It is, of course, only a matter of time before a domestic terror attack is once again successful. The Times Square and Detroit incidents obviously call into question how we stop an inbound terrorist from boarding an airplane in Amsterdam or a fleeing terrorist from escaping through JFK. But these terror attempts pose much more fundamental issues of how our government establishes strategic security objectives, determines budget priorities, develops long-term capabilities, and assesses whether our actions are making us safer. We must focus our attention well beyond information sharing and connecting the dots. Today’s complex security environment requires seamless interplay among our diplomatic, security assistance, border security, military, and intelligence communities.

The difficult questions implied by these two near-tragic incidents include: How do we address the continued existence of violent terrorist cells scattered around the globe? How do we establish effective assistance programs to help developing countries control their borders? How do we cut off the funds terrorist cells use to operate? What is the best approach for working with other countries to synchronize our homeland security efforts? What is the right investment in research and acquisition of airport security systems? Are we prepared to provide emergency management services should a major terrorist attack be successful? The list goes on.

Six years ago, the 9/11 Commissioners saw the need for a National Counterterrorism Center: a civilian-led unified command for counterterrorism to combine strategic intelligence and operational planning. A new report by the Project on National Security Reform found that NCTC faces a myriad of challenges doing this work -- overlapping authorities, conflicting mandates, differing ways of doing business, and an overall lack of incentive within the government to act in ways the military refers to as “joint.” Just one example: Congress gave NCTC authority to define the counterterrorism “mission, objectives to be achieved, tasks to be performed, interagency coordination of operational activities, and assignment of roles and responsibilities.” But it had previously given the State Department "overall supervision ... of international counterterrorism activities."

The new national security team, far from being the predicted team of rivals, has operated with a sense of collegiality and common purpose rarely seen in government. As National Security Advisor James Jones recently noted, Washington’s legendary stovepipes are “bending towards the middle.” Phrases like “interagency collaboration” and “whole-of-government” have crept into the national security lexicon. Yet our national security system -- governed by legislation, presidential directives, and long-held practices -- has not kept pace with the changing intentions and statements of its leaders.

Congress and the President should use the two recent failed terrorist attempts as impetus to re-evaluate the changes put in place after 9/11 -- strengthening and nurturing “cross-cutting” capabilities like NCTC. Defense Secretary Gates speaks of new approaches to governance that “would actually incentivize collaboration between different agencies of our government, unlike the existing structure and processes left over from the Cold War, which often conspire to hinder true whole-of-government approaches.” It is time that the bureaucratic structures of government catch up with the intentions of its leaders.

Three things strike me about the failed terror bombing in Times Square.

1. We were lucky. Just as with the attempted Christmas Day bombing, there was not one thing that the government did to prevent the bomb from exploding and killing hundreds of people. We should admire the law enforcement work that found and arrested the suspect, but we should not delude ourselves that the government prevented him from being successful. Only his incompetence managed that.

2. We need to use all of the tools we can constitutionally in order to prevent terrorist attacks – not just arrest the terrorist afterwards. The Obama Administration has taken some of the most effective tools – such as the CIA’s interrogation program – off the table. When the next bomb is ticking away in Times Square, we may wish they had not done so.

3. In his book Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century, Marc Sageman wrote in 2008 that:

"The strategy of taking the glory out of terrorism also means putting a stop to press conferences at which representatives from the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security hold self-congratulatory celebration of their newest victories in the 'war on terror.' The press conferences are good for electioneering, but they are counterproductive. Homeland security will be better served through quiet arrests and prosecutions of potential terrorists. This apparent neglect of terrorists and their reduction to common criminals robs them of the stage they crave and undermines the effective promotion of their cause through propaganda by the deed."

The spectacle we witnessed in this case, from the early leaks that endangered the lives of law enforcement personnel trying to find and arrest the suspect to the press conference just as Sageman describes and the continuing leaks about how much the suspect was talking, should not be repeated. It only encourages others to try.

