On Christmas Day, a London-educated Nigerian apparently took explosives from Yemen, flew through Amsterdam, and attempted to bring down a plane over Detroit. None of these places have garnered the level of attention the United States has placed on Afghanistan in recent months.

As the U.S. prepares a significant escalation in Afghanistan, security experts are suggesting that more needs to be done elsewhere — particularly at home.

There was no information to place failed Christmas terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on a no-fly list, according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. She went on multiple Sunday talk shows to discuss the incident, insisting “the system worked.”

[Watch Napolitano's performance here]

Basically, the whole “Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them right here” plan is not only bunk, but dangerous bunk: The kind that can explode an airplane over the skies of, say, Detroit. Since terrorism exists beyond traditional nation states, dropping an army in the middle of x desert doesn’t really yield the kind of results that had worked so well for our colonialist forebears.

Also, chasing al-Qaeda around the world with an ever-dwindling cache of volunteer soldiers and atrophying domestic resources and proceeding to blow up sizable chunks of other nations seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it, if the point of a war on something like terror is to actually decrease the amount of terror? When the real solution is just better trained airport personnel?

The only other alternative? Electing a Democratic president to clean things up. A few dozen of these guys: