People are pointing to last week’s attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight as evidence that the aviation security system failed. Narrowly defined, it did fail, in that someone with explosives managed to get on board a plane and tried to set them off. But I would suggest that we’re defining the subject too narrowly.

The fact that the airport screening system failed does not mean that Al Qaeda therefore succeeded — because, obviously, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab did not blow up the plane. If you consider passengers and flight crew part of the air security system, then the system worked, because they subdued him before he could carry out his plan. (Since 9/11, passengers have known that they have to resist terrorists, not cooperate with them, in order to survive.)

It comes down to what your security system’s goal is. Are you trying to prevent terrorists from commandeering or blowing up planes in mid-flight? Then it’s okay if they’re stopped in the plane by the flight crew, other passengers or air marshals. But if your goal is to prevent them from even boarding the aircraft, then you’ve got a much taller order. You can’t harden every target in the aviation sector.

So instead we get the latest round of lunacy applied to every passenger, and argue whether keeping everyone seated or shutting down all their electronic devices an hour after takeoff or an hour before landing, or banning carry-on bags, will make any difference at all. It won’t, if only because terrorist attacks are so profoundly rare. And because, as Bruce Schneier points out, we’re spending all our time trying to prevent a recurrence of the specific tactics of the last attempt — about which see this Globe and Mail article and this opinion piece by Schneier. Lots of individual freedom taken away for hardly any benefit.

We’re making a big mistake by focusing on airport screenings and no-fly lists. (You might have noticed that the bombings in London, Madrid, Bali and Mumbai had nothing to do with airplanes.) Counter-terrorism is more than that.

The point is to stop them. Does it matter that the passengers and flight crew stopped him, so long as he was stopped?

If we freak out because we foiled a bombing attempt, then the terrorists don’t have to succeed in their plots to win. They don’t even have to try very hard.