an unsound policy appear sound, or vice versa. And of course we don’t know how the recent history of terrorism would have been different if the policies had been different.

With that huge set of caveats, I would point to defensive homeland security measures as the area in which significant beneficial departures were made in the past eight years, departures which have made it at least somewhat harder for terrorists to do harm to the American public. That trajectory of increased defensive security measures should be continued. I hasten to add that even in this area there are numerous things that could use modification or augmentation. There also are legitimate issues to debate regarding how much security the American people should buy at the price of decreased personal freedom or privacy. And there are ways in which the homeland is still quite vulnerable. We should not be surprised if next week a Madrid- or London-style attack were made against the transit system of a major American city, for instance, simply because such attacks are easy to launch and there is no shortage of people who would wish the United States harm. I know I would not be surprised.

The only other topic that comes to mind is Afghanistan, in the sense that the intervention there in late 2001 was an appropriate use of military force on behalf of counterterrorism, and it did significant good by ousting the Taliban from power in Kabul and rousting their Al-Qa’ida allies from their Afghan safe haven. Afghanistan is not so much a matter of continuing existing policies, however, because the more recent deterioration of security there—partly because of diversion of U.S. resources to other endeavors—does not represent a trajectory we should continue. The new president has already made clear he has some different ideas with regard to the size of the U.S. troop contingent there. Legitimate questions are being raised about how much a troop augmentation can accomplish—but that’s another topic.

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