Obama’s to-do list

For a long time, I have thought Obama has a particularly long to-do list. Steve Benen agrees with me:

Since then [April 2009] – in addition to the two wars, economic crises, and global flu pandemic — it’s been hard to keep up the pressing and immediate challenges on the Obama administration’s to-do list. We’ve seen natural disasters (Haiti’s earthquake, Nashville’s flooding, Oklahoma’s tornadoes), man-made disasters (the BP oil spill), default crises (Dubai, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal), foreign policy crises (North Korea, Israel), and attempted terrorist attacks (Abdulmutallab on Christmas, Shahzad in Times Square).

I can only assume that it’s fairly common for President Obama to wake up, receive his morning briefings, and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Well, nobody made him run for president.

Terrorist attack rocks Lahore

Friday:

Extremists stormed two mosques belonging to a religious minority in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Friday, killing at least 80 people in the worst-ever assault on the country’s Ahmadi community…Pakistan’s Geo TV channel said the Punjab province branch of the Pakistani Taliban had claimed responsibility

Another milestone in the War on Terror

The cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is just about to hit $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion). Al Qaeda spent $200,000 carrying out the 9/11 attacks. This means that for every $1 al Qaeda spent on 9/11, the US has spent $500 million fighting al Qadea, or about $30,000 per US citizen. I can’t think of a reasonable way to justify this expenditure.

Terrorism prevention?

Austan comments on my recent post, How Exactly did the System Fail, on Faisal Shahzad:

the system of prevention failed while the system of apprehension worked…and those are two different systems.

I am going to say something few of our elected officials have the courage to say: a free society must make trade-offs between security and civil liberties. While there is no clear line – that is for democracies to solve themselves – you can’t have a police state and a democracy. I don’t know if we can do terrorism prevention (I have my doubts), but I am certain that a robust terrorism prevention policy can’t exist in a democracy.

How exactly did the system fail?

The tee vee has been talking at me over the past few days about how Faisal Shahzad’s botched attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square shows that the US system to fight terrorism is failing. Excuse me for being dense, but how exactly did the system fail?

Consider the chain of events. On Saturday evening, Shahzad parked the SUV in Times Square. Soon after, a nearby vendor saw smoke coming from the SUV. He contacted the police. The police swiftly cleared the area and defused the bomb. Subsequently, they traced the SUV to its previous owner and got Shazad’s cell phone number from her. Even though they did not have Shazad’s name, he previously gave the number to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent who had questioned him the last time he returned to the US from Pakistan. The CBP then gave the information to the FBI. Thus, when the police traced the number, they got the name from a FBI database. Because the FBI feared he would leave the country, they put his name on the no fly list and alerted the CBP. The CBP found out he had bought a plane ticket to Dubai. Even if Shazad’s flight had left before the CBP caught up with him, they knew where he was going and thus could have arrested him when he got to Dubai. The entire process from the bomb attempt to Shazad’s arrest took a little over two days.

I am no fan of US anti-terrorism strategies and have mocked them mercilessly on my rants about security theater. Nevertheless, I was quite impressed with how quickly the police/FBI/CBP arrested Shazad. The New York City Police Department also handled the situation extremely well –  Times Square was functioning normally by Sunday morning.

In short, the system seemed to function very well – almost seamlessly, in fact. Yet the tee vee keeps telling me the system failed. Am I missing something here?