The Pakistan Problem Comes to Times Square
The New York Times has a nice piece on how the Feds tracked down and arrested the would-be Times Square car bomber, Faisal Shahzad, in just 53 hours and 20 minutes, which I thought was pretty damn good police work.
It's also true that we got lucky on this one, because the bomb didn't actually go off. But maybe it's not just luck. If it's true that Shahzad got explosives training from al-Qaeda in Pakistan, let's hope the result is an accurate reflection of the quality of that training.
It certainly seems to be an accurate reflection of Shahzad's skills. In addition to leaving his house keys in the car with the bomb, so that he had to go back and ask his landlord for a new set of keys before he could make his escape, Shahzad also cobbled together what appears to be a totally untested, jerry-rigged bomb. Looking at things from the perspective of an engineer, Jack Wakeland concludes that "Faisal Shahzad is not a good advertisement for the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut."
"After getting a dual-major Bachelor's of Science degree in Computer Science and Computer Engineering (and, later, a Master's of Business Administration), Faisal was still incapable of designing, testing, or fabricating a bomb.
"A fellow supposedly educated in how to make digital devices, he failed to come up with a functioning bomb trigger and detonation system. He didn't even bother mixing ammonium nitrate with fuel oil. He was hoping to ignite plastic gasoline cans with fireworks? He was hoping the gasoline fire would ignite the propane tanks? And what was he thinking about when he threw in a couple of bags of ammonium nitrate? He must have missed the Discovery Channel show about how strip miners and quarry operators mix ammonium nitrate with something to make it go boom. (It is certain that he slept through his freshman Chemistry class.)
"What an idiot! (Thank goodness.)"
In all likelihood, it is precisely because Shahzad was a loser that he decided to compensate by turning himself into a holy warrior. An immigrant from a well-off family in Pakistan, Shahzad apparently got himself over his head in debt and had to return to Pakistan in order to walk away from his mortgage. What better way to evade his sense of humiliation than to blame it on US foreign policy?
But all of this is just the preliminary impression we're getting. The news is that Shahzad is talking to his interrogators, so presumably we'll know a lot more soon.
The left, as usual, preferred its own fantasies to reality. After months of working themselves into a frenzy portraying the Tea Party movement as a simmering domestic terrorism threat, the left just couldn't help but to project this fantasy onto the Times Square story.
New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg—who is technically a Republican, but who isn't really fooling anyone—was eager to speculate that the bomber might have been opposed to the health-care bill—and then promptly used the attack to argue for stricter gun-control laws.
This was part of a wider pattern on the left of reflexively assuming that the Tea Parties must be to blame for the attack. Some examples are collected here, including one that reveals the crude motive behind this rush to judgment:
Washington & Lee law professor Timothy Stoltzfus Jost: "...If, as I believe much more likely, the bomb was placed by a right-wing lunatic, it seems to me that questions need to be raised as to whether the right wing media bears some responsibility for stoking the delusions of such people through its relentless and often unfounded attacks on the Obama administration and the federal government."
Of course, there is also another motive: the desire to evade the politically incorrect fact of Islamic terrorism. Thus, an MSNBC host openly admits that she wishes this were an act of domestic terrorism.
I get frustrated, and there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.
The only "bigotry" that is allowed, apparently, is bigotry against advocates of free markets and limited government.
But yes, Virginia, there is a jihad. The plot has been traced back to Pakistan, and there is potential that it could go wider and deeper when we follow its roots there. The would-be bomber wasn't just a disaffected villager. He was the son of a retired air vice marshal in the Pakistani Air Force, and his father-in-law has also been picked up for questioning.
A very good article in the Wall Street Journal catalogs the number of terrorists who had ties to Pakistan and offers a very important explanation for this pattern:
Pakistan was carved out of the Muslim-majority areas of British India in 1947, the world's first modern nation based solely on Islam. The country's name means "Land of the Pure." The capital city is Islamabad. The national flag carries the Islamic crescent and star. The cricket team wears green.From the start, the new country was touched by the messianic zeal of pan-Islamism…. Through alternating periods of civilian and military rule, one thing about Pakistan has remained constant—the central place of Islam in national life.
Pakistan is not an entirely uncivilized place, but the nation's culture has strongly resisted making a choice between Islamic fanaticism and civilization. That is Pakistan's fundamental problem—and it has once again come to wreak havoc in America's largest city.
The only good news is that this could force the Pakistanis to make a clearer choice. Writing in the New York Daily News, Pakistani liberal Ahmed Rashid points out that the government of Pakistan has taken some action against terrorists but left two safe-havens for Islamic fanatics: Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist network that is tolerated because it mostly attacks India, and North Waziristan, the only area not targeted in a recent attempt to reconquer Pakistan's tribal regions. He concludes: "The car bomb in NYC luckily failed to explode, but if the quiet 'establishment' terrorist is found to be linked to either North Waziristan or [Lashkar-e-Taiba], Pakistan will face explosive pressure from the US to do something about these untouched sources of terrorism."
Maybe—but then again, Barack Obama is our president and has heretofore shown no inclination to assert or protect America's interests.
I can't leave you on such a grim note. After all, this attack did fail. So I'll leave with a story about the ultimate solution to the problem of terrorist safe havens: a British sniper in Afghanistan has just set a new record, killing two Taliban at an astonishing range of one-and-a-half miles.—RWT
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