Was FBI too Inexperienced in Global Politics to Prevent Boston Marathon Bombing?

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Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev

The FBI did a masterful job of apprehending the Boston Marathon bombers. I am proud of their efficiency and speed and congratulate them. But three people died in this tragedy, including an eight year old boy. Countless others lost their limbs. Could this nightmare have been prevented? The answer is "probably".

Russian intelligence had warned the FBI in early 2011 that suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev might be engaged in extremist activities.  But the FBI  failed to take this valuable intelligence seriously, because it was inexperienced in assessing dangers coming from foreign locales unfamiliar to most Americans.  The agents did not know what to look for.

Tamerlane Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, were battle-scarred ethnic Chechens who came to the United States from Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic in central Asia. The elder Tamerlane had visited neighboring Dagestan, a hub of extremism,  for six months last year.  The oldest brother had even posted more than a dozen videos on Youtube supporting  Al-Qaeda, to which he had added a playlist with links to men identified as "terrorists." According to news reports:  "

One link features a nearly hour-long speech by an Islamist named Sheik Feiz Mohammed, who intelligence sources in the US said had followers among the Dagestani guerrillas."  The FBI also knew that Tamerlane had visited Dagestan for six months the previous year.   

What's going on here?  Today's FBI is  too provincial, too "white-bread" American to fulfill the responsibilities now being laid at its feet. It must do a better job of tracking down international terrorists, entering the United States with murderous intentions. But in order to do so, the agency will need to change the mindset of its agents.  The FBI  ignored warnings about the two young men from Chechyna because they did not  associate white men from the Caucasus (where, bytheway, the term Caucasian comes from) with Islamic terrorism. Tamerlan seems to haven fallen off the FBI's monitoring list after it was concluded that he was "assimilated," that is, a regular American who just happened to hail from Eastern Europe. But their homeland of Chechnya is a breeding ground for terrorism, having over the last several decades experienced unspeakable levels of violence -- involving Josef Stalin, collaboration with Nazi  Germany, ethnic cleansing, and terrorist attacks against Russians -- that puts the 9/11 tragedy at the level of child's play.     

Just as all domestic terrorists are not going to fit the Timothy McVeigh mold, all Islamic terrorists are not going to resemble the turbaned, long-bearded, Osama bin Laden in appearance.The FBI needs to take a more international view, not just at the policy level, but also in the way it trains and recruits its agents.

Given the speed with which the FBI solved this case, that agency is anything if not a quick learner. But if such tragedies are to be prevented rather than solved after the fact, that learning curve will have to shift from reactive to pro-active.