Daniel Byman and Christine Fair have written a short but compelling essay at The Atlantic in which they assert (with good evidence) that the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorist organizations are not characterized by stunning skill and crystal-focused religious zeal, but rather by incompetence and an obsession with porn.
To call terrorists “nitwits” is to deny them the capacity to terrify us. It is to disarm them. Want to stand up to terrorism? Then laugh at the fools who expect us to bow and scrape before them while they can’t even light their shoes or their underwear or their SUVs on fire.
Ah, but then, if we just laugh at the incompetent nitwit terrorists, we don’t get to build up the Department of Homeland Security and maintain decades-long wars, do we?