Editorial: Terror always one step ahead

It was probably inevitable that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the al Qaeda-linked Nigerian who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, would end up being described in headlines as the Undiebomber.

But the name threatens to trivialise by ridicule the enormity of the tragedy that was only narrowly avoided in the skies over Michigan.

Whether by good luck or mismanagement, something went wrong in the detonation process and Abdulmutallab did no damage to anybody but himself. But good luck or conspirator incompetence is not a reliable defence against catastrophes.

The question is: what will protect airlines - not to mention railways stations, public buildings, boats and places where people gather (a volleyball tournament in Pakistan was a recent target) - from the depredations of extremists who believe that mass murder is a legitimate way to enunciate their political principles.

US President Barack Obama has made plain his anger about the failure of intelligence agencies to "connect the dots" between discrete pieces of information which, had they been considered together, would have been enough to stop Abdulmutallab boarding the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam. "This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous," he said.

Yet the failed bombing poses a severe test of Obama's management. He is not a President who has made homeland security as central a part of his remit as his predecessor did. Indeed he campaigned on a promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay - he signed an order with a deadline of January 21, which will plainly not be met - and in his victory speech, ringingly rejected "the false choice between our security and our ideals".

But in the wake of the Christmas Day near-miss the administration has announced it will require additional screening for air passengers bound for the US from any of 14 countries - including Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen - and will increase explosives-detection teams at airports.

The problem with the choice of countries is obvious - and not just because Cuba is included (the Communist regime in the Caribbean island has never attempted a terrorist attack on the US but the CIA, by some counts, tried to assassinate Fidel Castro more than 600 times in the first 30 years of his regime).

But the list of countries targeted by the presidential directive is perverse. Abdulmutallab, it will be remembered, boarded in Amsterdam. Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber, is a South London native who tried to blow up a Miami-bound flight originating in Paris. The 9/11 hijackers were not heading for the US; they were already there.

The American political humorist P.J. O'Rourke once described his country's foreign policy by saying that "wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening." And the obvious hyperbole contains a germ of truth. In the shifting and shady world of international terrorism we may be certain of very little. But it's a safe bet that no one is going to be hopping on a US-bound flight with explosives in his underpants any time soon. And wherever the explosives are concealed, the would-be bomber will not be boarding a flight at any of the airports mentioned in the presidential announcement.

More than eight years after 9/11, anti-terrorist security and intelligence activities are based on detecting a repeat of the last thing a terrorist group did. But that is, by some margin, the least likely thing to happen next.

In the most conspicuous triumph of law over disorder, the so-called "liquid bombers" - the London-based Muslim fanatics who had planned to down seven transatlantic airliners - were foiled in 2006 by British police using old-fashioned detective work. Whether presidents and prime ministers like it or not, that is the way of the future: boosting intelligence agencies, improving communication with local Islamic communities (and the Arab world, where aid money could buy much more goodwill than military spending), and giving police the resources they need to track down plots as they germinate, not just before they ripen. Forcing grandmothers to remove their shoes and patting down underpants in the airports of Africa and the Gulf states doesn't cut it any more.