Major flaws in US intelligence-gathering were recently exposed after the failed terrorist attack on a transatlantic flight on Christmas Day and the killing of seven CIA agents in eastern Afghanistan on December 30.
The defects heighten the need for an urgent review of US intelligence operations that are so crucial in the fight against global terrorism.
In the first incident, a Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had links to Al-Qaeda in Yemen - and was known to some US security agencies for his Jihadi beliefs - managed to board a flight to Detroit with explosives hidden in his clothing. Luckily the attempted downing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 failed.
In the second incident, a suicide bomber - who was a triple agent - inflicted the worst toll on the CIA since the US Embassy was blown up in Beirut in 1983.
"A systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable," US President Barack Obama said after he heard of the incident. The President assumed political responsibility for this fiasco and consequently ordered an immediate review of US intelligence and security operations.
Obama later announced changes to US intelligence gathering and sharing aimed at preventing a repetition of the Christmas Day bomb plot. More air marshals will be recruited, screening at airports improved and visa rules reviewed, he said.
Obama admitted that although the intelligence community knew Al-Qaeda in Yemen planned to strike the US and that it was recruiting operatives to do so, this was not aggressively followed up. This, he said, contributed to a larger failure of analysis, "a failure to connect the dots of intelligence that existed across our intelligence community and which, together, could have revealed that Abdulmutallab was planning an attack."
Obama said this, in turn, fed into shortcomings in the watch-listing system, which resulted in this person not being placed on the 'no fly' list, thereby allowing him to board the plane in Amsterdam for Detroit.
In a nutshell, Obama said the US government had the information - scattered throughout the system - to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack.
"Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence we already had," he said.
Obama ordered the intelligence community to immediately begin assigning specific responsibility for investigating all leads on high-priority threats and for intelligence reports, especially those involving potential threats to the US, to be distributed more rapidly and more widely. He also ordered the strengthening of the intelligence analytical process, and the integration of intelligence that is received.
The killing of seven CIA personnel in Afghanistan involved suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a young Jordanian doctor of Palestinian origin, who was apparently turned into a Jihadi by events in Iraq and Gaza.
However, he was picked up by Jordanian intelligence and turned into a double agent. He was soon put in touch with the CIA in Afghanistan, where he became a triple agent for the Pakistani Taliban.
In Afghanistan, Al-Balawi was meant to lead the CIA to Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Instead, he blew himself up during a meeting at the CIA base near Khost, killing the agents as well as a Jordanian spy who accompanied him.
A video released after Al-Balawi's death shows him sitting next to Hakimullah Mesud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and claiming the attack was in revenge for last summer's drone assassination of Baitullah Mehsud, then Pakistani Taliban leader.
This latest bombing highlights the fact that co-operation between Al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban is on the increase, which is a worrying development. Furthermore, the killing of the CIA agents shows just how weak the US is when it comes to human intelligence in Afghanistan.
This point was amply emphasised by Nato's chief intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Major General Michael Flynn, who recently issued a ferocious critique of US military intelligence gathering, and warned that a failure to understand local communities had denied commanders of much-needed information in the war against the Taliban.
"Moving up through levels of hierarchy is normally a journey into greater degrees of cluelessness. US intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high-level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency," Flynn wrote.
The report says intelligence officers are "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers."
It quotes one officer as saying: "I don't want to say we are clueless, but we are. We're no more than fingernail-deep in our understanding of the environment."
Hopefully, in the aftermath of this damning report and after the suicide bombing of the CIA agents, the US administration will now review its Afghan intelligence operations, which have such an important role to play in the war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.