

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab couldn't manage to blow up a plane over Detroit last Christmas, kicking off a year's worth of high-profile terror-fails. But that hasn't stopped the U.S. government from freaking out – putting naked scanners in airports and groping passengers. Overreactions like that compelled one of its senior-most counterterrorism officials yesterday to implore the public not to hand al-Qaeda victories from the jaws of defeat.

"We aim for perfection," Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies yesterday, but "perfection will not be achieved." That's perilous for a senior counterterrorism official to say, since, like terrorism, it's easily demagogued. Leiter repeatedly stated that there's no excuse for terrorism; that any successful attack is a tragedy; and that he'd welcome due oversight and criticism of his efforts if a terrorist pulls something off, just in case his admission seemed self-serving.

But in order not to make terrorists seem "ten feet tall" – in other words, inadvertently support their narrative that they're world-historical forces on par with the U.S. – it might be time to publicly de-emphasize terrorism in the public discourse. "Sometimes we ought to just talk about this a lot less," Leiter said. "We shouldn’t always be vocal, in my view, and visible about all the things we are doing in our society about counterterrorism."

That's difficult in a world of whole-body imaging at the airport – and, moreover, debate about the liberty-security balance. But to "hammer the counterterrorism drum over and over," Leiter said, risks "glorif[ying] al-Qaeda, who are simply a bunch of murderous thugs."

To some degree, the transformation of al-Qaeda to more of a decentralized entity – Leiter compared it to a Hydra made of all heads and no body – means that the greatest danger from terrorism has receded, as the likelihood of al-Qaeda's leaders in Pakistan directing an attack using weapons of mass destruction has "been greatly diminished." That means we "should not assume that the terrorist threat is existential" – something that also plays on al-Qaeda's rhetorical turf.

But the rise of al-Qaeda's regional affiliates and self-radicalized terrorists inside the U.S. has meant a proliferation in attempted "lower-scale attacks," like the October attempt by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to blow up cargo aircraft with bombs packed in printer cartridges; or attacks like last year's shooting at Fort Hood, which "in most cases do not pose the same catastrophic results but certainly can have an enormous effect on the United States." They're hard to detect, hard to prevent, and they've required keeping counterterrorism officials operating at a "relentless" pace, Leiter said.

And that means when an attack succeeds, it'll be tempting to treat it as a greater disaster than its destructive power warrants. Leiter didn't single out any politician or commenter for scorn. But it's easy to see how cable news (and, of course, the internet) and the country's default mode of political hysteria feeds into the dynamic he discussed. The printer-bomb plot received wall-to-wall coverage, even though it probably wouldn't have killed very many people even if it successfully detonated – certainly not on the order of those who would have died if Abdulmutallab had blown up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 last Christmas. And that would have been an order of magnitude fewer deaths than the 3,000 whom al-Qaeda killed on 9/11.

Still, Leiter's advice sidestepped several critical counterterrorism questions. Doesan open-ended war in Afghanistan serve to radicalize more people than there are terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan to confront? Do the dozens of billions of dollars spent every year on counterterrorism-related defense measures advance al-Qaeda's goal of bankrupting the U.S.? If, as Leiter asserted, the new waves of terrorists play off "local" grievances, is it counterproductive to send cruise missiles and drones to places like Yemen?

Ultimately, Leiter said, it'll be the "quiet, confident resilience" of Americans after a terrorist attack that will "illustrate ultimately the futility of terrorism." That doesn't mean not to hit back: Leiter quickly added that "we will hold those accountable [and] we will be ready to respond to those attacks." But it does mean recognizing, he said, that "we help define the success of an attack by our reaction to that attack."

Photo: U.S. Air Force

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