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Before September 11 an al Qaeda operative who was intended for an attack on the United States would receive months of expert training before being sent on a mission. But the Taliban was not al Qaeda—the strike, if successful, would have been the group’s first attack abroad. And the luxury of time had been deeply disrupted by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the corresponding Pakistani crackdown along the border.42 Shahzad was shuttled into a training camp in the border region of Waziristan, where he went through a few short weeks of general training followed by only five days of instruction on the art of bomb making.43

The utter failure of Shazad’s training was on full display when he returned to the United States to make his move. During the course of a few months, he gathered bits and pieces of flammable and explosive materials, any two or three of which would have been enough to create a fairly dangerous bomb, and then he proceeded to mash them together in the back of his Nissan Pathfinder SUV. He stuffed fireworks, propane, gasoline, and fertilizer into the vehicle and wired it up with a bizarre combination of timers and fuses, all purchased with thousands of dollars of Taliban money.

Despite the demented design, dumb luck might have ignited the improvised bomb into a significant fireball. Fortunately, Shahzad was poised at the nexus between competent and incompetent. If he had been a little better at his job, it would have worked. If he had been a little less ambitious with his design, it would have worked. He fell perfectly in the middle.

Shahzad drove the SUV to Times Square on the evening of May 1, 2010, and left it parked on the side of a crowded street. The detonator mechanism created so much smoke that it choked off the oxygen supply that would have ignited the flammable components. The fertilizer he chose for its supposed explosive power turned out to be inert. He forgot to arm a key component of the bomb—and he left his car and apartment keys in the Pathfinder.44

The attack was a disaster, just not the disaster that Shahzad had intended. As he fled back to his apartment in Connecticut, the Taliban e-mailed a triumphant audio to the terrorism news website The Long War Journal, claiming credit for what it described as a “jaw-breaking blow” against the United States.45 Shahzad was captured while trying to flee the country.

After cooperating with investigators for several weeks, Shahzad appeared in court on June 21, 2010, and entered a defiant guilty plea—“guilty and one hundred times more”—calling himself a “Muslim soldier” and insisting that he acted alone while in the United States. Questioned by the judge about his willingness to kill children in Times Square, Shahzad was unrepentant.

Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims. [ … ] I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.

LASHKAR-E-TAYYIBA

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not the only organizations recruiting Americans for violent jihad. There are a host of enemies, stretching from West Africa through the Middle East, Asia, South Asia, and on into Southeast Asia: al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Fatah Al Islam, Hamas, Tawhid and Jihad, the Abu Sayyaf Group, and a score more of various sizes and shapes.

Most are concerned primarily with local issues, but they also accept foreigners in their ranks. Some aspire to play on a broader stage.

In Pakistan, not far from the Taliban’s domain, a cold war has been threatening to go hot for more than twenty years. The border between Pakistan and India is disputed. The conflict has