The Times Square incident was a close call, an instance of terrorism being defeated by helpful citizens, poor tradecraft, good police work, and a whole lot of luck. Shahzad is the second instance that we have seen recently of radicalized citizens who are moved by circumstances or conscience to commit acts of terror. Counting examples in UK, Spain, etc., there are now dozens of "local boys gone bad" incidents. The new wrinkle here is the fact that Shahzad was trained and partly indoctrinated by the TTP. Neither his indoctrination nor his training seemed to have been very good. The TTP et al are now not only fighting Pakistan, they are trying to get at us. No doubt, they see the drones as a case where the USA started the fight. I for one see this as yet another bit of evidence of common cause between the Taliban of all stripes and Al Qaeda. We should not hesitate to see the TTP as just another fellow traveller of AQ Central and its other associates. We should not hesitate to take out their top leaders in a responsible fashion.

It is very important to keep these incidents in their proper context. This is an evolving threat but not so dangerous as when AQAM graduated from taking out overseas targets to attacking the US homeland. Vigilance at home and common sense offensive tactics abroad seem to be in order. Shahzad was a small blip on the screen that records our national experience with terrorism. We can make some money on his efforts by learning to work closely with the Pakistanis. Each of these incidents that are traced back to Pakistan is a lesson for the Government of Pakistan and a warning: if you build Frankensteins, one day they may decide to come after you.

The Times Square incident underscores, among other things, these aspects of the contemporary terrorist threat to the United States:

First, our society—short of turning it into a rigidly controlled police state—is inherently, unavoidably vulnerable in countless ways to damage from anyone motivated to cause it damage. This particular car “bomb” was a comic concoction of firecrackers and some other flammable items. A real car bomb in that same location might have been the most lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. The inherent vulnerability of American cities and public places means that defensive security measures—although a useful and important portion of a comprehensive counterterrorist policy—have the major, inherent limitation that terrorists who face well-protected targets always have plenty of alternative targets to which to turn. Second, which terrorist plots succeed in causing damage, and which ones, successful or not, come to our attention, is in large part a matter of luck. The thin margins of time in the story of how the suspect in the Times Square incident was taken off a plane moments before he was headed to the Middle East meant that authorities were lucky in capturing him. We also were lucky that he was so incompetent in building a bomb. Many other terrorist plots succeed or fail because of circumstantial details that are essentially random and cannot be said to be indicative of any larger pattern of capabilities on the part of either the terrorists or the authorities. Third, it is mistaken to think that we always ought to be able to uncover every potential terrorist before he becomes a real terrorist, and to discover and prevent every terrorist attack. Commentary about the Times Square incident has focused on the tracking down of the suspect after the incident, with intriguing details about surveillance officers losing their man and updated no-fly lists not being checked. Perhaps if those details were somewhat less intriguing, more of the commentary would be focusing on the fact that the suspect evidently had not been on anybody's counterterrorist radar screen before the incident. In that respect it would be like most other terrorist incidents, in which hindsight-driven post-incident commentary and recriminations dwell on bits of evidence that supposedly should have enabled security services to pick this terrorist needle out of the haystack of people who could be, but aren't, terrorists. Fourth, “links” to particular, known groups are not necessarily important in determining who presents a danger and who does not, and certainly not nearly as important as most commentary on the subject suggests. Not long ago the Pakistani Taliban were being described as a juggernaut that was marching toward Islamabad and on the verge of getting their hands on Pakistani nuclear weapons. Today they are being identified as the organization responsible for one of the most ludicrously incompetent bombing attempts in recent years. The Pakistani Taliban probably are capable of organizing, if they choose to, a much more competent terrorist operation. The skills demonstrated in any one operation are not necessarily indicative of a group's overall capability, because the initiative is often coming from an individual outside the group who comes to the group for help. Probably in the Times Square case the individual did make contact with the Pakistani Taliban, who were not particularly impressed with him but figured they had little to lose by extending at least minimal assistance to someone who at least had a chance of inflicting some damage on the Americans. Any assistance must have been minimal indeed; one wonders what kind of training would lead to bomb-making like this. Fifth, the United States is counterproductively stimulating terrorism through some of its own actions taken in the name of counterterrorism (even though some of those actions also do some counterterrorist good in the short term by taking bad guys out of commission). We do not know whether this recent attack was intended as reprisal for any particular US action in the AfPak region. But it seems clear that Faisal Shahzad's alleged act—like most of the several other terrorist incidents in the United States over the past year—was motivated in large part by anger over US use of force overseas.

