The takeaway from the Yemeni 'underwear bomber' plot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/09/takeaway-yemeni-underwear-bomber-plot

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As the news of this week's intelligence sting against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula became public, there was a seemingly odd contradiction. On the one hand, the president, speaking from Afghanistan, had just announced that, thanks to US military action, al-Qaida was "on the path to defeat". In the words of John Brennan, "In short, al-Qaida is losing badly." On the other hand, there was news of a new and potentially lethal plot – a perhaps undetectable bomb aimed at blowing up an airplane.

At first blush, these two facts seem incongruous. As a result, much of the editorial comment on the bomb plot has focused on the need for increased vigilance when it comes to al-Qaida. But there's a more important lesson to take away from this disrupted plot.

Since 9/11, the United States has responded with a full arsenal of national security tools. All too many of these were merely shots in the dark; many were misplaced attempts to find information, with few leads and even less understanding of al-Qaida. Whether it was enhanced interrogation techniques, or FBI stings that focused on individuals with few or no real ties to al-Qaida, or the useless expenditure of funds on fruitless and unfocused data collection, law enforcement and national security officials spent a decade struggling with, rather than mastering, the ways to detect and counter al-Qaida.

Throughout, there was a determination to find a way to place sources inside the inner chambers of al-Qaida – but until this case, the payoff seemed elusive. When US intelligence services did get close to infiltrating al-Qaida, the result was disastrous – witness the trust the US placed in the triple agent who blew up the CIA team of seven operatives in Khost.

The success of this latest tactic – successful infiltration based on wise intelligence and careful espionage work – carries an important message. It did not involve secret prisons or torture. It was not a made-up plot designed to lure individuals to the cause of jihad. It was not a case of surveilling or rounding up whole groups of people to try and find one who might pose a danger to the United States. Accordingly, it signifies the new era in counterterrorism, one in which the threat is understood and is therefore manageable; a threat for which the lawful, legitimate and professional skills of the national security apparatus take center stage.

The Yemeni underwear plot is not the only recent sign of the way in which law enforcement and intelligence have reached a new plateau. Last week, a verdict was returned in the federal courthouse in Brooklyn in a case where three men were accused of plotting to blow up the New York city subways. This was a case where the accused, two of whom have pled guilty and the third of whom was convicted by the jury, were apprehended in the midst of a plot in which training in Waziristan, the purchase of explosives, and the plot to bomb the subways was well underway by the time law enforcement became involved. It was, one could argue, the most serious homegrown terrorist threat to the United States since 9/11. And it was one in which law enforcement intercepted the crime through tactical surveillance.

Both of these cases, sobering as they may be in their potential for harm, signal that rather than flailing about to find those bent on destruction, the United States has reached a new level of confidence and competence in addressing the threat of al-Qaida. This is a welcome turn of events, one that suggests that counterterrorism has come to rely on knowledge, on on-the-ground information, on patience, and on strategic methods of investigation and pursuit. 

The president was right. The age of al-Qaida, as we once knew and feared it, is dwindling. With the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, BinLadenism has essentially disappeared. What remains seems to be a less centralized enemy, one that we are now able to declare can be handled by methods of intelligence that have been used against far more recognizable – and far more lethal – enemies. Of equal importance, though, was the manner in which the discovery and disruption of the plot came about: techniques that were essentially by the book, without either illegal methods or overblown claims of danger.

The sobering significance of the Yemeni underwear bomb was less the plot itself than what it indicates about the way forward. In the future, a frantic reliance on torture, entrapment, and over-inclusive surveillance can give way to the more reliable methods based on knowledge of the enemy, on-the-ground intelligence, global cooperation, and strategic planning to make us safe.

If only our efforts at apprehending terrorists had trusted these tried and true methods early on in the "war on terror". Perhaps, then, we could have avoided the lapses of law and morality that have marked the era.