Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity.
Islam is, to be sure, a big tent, and the one and a half billion Muslims in the world run the gamut from mystical, moderate, pacific Sufis to Salafists.
For many terrorists, carrying out an attack allowed them to become the heroes of their own story.
The dangers of TATP bombs can be seen in the case of Matthew Rugo and Curtis Jetton, 21-year-old roommates in Texas City, Texas. They didn't have any bomb-making training and were manufacturing explosives in 2006 from concentrated bleach when their concoction blew up, killing Rugo and injuring Jetton.
The civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and the Sunni empowers groups like ISIS and al Qaeda who claim to be the defenders of Sunni rights against Shia attack.
In the past, Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, of which SEAL Team 6 is a key component, has only launched ground raids in Yemen when the lives of hostages held by al Qaeda seemed at risk.
Abu Musab al-Suri is someone I got to know pretty well because he's a Syrian. Very bright guy, lived in London. He actually was the person who took myself and correspondent Peter Arnett and the cameraman, Peter Juvenal, to interview bin Laden for his first TV interview.
The only lethal terrorist to immigrate to the United States as an adult and conduct an attack shortly after arriving is Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan.
Trump has claimed he knows more about ISIS than America's leading generals. Clearly, this is also total nonsense; he doesn't seem to have done the slightest thing to educate himself about ISIS.
So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy theories have a life of their own.
Keeping a relatively small, predominantly U.S. Special Forces presence in Afghanistan to continue to train the Afghan army past December 2016 is a wise policy that would benefit both Afghans and Americans.
The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.
The war on terror, sometimes known as the 'Global War on Terror' or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.
In Yemen, the United States conducted more drone strikes in 2016 than any year except 2012, the peak of the campaign in the country, according to data collected by New America.
In the public's mind, Special Forces are often confused with the 'door kickers' of Special Operations Forces - such as SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force - who are the United States' elite counterterrorism operators.
At one point people in al Qaeda were actually drawing monthly paychecks when they were based in Sudan.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers who carried out the marathon bombing, was a non-practicing Muslim who only became an Islamist militant once his dreams of becoming an Olympic boxer faded. At the time of the attack, he was unemployed.
Anwar al-Awlaki was a U.S. citizen by virtue of his birth in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 while his Yemeni father was studying at New Mexico State University.
ISIS is even at war with its most natural ally, al Qaeda in Syria.
If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero.
