Something to consider: it worked. It would still be presumptuous, but at least a little less misdirected, to Monday-morning-quarterback a team that lost the game.
It didn't work, as the suspect was discovered after the curfew was over, by a man who had been inside his house all day. Had the man been outside his house earlier in the day, and seen the cover of his boat, its all but likely the suspect could have been apprehended 8-12 hours earlier.
At the point when the lockdown started, the intended outcome was likely to catch the suspect without any more death, injury or destruction. It worked. You can speculate as to whether it would have also worked with a different approach, but you can't say the selected approach didn't work.
I'm talking black box QA. Input is suspect identified. Output is that inside 24 hours they had him alive.
Every particular possible outcome has some set of strategy changes that, in retrospect, would have made apprehension quicker. But this success was reached without the benefit of clairvoyance.
Actually, I don't keep any gunpowder under my sink. Why are you deliberately mischaracterizing the inciting incident, and omitting the rather significant context that it involved multiple detonations at a public event?
OUTPUT: front page headlines around the world; whole city gets shut down
Front page headlines - so what, we should censor the news now? As for a city shutdown, that could just as easily be interpreted as 'whole city cooperates to catch bombing suspect.'
Yeah, I'm sure the 19 year old bleeding in the boat was feeling pretty victorious. I'm sure shutting down Boston for a day was basically his life's goal.
If the goal of terrorists is to make Americans live in fear every day, it certainly seems to me like they are losing, badly. If the goal is to make Americans uneasy for a day, whatever. I have no problems admitting I am uneasy about a guy roaming the neighborhood, armed and running from the cops. Did the terrorists just win when I admitted that?
As the original article points out, these two kids achieved something that the worst of the World War Two bombing of London was not able to do, which is to shut down a major city for a day.
Rightly or wrongly, terrorists will view this as a spectacular success, in some ways greater than 9/11 since it only took a couple of kids to pull off.
I don't know if that kid feels victorious but you can be darn sure that his peers are throwing high fives all around.
these two kids achieved something that the worst of the World War Two bombing of London was not able to do
Sure, but I'm still unsure that anybody would actually care. It seems like a "Guinness Book of World Records" achievement, not a global politics achievement.
Who would care? People who want to disrupt the US economy with minimal effort and resources. The terrorist 'incubators' around the world are certainly buzzing right now.