Like Steven Metz, I expected far more of this in the years following 9/11 because it can be particularly difficult to identify and neutralize "lone ranger" efforts aimed at carrying out acts of terrorism. I am gratified, of course, that very few of these attacks have happened--at least so far, and that each foiled effort helps tighten up loose ends like the infrequency with which watch lists were being checked by airlines.

That said, it is important that we do not overreact. Dictionary definitions of "terror" include: "panic or dread,"and "intense, overpowering fear." We must endeavor to maintain our perspective amidst such relatively limited or unsuccessful attempts at terrorism. The fact is that terror itself regularly grips the broader public with fear considerably greater than that inspired by the dreadful homocide rates in some American metropolitan areas or even the hemorrhage of highway deaths and serious injuries across the country per week, even though the likelihood of being a victim or the former is vastly less than the latter. Clearly, there are acts of terrorism that legitimately inspire profound concern, such as attempts to bring down large airliners or the potential for the possibility of radiological or CBW attacks in highly populated areas. I am not trying to minimize their significance.

Nonetheless, since the United States finds itself involved in a "Global War Against Terrorism," it must expect some blowback. Now, that term (GWOT) increasingly has been left behind (and I did not favor it myself in the first place), but we are facing a largely global threat. And here on the home front we cannot expect to be entirely shielded from the impact of that struggle. In other words, at best, efforts aimed at stopping attempts to inflict terrorism against the Homleand cannot be expect to attain a 100% success rate. This is especially important for Americans to bear in mind because during our two great world wars, many other countries absorbed huge losses and destruction far from the fighting fronts (vastly worse than even 9/11), often involving large cities, unlike the U.S., which was shielded from becoming a battlefield or coming under massive aerial bombardment by two great oceans. In other words, the expectations among many for virtual immunity from such attacks are simply too high.

The 9/11 attacks were truly devastating, but even in that case the U.S. responded, carried away in part by the by the sheer immensity of the experience, by taking some ill-advised actions or measures quite self-destructive to our overall interests. The invasion of Iraq was perhaps the worst example of this tendency--an undertaking that has inflicted far more military, economic and political damage on the U.S. than on those associated with the post-9/11 terrorism challenge. As a result, in all aspects of addressing this menace, we must keep all this in perspective--an attitudinal response that will allow us the cope with all aspects of this threat more effectively.

The Times Square incident confirms more than it reveals. For it is in the mode of the underwear bomber incident and the Colorado/Queens incident. Together, they form a suggestive pattern from which we can draw a number of inferences.

1. The tangible terrorist threat to the United States, as opposed to the speculative one, is neither acute nor of great magnitude. Al-Qaidi, the original group that organized and executed 9/11, evidently lacks the capacity to deliver anything more than occasional pinpricks. This dog hasn’t barked because it can’t bark.

2. The same can be said of the loose coalition of radical Islamist organizations that go by various names: the Talban assemblage and the al-Qaidi franchises. If al-Qaidi itself is deficient, then the others are even less potent.

3. The volunteers who have undertaken recent missions are amateurs who received little training, lacked the skills to do much of anything, and were unknown to our intelligence agencies and to those of other friendly countries. These callow protagonists reinforce the conclusion that the ‘terrorist” groups are thankfully lacking in resources – human and otherwise.

