Spotting the Terror Threat

The human brain is designed to seek out patterns. The urge is particularly strong when we are frightened, and rightly so. Finding patterns in our past is a good way to survive the future, most of the time.

Just before 2 a.m. on June 29, police discovered a metallic green Mercedes filled with containers of fuel, cylinders of gas and a pile of nails outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London. About the same time, parking authorities discovered a blue Mercedes containing a similar cocktail of matériel. The very next day, a green Jeep Cherokee filled with gas cylinders and fuel blasted through the check-in entrance of Glasgow Airport in Scotland, bursting into flames.

What to make of it all? Much of the plot line was familiar: homemade bombs, near misses and violent extremists targeting civilians. But certain details didn't fit. Islamic terrorists had never before deployed car bombs in the U.K. What could it mean? "Baghdad comes to Britain," trumpeted the New York Daily News. "Make no mistake," intoned Lord John Stevens, the Prime Minister's new security adviser. "This weekend's bomb attacks signal a major escalation in the war being waged on us by Islamic militants." And was it just a coincidence that two of the three vehicles were Mercedes? "Typically [terrorists] use throwaway vehicles, not a luxury car like that," worried CNN anchor John Roberts. What about the fact that the suspects appear to be doctors from outside the U.K.? Those did not fit recent patterns either. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, "It is clear that we are dealing, in general terms, with people associated with al-Qaeda"--though his security chiefs conceded it was too soon to say for sure.

The speculation made it easy to forget that the attacks had failed. "They didn't get the victims they sought--and thankfully so," says a veteran French counterterrorism official. "They did create the fear and attention they were after, which is less fortunate." As a result, the most important lessons may be overlooked. "The one overwhelming thing was that [the attacks] defied all of our assumptions," says Peter Neumann, director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College in London. That's the reality of terrorism: it adapts, mutates and constantly challenges our preconceptions. So counterterrorism strategies should do the same thing. That's the best way to limit the damage terrorists can inflict and, ultimately, reduce the supply of new recruits. The failed car bombs are a reminder that it is time to jettison three of our false assumptions about the nature of the terrorist threat:

SOPHISTICATES VS. AMATEURS

Much has been made of the fact that at least five of the eight suspects arrested so far in the car-bombing cases are doctors. It's interesting, but it shouldn't be surprising. Omar Khyam, a cell ringleader convicted this year for a 2004 plot to blow up a London nightclub and a shopping mall with fertilizer bombs, was a computer-science student. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned 9/11 and other attacks, has a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a doctor.

Trying to profile would-be terrorists based on metrics like education or income can be counterproductive. French authorities say they continually come across new radicals whose backgrounds give absolutely no reason to suspect an embrace of extremism. "In Montpellier, we arrested three university students who had formed a cell after self-radicalization from Web sources but who previously were in no way interested in religion at all," says an official with a French intelligence service. "This happens anywhere people are seduced by the radical discourse. We have to avoid falling back on stereotypes because they cause you to miss things."

And yet given their level of education, isn't it surprising that the plotters chose such crude weaponry? Yes and no. True, the foiled bombs were rudimentary collections of gas canisters, gasoline and nails--no biological, chemical or radioactive elements, not even any C4 or TNT. But what matters is not the technological complexity of a device but how many people it can kill. The London car bombs were fuel-air explosive bombs--designed to produce a huge fireball by igniting aerated liquid gasoline. Had they worked, scores of people could have been severely burned. Similar explosives were used by the U.S. military to clear acres of jungle in Vietnam.

Terrorists are less inclined to seek the newest or most sophisticated method of attack than to fall back on pragmatic solutions. The car bomb has been a part of British life longer than the Internet. Since 1970, terrorists of one stripe or another have deployed at least 756 vehicle bombs around the world, according to research conducted for TIME by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. At least 101 appeared in the U.K., many of them planted by the IRA. (From 1998 to 2004, the top car-bomb perpetrator worldwide was ETA, the Basque separatist group; al-Qaeda came in fourth.)

Terrorists can be sophisticated failures. They can also be amateurish murderers. The only sensible option is to focus on reducing their ability to inflict mass casualties, however they might do it. In other words, with our limited resources, it's more important right now to protect Times Square from an old-school fertilizer bombing, a relatively easy attack that could kill thousands, than to try to prevent an airplane from being taken down by liquid explosives.

HOMEGROWN VS. IMPORTED

On the basis of a string of previous cases, it had become conventional wisdom that Islamic terrorists would attack Britain from within. But the suspects in the car-bomb cases are all from outside the U.K. So how much difference does that make?

The world has gotten much smaller. Country of origin is no longer the immutable trait it once was. The suspects arrested so far in the unsuccessful July 21, 2005, transit bombings in London were all from Africa. But the men charged with the devastating July 7, 2005, bombings were U.K. nationals who allegedly began plotting after a trip to Pakistan.