Bin Laden gone but war on terror still being lost

Osama bin Laden’s death shows how the free world’s perception and behavior have changed, though never more so than in air travel. As the Montreal Gazette notes: “The terrorists won — when it came to air travel at least.”
 

But that’s not the only issue in the wake of his death: can the US afford to continue to fight terrorism is another major emerging question?
 

Terrorists not only made it more unpleasant to fly but there is also a high price for even the most tenuous security.
 

Martine Ohayon of Montreal’s International Air Transport Association told the Gazette that airlines worldwide pay about US$7.4 billion for anti-terrorist measures. Before 9-11, the cost was only $800 million.
 

Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post, says the US never quite grasped the fact that bin Laden’s real goal was not to beat the US with its strong military but to bring it to the brink of bankruptcy. That was what happened in the Soviet Union.
 

“Add up the trillions spent on wars and homeland security. Factor in the ‘loose monetary policy’ the Fed put in place after 9/11 to ward off a ‘fear-induced recession,’ a policy that may have led to the credit bubble a few years ago. And on and on," Klein writes.
 

For bin Laden, he writes, success was not to be measured in body counts. It was to be judged in deficits, in borrowing costs, in investments we weren’t able to make in our country’s continued economic strength. “And by those measures, bin Laden landed a lot of blows."
 

The US has increased homeland security spending by more than US$1 trillion since the 9-11 attacks. A new academic paper quoted in the Economist in its Gulliver column raises the question of whether there was value for the money.

The study due to become a book in the near future was done by John Mueller of Ohio State University and Mark Stewart of the University of Newcastle in Australia.
 

They also asked whether policymakers ever considered anything remotely resembling a cost-benefit analysis before they spent all that money. “The answer in both cases, it seems, is no,” says the Economist.
 

Gulliver has always argued that many post-9/11 "innovations" in homeland security are not worth their cost. “But the findings in this paper are truly remarkable,” says Gulliver.
 

By 2008, according to the authors, America’s spending on counterterrorism outpaced all anti-crime spending by some $15 billion. Mueller and Stewart do not even include things like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which they call "certainly terrorism-determined”) in their trillion-plus tally.
In the time immediately after 9-11, it has been assumed there would be other attacks. But other attacks have been far smaller and not stoppable by normal airline procedures.
 

Even if increased security could prevent attacks on high-value targets like the Twin Towers, it would run the risk of simply pushing terrorists to attack softer targets. And according to Mueller and Stewart, the increased cost of post-9/11 security measures can only be economically justifiedif we were certain that, absent those measures, one 9/11-style attack would succeed each year.
 

Getting back to air travel, hijacking planes goes back as far as the 1960s and continued through the 1980s. But Osama bin Laden created a whole new terror: using planes as weapons.
 

“In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, after air travel resumed, it was bedlam. Airports, particularly in the US, became armed camps, lineups snaked around terminals, travel documents were scrutinized minutely instead of rubber-stamped,” said the Gazette.
 

The Gazette’s musings were not entirely new.
 

Travel columnist Christopher Elliott last December wrote, “It pains me to write this, but when it comes to air travel, I think the terrorists may have won.”
 

He said they had not brought down another plane.
 

“The bad guys have won in another important respect: They’ve succeeded in making air travel a transportation mode of last resort for many Americans. Readers are telling me they’d sooner walk to their destination than fly, thanks to the Transportation Security Administration’s invasive body scans and pat-downs,” he said. And that was before the death of bin Laden and predictions there would be retribution.
 

It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which TSA has mismanaged security, particularly since overreacting to the underwear bomber incident, Elliott wrote.
 

“This isn’t just an airport thing. The Department of Homeland Security’s Orwellian ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign which is being expanded to shopping centers and federal buildings, doesn’t make anyone safer. Instead, it makes Americans feel as if they are living in a police state,” Elliott writes.
 

Many measures in the bin Laden-created terror realm were little more than nuisances such as not carrying aboard water bottles or nail clippers. But other security measures such as pat-downs and full-body scans have created some furious backlashes for passengers who think security should be somewhat more intelligent than a one-size-fits-all philosophy.
 

It used to be said that army generals are always fighting the last war.
 

The same is true of airline security agencies such as the TSA.

When the “shoe bomber” tried unsuccessfully to ignite his sneakers, passengers had to start taking off their shoes. Nothing ever came of that but it still remains a policy in most airports.
 

With the death of bin Laden, flyers are again raising questions about the future safety of air travel.
 

Safety concerns “vividly show the difference in the mind of the average American traveler between today and a decade ago. Those changes immediately following the attacks have continued through the years to affect traveler’s lives, “says Sure Start, a shopping and consumer site.
 

Air travel was not the only means of transportation impacted by 9-11.
 

“The War on Terror has driven up the price of oil and left gas prices fluctuating dramatically throughout the years,” said Sure Start.
 

With gas over $4 a gallon in some areas, not just airline fuel is rising. All types of travel are getting more expensive. Consider this: even buses. The terrorists unexpectedly have also hit there.
 

By David Wilkening