4. Most of them probably are lacking much in the way of motivation to attack the United States, too. The Taliban agenda has always been Afghanistan or Pakistan. Whatever assistance and direction was given to this latest “walk-on” was so meager as to indicate that their agenda and orientation hasn’t changed markedly. A target of opportunity presented itself, so some Taliban leader gave it a try. The same can be said for the al-Qaidi spinoffs like AQM or al-Qaidi in North Africa.

5. The now demonstrable fact that some Taliban group(s) would strike our homeland hardly constitutes a surprise requiring a reappraisal of “the enemy.” When you have been killing people for eight and half years, it follows that the target may try and kill you – however half-hearted this attempt. That is human nature – as we demonstrated when we first went into Afghanistan.

6. Our warring across a large swath of the Islamic world has been conducted largely on the enemies’ terrain. This is not a rule that they have agreed to – whether the Taliban, al-Qaida franchises or, of course, classic al-Qaidi itself which started it all on 9/11. Shock that large scale violence could lead to violent acts on American soil is a sign of how dissociated from a complicated psycho-political reality we can be. Doesn’t Scripture itself say something about reciprocated violence?

7. “Ordinary” Muslims originating from the places under attack by the United States can be expected to volunteer themselves for terrorist acts. Their numbers will be small and the consequences probably not of the first magnitude. The worst prospect is what similarly motivated British Muslims did in the London underground in 2005 – very nasty indeed. In fact on a par with routine occurrences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

8. It is conceivable that the gravest danger we face, although itself a low probability one, is that one or two mature, U.S. based or U.S. present persons with exceptional skills and will are motivated to do something truly serious. They would not be confused young drifters. They could act on their own, unaffiliated with any of the aforementioned groups. In truth, we have no or little ability to anticipate and neutralize such a threat.

9. The Department of Homeland Security remains a minimally competent mess. Our counter terrorism apparatus overall has dismaying flaws. Fixing them will not guarantee protection against the threat noted above; but it is still prudent to come to grips with the problem before the first books appear with the title: “AMERICA”S WAR ON TERROR: THE FIRST DECADE”

10 This latest infringement of American territorial immunity is sparking a mildly hysterical reaction. The spontaneous hysteria has been intensified by politicians – including those in and around the White House – playing to the crowd. Its most pernicious manifestation is an aggressive campaign to coerce the Pakistani army into an all-out assault on North Waziristan (where Mr. Faisal Shahzad allegedly received some form of instruction). A battery of senior American officials have bluntly told Islamabad that if they don't evict the Taliban, any al-Qaidi detritus and perhaps the forces of Gulbuddin Hikmeryar too, Washington will send in its Special Forces and other elite units. A more reasoned analysis, though, leads to the judgment that any such dramatic escalation would be highly counter-productive. One, it is a mission impossible given the extent of the Islamist networks in the region and the availability of other havens - e.g. Baluchistan and Karachi, not to speak of those abroad. Two, it would inflame anti-American animus throughout the country. Punjabi based radical Islamists would have a recruiting field day, creating a threat to the current government's stability and raising the specter of a full-scale insurrection. If we are really worried about the disposition of Pakistani nuclear weapons, that is the last thing you want to happen. Weighing this latter menace in the balance against the risk of another Shahzad, it is frankly hard to see how a responsible government would not temper its current overheated impulses.

Three, the crude logic that on whomever's soil a would-be terrorist gets 'training' is a legitimate target for American intimidation and/or occupation points to a nightmare of endless interventions. We could wind up chasing Islamists across much of Asia. Do we really want to find ourselves in 2020 launching strikes against militant Muslims in Mindanao - where we got our start in counter-insurgency 110 years ago? After only fifteen years there, we did get control of 'Moroland' - if that is any consolation.

