The 7/21 Attacks: Strategic Error

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

I've long said that 9/11 was an enormous strategic error on al-Qaeda's part.  Al-Qaeda was in a great position prior to 9/11:  Their training camps were producing countless terrorists every year, Islamist insurgencies were raging in far-flung places from the Philippines to Chechnya, and radical Islam was gaining ground in both Europe and the United States.  If al-Qaeda had waited until now to strike the United States, they almost certainly would have been in a far better position.  Instead, the September 11 attacks, while tactically brilliant, were a considerable strategic setback for al-Qaeda.

Likewise, assuming that today's attacks are the work of Islamic terrorists (which is not a foregone conclusion), this is another case of strategic error.  As of this writing, there is only one confirmed casualty, and it is not a fatality.  While today's attack on British mass transit will certainly scare people -- which is, of course, one of the terrorists' aims -- the bigger thing it accomplishes is again highlighting the continuing vulnerabilities of mass transit to terrorist attack.  To that extent, it is one more prod to make the British think critically about how they can protect their vital soft targets.

On that note, it's interesting to see that transit union officials, unhappy with the continuing lack of security in New York City's mass transit system after the 7/7 attacks, seem to have a view similar to those propounded by both me and Bill West about how to improve security.  The New York Times reports:

Transit union officials, charging that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has not done enough to prepare workers for the possibility of a terrorist attack, said yesterday that they had hired a Israeli security expert to train subway and bus workers in recognizing suspicious packages and passengers. . . .  The president of Local 100, Roger Toussaint, said the authority had done little to reassure workers since the July 7 subway and bus bombings in London, which killed at least 56 people.  "We have not received any communication, even a phone call, from the M.T.A. regarding union input, or even a briefing, on what their plans are in the aftermath of London," Mr. Toussaint said.  "This is consistent with the freezing-out of the workforce regarding the security needs of the subway and bus environment."

It's sad to see the MTA acting so uninterested in security that the transit union feels they have to take matters into their own hand, but encouraging to see that the union clearly recognizes the danger.

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