Check out William Gibson's op-ed in today's NYT. (One wonders how he managed to qualify as someone with "experience in security and counterterrorism.")

Did we just get lucky?

The Op-Ed page asked 10 people with experience in security and counterterrorism to answer the following question: What is one major reason the United States has not suffered a major attack since 2001, and what is the one thing you would recommend the nation do in order to avoid attacks in the future?

Giving Muslims Hope, By THOMAS KEAN and LEE HAMILTON

We must stop the radicalization of young Muslims from Jakarta to London, offer moral leadership, and put forward an an agenda of opportunity for the Islamic world.

We Can't Kill an Ideology, By MELISSA BOYLE MAHLE

AQ has not hit America because it has chosen not to. It’s time to start discrediting Al Qaeda’s ideology and offering Muslims nonviolent alternatives. The first step is to acknowledge that their grievances are legitimate. The second is to acknowledge that our current approach is only helping Al Qaeda go mainstream.

How War Can Bring Peace, By JACK GOLDSMITH and ADRIAN VERMEULE

Going forward, we should more vigorously embrace technology as a tool. Properly designed programs can produce large gains in security in return for small losses of privacy and liberty.

Don't Forget Our Values, By JOSCHKA FISCHER

Immediately after 9/11, Al Qaeda seemed to be losing its battle with America and the West. Unfortunately, that changed. What are we in the West fighting for?

Less Political Correctness, By RAFI RON

We must be less politically correct, and begin a program that looks for risks where they are most likely to be found.

Qaeda Set the Bar High, By CLARK KENT ERVIN

After spending some $20 billion on securing the nation’s airways since 9/11, one shudders to think how much more vulnerable our other assets are.

Keep American Muslims on Our Side, By JESSICA STERN

The jihadists understand that they are fighting a war of ideas. Major strikes can backfire. Let’s not make that mistake again.

Gibson offers his take on the "why no attacks?" question:

ANOTHER attempt on the scale of the 2001 attacks hasn't been necessary. The last one is still doing the trick, and the terrorists' resources are limited. The fear induced by terrorism mirrors the irrational psychology that makes state lotteries an utterly reliable form of stupidity tax. A huge statistical asymmetry serves as fulcrum for a spectral yet powerful lever: apprehension of the next jackpot. We're terrorized not by the actual explosion, which statistically we’re almost never present for, but by our apprehension of the next one.

The terrorist tactic that matters most is the next one used, one we haven't seen yet. In order to know it, we must know the terrorists. Without a national security policy that concentrates on the vigorous and politically agnostic maximization of intelligence rather than, in the phrase of the security expert Bruce Schneier, "security theater," that may well prove impossible.

10 Ways to Avoid the Next 9/11

Dana Priest sums up the situation.

In the last three months, following a request from President Bush to "flood the zone," the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden.

The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the "zone" is.

The Afghan-Pakistan border is about 1,500 miles.

At least 23 senior anti-Taliban tribesmen have been assassinated in South and North Waziristan since May 2005.

Pakistan has now all but stopped looking for bin Laden.

"Once again, we have lost track of Ayman al-Zawahiri," the Pakistani intelligence official said in a recent interview. "He keeps popping on television screens. It's miserable, but we don't know where he or his boss are hiding."

"There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!" one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. "Nobody!"

"We work by consensus," explained Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr. "It's not that effective, or we'd find the guy."

This is an interesting vignette:

In early November 2002, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.

"How did they get the intel?" he demanded.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.

"Why aren't you giving it to us?" Rumsfeld wanted to know.

Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.

Bin Laden Trail 'Stone Cold'

Over the last year, as Iran, Iraq and Lebanon have dominated headlines, hopes of gaining firmer control of a largely forgotten corner of the war on terrorism — the lawless Pakistan-Afghanistan border region — have quietly evaporated.

On Tuesday, the Pakistani government signed a "truce" with militants which lets militants remain in the area as long as they promised to halt attacks.

Is this the "separate peace" that Rumsfeld was talking about? He must be furious about this, right?