The attempted attack in Times Square has less to do with blowback, more to do with the jihadists’ current situation. U.S. counter-terrorist efforts have reduced al Qaeda central’s ability to launch terrorist operations worldwide, and have managed to thwart most domestic attempts like this one, but the jihadists remain determined and authorities will never be able to intercept every terrorist plot. That almost any determined terrorist group—or individual terrorist—can attack something, somewhere, somehow, we have known long before 9/11.

The lesson of the Times Square attack is that he terrorist threat posed by the jihadist movement continues to evolve. It is today more decentralized, more dependent upon al Qaeda’s affiliates, allies and individual acolytes to continue its global terrorist campaign. A continuing stream of communications from al Qaeda leaders and spokesmen exhort would-be jihadists, wherever they are, to do whatever they can.

Other galaxies in the jihadist universe like the Pakistani Taliban, influenced by al Qaeda’s vision of global jihad and seeking revenge for attacks on their leaders, have expressed their determination to carry out attacks in he United States. The Taliban in Pakistan, who reportedly assisted the Times Square bomber, however, appear to be less sophisticated than al Qaeda. Although a Pakistani-American walk-in with a U.S. passport would be seen by terrorist planners as gold, the Times Square bomber does not seem to have been carefully trained and prepared. Meanwhile, the Taliban’s claim of responsibility, then subsequently withdrawn, would seem to indicate internal debate about strategy.

According to a recent RAND paper, there were 46 cases of radicalization and recruitment to jihadist terrorism in the United States between 9/11 and the end of 2009. This does not include attacks from abroad like the failed Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner. In all, 125 persons were identified and indicted. Two more cases and several more arrests in 2010 bring the total to 130. Many of the cases involve single individuals; the remainder are tiny conspiracies. The number of cases and the number of persons involved both increased sharply in 2009. Whether this presages a trend we cannot yet say, but the total number of would-be jihadist warriors remains small.

These cases indicate that self-radicalization and recruitment to terrorist violence does occur in the United States, and poses a continuing domestic threat. The cases clearly demonstrate intent. Fortunately, America’s jihadists thus far have not proved to be very competent, although amateurs potentially can still be dangerous.

Of 24 domestic plots to carry out attacks in the United States, only three got as far as implementation, including the Times Square attempt—an undeniable intelligence success. All three involved individual terrorists. And only two resulted in fatalities. Both of these were carried out by lone gunmen.

Although about a quarter of these cases involve previous links to al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, or other jihadist groups abroad, they offer no evidence of a continuing terrorist organization in this country. They are, for the most part, individual responses to a combination of world events, U.S. policies, personal circumstances, and jihadist propaganda.

Many of the arrested jihadists expressed anger about some aspect of U.S. policy—the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, the missile strikes in Pakistan. But the jihadists have broader complaints about U.S. foreign policy—U.S. backing of Israel, support for despotic governments in the Middle East--as well as the perceived peril of Islam. Personal crises also figure in their self-recruitment to terrorism. Al Qaeda’s jihadist ideology has become a conveyer for individual discontents.

Decades of terrorism have demonstrated repeatedly that small groups or individuals, with a limited capacity for violence, but determined to kill, can attack public places. Despite improvements in intelligence and security, it is an unrealistic expectation that authorities will be able to detect or prevent every terrorist attempt.

I'm surprised this has been so long in coming. I've felt for a number of years that through terrorism, insurgents around the world have developed what might be call a strategic power projection capability.

Shahzad's incompetence provides the United States an opportunity to send a signal. Very bad things should happen to the Pakistani Taliban in the coming weeks, thus sending the message that the risks of striking the United States directly are greater than the benefits. When members of the El Savador insurgency assassinated six Americans in 1985, the United States sent that message through prompt and effective counterstrikes. Here's hoping we can again.

But from a broader strategic perspective, if insurgents launch successful terrorist attacks in the United States--and eventually they will--it will alter America's strategic calculus. Will the United States elect to become involved in far-away counterinsurgency campaigns if the inevitable result are bombs in American cities? That question, while hypothetical now, will soon become all too real.