The press has been pointing out what a fumbling, ill-planned, poorly prepared bombing effort was made in Times Square.

The bomb was clumsily made, the fertilizer used could not explode, the propane canisters in the car would not explode unless they were turned on, and so on.

After all that, the terrorist left his getaway auto and house keys in the lock of the bomb-carrying car and had to take the train home.

The errors were made by Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American born in Pakistan.
Shahzad was no dumbbell.

He came to the U.S. from Pakistan at 18 and earned an American undergraduate degree and a master’s of business administration degree.

The old English adage, “There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip,” and Murphy’s law, “If anything can go wrong, it will,” apply to terrorists, as well as to the rest of us.
The next aspiring terrorist they send us will not make the same mistakes.

Instead of congratulating ourselves on how poorly the attempted perpetrator performed, we should learn from our own errors.

Shahzad traveled to Pakistan several times. The last time he took his family.

He stayed five months in Pakistan and traveled to a part called Waziristan, home base of the Pakistani Taliban.

He left his family in Pakistan.

The fact he returned without his family for such a short stay in the U.S. should have been enough to put him on a watch list. It was not.

When his smoking, popping auto bomb was discovered just off Times Square, police did a remarkably fine job of tracing the car.

The cell phone he used to purchase the car was found in a Dumpster.

With these leads they found Shahzad.

After having found him, he managed to slip through the FBI’s fingers.

Shahzad made a last-minute reservation by cell phone, he paid cash for a one-way ticket to Dubai and walked on the plane.

I was told he would not have been discovered except that a new ticket agent at the Emirates Airline, on the shift following the one which sold the ticket, noticed his name and called the TSA.
Whether chance found him, or the TSA picked him off the passenger manifest forwarded by the airline, we were very lucky.

His name had gone on the “no-fly” list early Monday afternoon.

When he checked in at the counter, why not send his name immediately by computer link to the Transportation Security Administration for automatic comparison with the no-fly list?

This should be done whenever a person flies overseas.

We have the capability to do just that – without the intervention of human error or relying on the Dubai Emirate Airline employees to do that for us.

We should do what the terrorists are doing now: analyze our mistakes and correct them.
The Internet can link every airline counter in the United States and overseas with our no-fly list, make the comparison and notify the authorities.

We failed to keep tabs on a guy who went to the hotbed of anti-Americanism, took his wife and family and then returned to the United States without them.

He was found, then lost.

He placed his bomb vehicle at one of the busiest intersections in America.

He made a last-minute reservation by phone.

He bought a one-way ticket with cash just before boarding.

He is on the runway leaving for Pakistan when he is caught because an alert replacement ticket agent, or the TSA, recognized his name.

We cannot make these errors twice. Next time we will not be this lucky.
Next time the terrorist may be the lucky one.