The Taliban leadership is believed to have established a base of operations in and around the Pakistani city of Quetta. The Pakistani government sees the group as a tool to counter growing Indian influence in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks have doubled this year, and suicide bombings have tripled.

This year, the United States cut its aid to Afghanistan by 30 percent.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are no doubt betting that time is on their side.

Al Qaeda Finds Its Center of Gravity

This Week In Review article by Lowell Bergman follows up on the essay -- previously recommended here -- in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

There are few counterterrorism success stories more compelling than that of Raed al-Banna.

The absence of new attacks, even as terrorist violence worldwide has increased and bombers have struck in Madrid, London and beyond, "is not pure luck."

The Age of Terror, at least inside the United States, has morphed into the Age of the Foiled Plot. But this very success has led to a new debate.

A new study of all "terrorism-related" prosecutions since 9/11 found that of 417 people charged in the cases, the overwhelming majority faced immigration or other lesser charges. Just 39 have been convicted so far on terrorism-related charges, and only three of actual terrorism.

Tom Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 commission, says that the FBI has sometimes squandered huge resources on minor domestic cases.

"I’d prefer to bust conspiracies so early that someone doesn’t have access to a weapon."

Mr. Arquilla said, "I think making arrests in the Florida case actually made us less secure."

Adding Up the Ounces of Prevention

America is at war with a transnational terrorist movement fueled by a radical ideology of hatred, oppression, and murder.

Through the freedom agenda, we have promoted the best long-term answer to al–Qaida's agenda: the freedom and dignity that comes when human liberty is protected by effective democratic institutions.

It occurs to me that this point is rarely emphasized enough:

There is a broad and growing global consensus that the deliberate targeting of innocents is never justified by any calling or cause.

Even though few of you re-recommended it, you may recall this post from April:

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

Back to the document:

Challenges

* Terrorist networks today are more dispersed and less centralized. They are more reliant on smaller cells inspired by a common ideology and less directed by a central command structure.

In other words, al Qaeda is a scene. Note that this is the #1 challenge cited in the document.

You'll also note that the "Successes" section does not boast about the fact that there have been no successful attacks within the US since 9/11.

Does the strategy go astray here?

The long-term solution for winning the War on Terror is the advancement of freedom and human dignity through effective democracy. In effective democracies, freedom is indivisible. They are the long-term antidote to the ideology of terrorism today. This is the battle of ideas.

National Strategy For Combating Terrorism

I guess one way of viewing Don Rumsfeld's speech to the American Legion yesterday is that it was nothing more than garden variety election-year political pandering. Iowa farmers want to hear you swear undying fealty to ethanol subsidies and WWII vets want to hear paeans to blood and guts. Usually, they both get what they want.

Kevin Drum on Rumsfeld

Traveling through Newark, I grabbed a bottle of water after getting off the plane. The counter person (not a trained security agent, mind you), says, "you need to leave the cap here." This got my attention. It turns out that the policy at Newark (not other places I visited recently, just Newark) is that you can't buy a bottled water post-security and keep the cap.

It's a bring your own cap sort of situation I guess. (Are you allowed to bring your own cap?)

I will leave the analysis of the logic to you.

When bureaucracies become single minded

President Bush began a new drive today to rally the American people behind him on the Iraq war and national security, declaring that the United States must stay the course in Iraq because it is a battleground in an epic struggle between democracy and tyranny.

“Every element of national power” is being marshaled in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” Mr. Bush said.

Bush Says Iraq War Is Part of a Larger Fight

Now that the dreaded words "civil war" have been officially dropped into the Iraq debate, the next word the White House should brace itself for is "partition." As Iraq spirals out of control, arguments for dividing the country along ethnic lines have begun to surface with increasing frequency among scholars, diplomats and others.

Breaking Up (a Country) Is Hard to Do

Are we winning the war? The first question to ask is, what war? The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror." This political correctness presumably seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of the Saudis and other Muslims, but it comes at high cost. This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.

In reviewing progress on the three fronts of this war, even the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude that we are winning or that we can win without some significant changes of policy.

We're Not Winning This War