Learning the wrong lessons

I was disappointed (though hardly surprised) to hear yesterday of the dramatic and tragic airport bombing in Moscow. I've long worried that all of our expensive efforts to make airplanes safer have been in vain because they have largely ignored the airports themselves, and in fact possibly ironically made them less safe.

Specifically, as I've mentioned here before, I think that the incredibly long security lines that TSA screening has created makes those crowded "unsecure" areas among the most dangerous places a person could put himself. Why would a terrorist bother trying to sneak contraband onto a plane when he could just as easily create as much terror and human injury by simply detonating a bomb in the security line? Unfortunately, as soon as the news of the Moscow bombing broke, it was already clear that some people were in danger of learning the wrong lesson from the incident.

Experts say it is significant that those who masterminded the attack chose to bomb the arrivals hall of the airport -- Moscow's busiest -- because it was an easier target than the heavily-policed departures area.

"Arrivals has always been thought of as the 'soft' area of an airport," explained CNN's Richard Quest.

"Nobody is flying anywhere, the baggage has all been screened, because it has been on planes already, and crucially, people are leaving the airport. It's very rare that you ever saw somebody carrying a bag in to arrivals."

Security analyst Will Geddes told CNN: "The arrivals area is generally less secure .You have a large proportion of members of the public, people meeting friends and family...

Experts agree that airports worldwide, not just those in Russia, are likely to review their procedures in the wake of the Moscow attack...

And Quest said airports may begin screening people who come to meet friends and family at arrivals.

"What will happen is that the barrier will get further and further back, so no longer is it just at departures, but at the airport door, or in some cases on the road as you drive up to the terminal.

I think that all of this analysis is missing the point--in my mind, it's not significant at all that this incident happened in the arrivals area. It's only significant that it happened in the airport, rather than on an airplane. It just as easily could have happened in the departures area (in the security lines that I mentioned) as in the arrivals area. As this article suggests, our TSA would have been completely incapable of detecting an attack like the one perpetrated in Moscow.

We can move the security checkpoint all the way out to the interstate if we want to, but then you'll just have a long queue of cars (waiting to be inspected) that create a newly inviting target for terrorists. Sooner or later, no matter how much "security" you provide, there will inevitably be a crowd of people waiting to get into the secure area. Simply put, there will always be inviting targets for terrorists--trying to minimize those targets may be a laudable goal, but it misses the point.

We can't realistically prevent terrorism by removing the terrorists' targets--we never would have thought of the World Trade Center (or the Pentagon) as a target, until it became one. It is a very natural and human desire to want to gather in a central location, and by the very definition of terrorism, that means that we will naturally leave ourselves vulnerable to attack.

The only viable way of preventing terrorism over the long term is trying our best to prevent the creation of terrorists. Why do people resort to terror? Who becomes a terrorist? What can we do to prevent the process of terror cell creation? These are the questions we need to answer if we are going to prevent terrorism--NOT questions like how can we prevent large crowds of people from gathering in the same place, which is by definition a fool's errand.

I don't know how to answer the questions I posed in the previous paragraph, but I can assure you that long-standing military presences in foreign lands isn't helping. Diplomacy is a tricky game for sure, but its intelligent use is the only hope we have of preventing incidents like that in Moscow yesterday. "Securing" the arrivals area is at best a red herring. I am hopeful (though not confident) that we will learn the right lessons from yesterday's attack.

[CNN]