Connecting The Dots

Of course the past decade, if it indeed ended last week instead of a year from now, was the 9/11 decade. I just read a longish piece in the New Yorker where the author was trying to decide if the years since 2000 can be called anything (it came out in late December, but we get our New Yorker even later here in Holland than we used to get it in Milwaukee). One of the major lessons we were supposed to have learned from the attacks on 9/11 is that the various parts of the government charged with keeping the country safe need to share information about possible threats more readily and efficiently. This was why, as a result of the report of the 9/11 Commission, there came a new intelligence czar, at the expense of the influence--supposedly--of the director of the CIA, though maybe not of that of the director of the FBI. And it's why there emerged a new Department of Homeland Security, and a terrorism czar. And what are we forced to conclude in the wake of the failed bombing of the Northwest flight on Christmas Day? Responsible government agencies, individually in possession of all the information required, failed to connect the dots that should have kept Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab off that flight to Detroit. Today there's a op-ed in the New York Times by Thomas H. Kean and John Farmer Jr., respectively, the co-chairman and senior counsel of the 9/11 Commission, that makes for depressing reading. We don't seem to have come very far since July of 2004, when the Commission released its report, as witness the following section of the op-ed:

Despite the best efforts of the 9/11 commission and other intelligence reformers, budgetary authority over intelligence remains unaligned with substantive responsibility. Turf battles persist among intelligence agencies. Power is sought while responsibility is deflected. The drift toward inertia continues.

Government agencies are most likely to succeed when structure matches mission. With its many jurisdictional boundaries and its persistent bureaucratic fault lines, our current system, although greatly improved since 9/11, affords too many opportunities to let information slip, too many occasions for human frailty to assert itself.

The attempted Christmas bombing carries an eerie echo of the failures that led to 9/11 because those fundamental flaws persist. The challenge for President Obama and Congress is to resist superficial sound-bite solutions and undertake the harder task of reinventing our national security system.

Elsewhere in the piece the authors warn against descending into a political blame game, and it's probably right to avoid blaming the Bush administration for the lack of progress. Instead, what we seem to be dealing with first and foremost are systemic problems. It's one thing to say that government agencies should, and in theory can, share vital information relatively easily, it clearly is quite something different to move these huge, territorial, impersonal bureaucracies in practice. But there's no choice, and leadership can make a difference, one should hope. It's hard to avoid thinking, however, that we have here the equivalent of what the armed forces increasingly have to deal with too, namely the phenomenon of asymmetrical warfare. We're big and, on paper, very powerful in all kinds of ways. They, the terrorists, are small, but therefore more flexible, more able to engage the fight on their own terms, instead of ours. Even if we were able to prevent new Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabs from getting onto airplanes, al Qaeda will think of something new, something our huge bureaucracies will have a hard time adjusting to for all the stated reasons. I don't think it's hopeless. Just think of how the armed forces, in the course of the war in Iraq, have been able to shift to an approach that is much more suited for the kind of asymmetrical warfare terrorists and others engage in there. This counterinsurgency approach is military only in part; it's political too, addressing some of the deeper causes behind the insurgency. In our international anti-terror policy we'll have to do the same--or rather, we need to do more to prevent new Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabs from choosing al Qaeda, because some of this we already do. In Iraq, the armed forces, in their political work, worked closely with local leaders; in this global war on terror we'll also need to promote changes "on the ground" in countries that tend to produce Islamic radicals. Easier said than done, but essential work nonetheless.