Times Square Bomb: The Growing Threat of 'Improvised' Explosives

Add Times Square to the growing list of places like Peshawar, Kandahar or any crowded Iraqi market where car bombs, suicide bombers and IEDs are now a deadly threat.

Expertise in making bombs -- especially using common materials like those found in the smoldering Times Square truck bomb Saturday night -- is spreading like wildfire across the globe with technical data and training widely shared among terrorist groups, experts have found.

In Afghanistan, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or roadside bombs have killed 89 Americans so far this year. The dead include three in the past week: Army 1^st Lt. Salvatore S. Corma, 24, from Wenonah, New Jersey; Marine Lance Cpl. Thomas E. Rivers Jr., 22, of Birmingham, Alabama; and Sgt. Keith A. Coe, 30, of Auburndale, Florida.

But these tragic deaths are only part of a tide of global bomb attacks that are causing a significant increase in dead and wounded, according to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. Indeed, the increasing use by terrorists of homemade explosives and yes, "improvised'' bombs, like the Times Square device, makes it more likely that what we have gotten used to seeing on our TV screens may soon be happening on our streets.

In the first three months of this year, 837 IEDs were detonated worldwide -- excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization.

Globally, attacks with explosives, IEDs, vehicle bombs, letter bombs, grenades and firebombs -- attacks mostly on civilians -- grew by 40 percent between 2005 and 2009, according to the NTIC's global data base. The worse news is that the death toll from those attacks grew in the same period by 30 percent and the number of wounded by 51 percent.

Bloody casualties might have been the case in New York if the dark green 1993 Nissan Pathfinder that was parked in Times Square at 45^th Street and Broadway on Saturday night had exploded as intended. The SUV was packed with what one counterterrorism official later described as an "unsophisticated'' explosive device made with three propane gas canisters, two cans of gasoline, eight bags of fertilizer, dozens of M-88 firecrackers and two clocks with wires and batteries.

Whoever built the device, Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday, "intended to spread terror across New York ... we certainly would have seen a substantial loss of life.''

In the aftermath of the failed bombing came the usual confusion about who or what group attempted the attack, and why. The Pakistan Taliban, Tehrik-e Taliban, was reported to have issued two videotapes asserting responsibility, but the Taliban spokesman later Monday denied the group was involved.

There was also considerable speculation as to possible motives for the Times Square bombing which seemed inconclusive. What was beyond debate, however, was that the attempted attack was part of an expanding wave of similar attacks around the world "in which terrorist and insurgent bombing campaigns have taken progressively shorter periods to achieve relatively high levels of technical and tactical sophistication,'' according to a new study on the global IED threat.

The report, issued by the New American Foundation, observes that it took the Irish Republican Army about 30 years to "progress'' from crude wire-detonated bombs to radio-controlled detonations. But it took six years for insurgents to make the same technical leap in Chechnya, three years for the fighters in Gaza, and about 12 months for militants in Iraq.

What worries investigators now, however, is that the same kind of accelerating sophistication is taking place in terrorist tactics, not just technology. One shift in tactics adapted by al Qaeda is to use minimally trained agents, rather than well-established extremist cells, in smaller one-time attacks instead of trying to pull off a massive, coordinated attack.

In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in February, Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence, said that " recent successful and attempted attacks represent an evolving threat, in which it is even more difficult to identify and track small numbers of terrorists'' who are newly trained and engaged in short-term plots. It is far easier, Blair acknowledged, "to find and follow terrorist cells engaged in plots that have been ongoing for years.''

For example, unlike the 9/11 plot, which drew foreign terrorists into the United States to coordinate their successful skyjacking attacks, recent attempts have suggested that the attackers are more likely to be Americans and thus far more difficult to detect and intercept.

Last month two Americans, Zarein Ahmedzay and Najibullah Zazi, pleaded guilty to planning to blow themselves up using homemade explosives on the New York City subway on the eighth anniversary of 9/11. The guilty pleas of these two Afghan Americans, who had gone home to fight U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, revealed that they had been recruited and sent back by al Qaeda.

What is striking about this and other recent cases, according to Bruce Riedel, a former CIA counterterrorism official now at the Brookings Institution, is that it reveals that ''al Qaeda has asked all of its allies in the global Islamic jihad, like the Taliban and Lashkar e Tayyiba, and its franchises around the Muslim world, including the one in Yemen, to help it find killers and press the war on America.''

What is clear, Riedel writes, "is that al Qaeda still has got the Big Apple in its gun sights. Whether they had anything to do with Saturday's car bomb or not, we know they are determined to strike inside America again.''