When will Osama test Obama?

In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, vice presidential candidate Joe Biden offered an inconvenient prediction: "It will not be six months," he said, "before the world tests Barack Obama. We're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

History is on Biden's side. On Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and his national security team were caught unaware. This despite a clear trend from the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, bin Laden's official declaration of war on the U.S. in 1998, the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Africa and an attack on a U.S. warship in 2000. Holdovers from the previous administration were sounding the alarm. Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke argued repeatedly: "We urgently need a principals [Cabinet] level review of the Al Qaeda threat." But as the bipartisan commission investigating Sept. 11 found: "No principals committee meeting on Al Qaeda was held until Sept. 4, 2001."

Similarities between Sept. 11 and the terrorist attack in the first months of President Bill Clinton's administration are not coincidental. Thirty-seven days after he took office, Al Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef parked a van filled with explosives in the basement of the World Trade Center. Yousef was the nephew of the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. His plan was designed to kill 40,000 people by toppling one tower of the center into a second. Fortunately, the driver failed to park the van at a location that would have had maximum effect. Six people were killed and 1,000 injured.

The newly elected president and vice president are acutely conscious of the threat posed by bin Laden. They know that bin Laden has challenged the Al Qaeda movement to trump Sept. 11. During the campaign, Obama recognized that "the single most important national security threat that we face is nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists." He criticized the Bush administration for taking its eye off the perps who attacked us on Sept. 11 and vowed that he would "find, disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda."

To meet this threat, Obama must do three things.

• First, he should use the transition period to assure a seamless handoff of all ongoing defensive and offensive operations against Al Qaeda to guarantee that his administration is fully ready on Day 1. His team must be fully apprised of expanded rules of engagement for Special Forces and CIA Predator attacks that have expanded twentyfold since last summer.
• Second, he must recognize that his oft-expressed steely determination to destroy Al Qaeda will not have gone unnoticed. In the campaign, he pledged: "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority." This creates an urgency for bin Laden to act before he is acted upon. The recent video from bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, sent a shrill message to followers to intensify the "jihad": "Your enemy's stagger has begun, so don't stop hitting him."
• Third, heightened threat requires extra preparedness during the inauguration and in the months immediately after. Here his team can adapt lessons from the vigilance, coordination of all elements of American power, and direct presidential engagement demonstrated by the Clinton administration's preparation for the millennium. That effort prevented an attack on the homeland by apprehending at the border an Algerian jihadist with explosives and a plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. Obama has warned that "we have to be careful, we have to be mindful as we pass the baton in this democracy, that others don't take advantage of it." Coping with the current economic crisis could become all-consuming. Facing an adversary who could do even greater damage to the U.S., however, our new president must assure the care and mindfulness this clear and present danger demands.

Graham Allison is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe."