One of the major problems is that once you have a pool of terrorists that exceeds law enforcements ability to track them, you're going to get hit. Tracking even 25 terror suspects is going to involve hundreds of public servants and a number of agencies.
Try tracking 250. Or 2,500. Or 25,000. Especially when every time a cell is caught, the government is seen as racist and anti-Islamic. More extremists are created, to avenge their comrades, and they are now armed, in a Darwinic fashion, with the knowledge of how not to get caught the same way their friends were.
Every time we roll up a terror cell, the next team gets harder to catch. Also, every time we investigate a new cell, it turns out to be only several months old, where a normal terrorist cell used to be several years old. They're gestating faster, and becoming harder to spot. Time in not on our side, and sadly, we won't be able to summon the national will to stamp out this type of evolving threat until we get hit again, and hard.
"Tracking even 25 terror suspects is going to involve hundreds of public servants and a number of agencies.
Try tracking 250. Or 2,500. Or 25,000."
Excellent point. I was thinking myself the other day, doesn't this sort of scalpel-style anti-terror operation only work when the number of radical muslims is relatively small. When a significant portion of the population is muslim and radicalized, doesn't that make anti-terror impossible from a law enforcement standpoint and become basically a civil war?
Bingo.