Via Cynical C, some of Bruce Schneider’s most recent commentary on terrorism prevention:
If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we’ve wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we’ve wasted our money. Terrorists don’t care what they blow up and it shouldn’t be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.
I’ve read Schneider’s stuff before and found it insightful, but this seems greatly misguided. Sure, clever and rational terror plotters would mix up their choice of targets. With everyone looking for plane-based plots after 9/11, they’d go after trains or stadiums or shopping malls or post offices or something. Nowhere would be safe. But for some reason, terrorists have decided that airplanes are the thing to do–partially, as Schneider suggests, because a small bomb can kill a lot of people, but I think part of it is that the terrorists must think targets not planes aren’t enough of an accomplishment to be worth the effort. As long as that’s true, it makes sense to focus our efforts on aviation security.
To understand why the enemy selects a target, you must also understand what the enemy hopes to achieve. That is to say, terrorists ARE rational, and do what they do for a reason. They wish to effect a political change in the world, not to create chaos as an inherent good. And consequently, we would expect them to select planes as targets when it is convenient and consistent with their objectives to do so, and to have a wider universe of targets than airplanes (i.e., apartment towers in Saudi Arabia housing non-Arab workers, nightclubs in Bali catering to non-Muslim tourists, commuter trains in Madrid, subway stations and busses in London).