One Man, One Bomb: New Threat?

Car bombs in the USA? Top national security experts weigh whether "one man, one bomb" is the new face of terrorism.

There was a straight-line connection drawn yesterday between the outback of Pakistan and the May 1 car bomb attempt in New York’s Times Square.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday that the U.S. now has evidence that the Pakistan Taliban was behind the bungled Times Square attack.

“Intimately involved,” said Holder, in the attempt by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad to blow up gasoline and propane tanks in the heart of New York.

The Obama administration has been raining drone attacks on militants in Pakistan. Now, the pushback.

This Hour, On Point: Pakistan, and car bombs in America.Guests:

Michael Sheehan, former deputy commissioner for counterterrorism with the New York Police Department. He's a security consultant and the director of the Madison Policy Forum, a national security policy group. He's also a former member of the National Security Council and a former State Department senior counterterrorism adviser.

Daniel Byman, senior fellow of Foreign Policy at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He's author of The Five Front War: The Better Way to Fight Global Jihad and Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism. He's written a new piece for Brookings about Al Qaeda affiliates.

Mosharraf Zaidi joins us from Islamabad, Pakistan, where he's a columnist for Pakistan’s biggest English-language newspaper, The News, and for the Egyptian paper al-Shorouk. His work also appears in the Far Eastern Economic Review. Read his sharply critical piece on Pakistan's internal security problems, in which he writes, "In 2009 alone, more than 2,227 civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks in Pakistan. One thousand soldiers have laid their lives on the line defending this country." His web site is http://www.mosharrafzaidi.com/.