Top basketball players, heroes to millions, are converting to Islam. So does the US shelter an army of home-grown Richard Reids? Andrew Stephen reports

I flew in to Miami international airport in a Boeing 767 just a few hours before Richard Reid, aka Abdel Rahim, was due to do the same. Instead, the 28-year-old from Bromley ended up in a prison south of Boston - talking to the FBI like a parrot, apparently - with plenty of time to mull over his failure to set light to the triacetone triperoxide hidden in his exploding sneakers. But here, within a week that encompassed the cathartic celebrations of Christmas and New Year, that Reid so nearly succeeded in despatching himself and 196 others to the icy seas of the mid-Atlantic was soon largely forgotten.

But 2002 is not going to bring the instant relief that the nation anticipated in the final days of an unforgettable 2001. By 18 January, for example, the Aviation Security Act is due to come into force: as late as 20 December, it was laid down as part of the new law that baggage screeners "must be US citizens, have a high school diploma and pass a standardised test". Now it is recognised that, in an economy such as that of the US, you cannot have 28,000 workers screening luggage who are both highly qualified and low paid. Hence, quietly and over the holidays, the authorities dropped the required qualification that one be a high-school graduate. By 18 January, too, all checked baggage is supposed to be screened for explosives and matched case-with-owner: the first is practically impossible at most airports in the US (which lack explosive-sniffing devices or even sniffer dogs) and the second of no use when it comes to suicide bombers, be they like Reid or the more co-ordinated teams of 11 September.

That there was so nearly a catastrophe on Reid's American Airlines transatlantic flight just before Christmas, however, is largely being attributed here to those lax Europeans and their lazy ways (thank God for the alert Americans on board!). How can it be, Americans ask incredulously, that Reid could be questioned closely by the French the day before he took his nearly fateful flight, put up in a four-star hotel at the airline's expense, but then be allowed to catch the same flight the next day? And what about these Brit prisons, which are such fertile recruiting grounds for Islamic extremists? Each is a legitimate question, naturally, because al-Qaeda members certainly have used the more-or-less free borders of Europe to organise western cells. But there is an equally blatant trend in the United States that has recently received no attention in the US media: namely, that many prisoners in domestic jails, too, are also being recruited to Islam.

A giveaway to this is the prison chaplain chosen by many condemned black men to stay with them at the time of their executions. Increasingly, they tend not to be Christian priests but Muslim chaplains whose true theological standings, just as in Britain, received little or no scrutiny prior to 11 September. Top basketball players - huge role models and multimillionaire celebrities to millions of the nation's youth - proclaim their devotion to Islam (including, I am told, the legendary Michael Jordan).

In American eyes, that notoriously unreliable, amorphous entity known as "Europe" is analogous to unreliable intelligence and security. Yet exactly the same phenomenon already exposed in Europe is unfolding simultaneously (but remains as yet undiscovered) in America. The country already has a home-grown Talib from Marin County, John Walker Lindh, but he is clearly an aberration. However, it may not be too long before the US has its own, conveniently named Richard Reids (that is to say, with no giveaway Mohammads or the like as part of their names) who have been recruited in US prisons.

The huge, apparently panicky security blitz by John Ashcroft, the attorney general - in which 5,200 young men with Middle Eastern backgrounds are being questioned by the FBI, and hundreds imprisoned without trial - is indicative of the Bush administration's realisation, yet to seep through to the American public, of the magnitude of the domestic and international tasks the US is now facing.

Bush has made a genuine public relations effort to avoid the notion that Muslims in America are now routine targets, but terrible racial divisions are already developing: over the holidays, a plain-clothes secret serviceman, on his way from Baltimore airport to go on presidential protection duties in Texas, was barred from taking a commercial internal flight. The reason? He was an Arab American, and the pilot simply did not like the look of him. (I have noticed that, on domestic flights nowadays, the captain greets the passengers as they arrive from the jetway on to the plane. This is not a new, reassuring courtesy, as many passengers seem to assume, but a security measure that lifts the burden of the last possible security screening from flight attendants.)

A dazed nation, while absorbing all the depressingly schmaltzy year-past retrospectives of 2001, has meanwhile barely noticed the Indo-Pakistan conflict. "Should we care?" was the opening question from a Fox Television anchorman to a former US diplomat. That the conflict is a direct result of the US administration's about-turn on Pakistan, following 11 September, is an idea that has not impinged on America's consciousness; General Pervez Musharraf suddenly became America's best buddy following the atrocities and is now uniformly referred to in the US media as "the president" of Pakistan, rather than its "military dictator". The wildly erratic US policy towards Pakistan over recent decades, if known at all, is dismissed as irrelevant.

So India is the world's biggest democracy, with around four times the population of the US? I doubt whether one in a hundred Americans knows that. What will start to matter to Americans is if Musharraf loses control and/or is ousted, and if al-Qaeda then starts to regroup within Pakistan, with Osama Bin Laden still frustratingly elusive and possibly operating from there. Already, the attentions of 60,000 Pakistani soldiers policing the 1,800-mile border with Afghanistan are being drawn back towards India.

The catharsis in the US from Thanksgiving and then Christmas and New Year is only partial; Americans are convincing themselves that they have already won their overseas war, at the same time uncomfortably acknowledging that Bin Laden and his top aides in al-Qaeda have apparently made a clean getaway.

Hints of recriminations are also beginning to surface. Bill Clinton, inevitably, is a target, accused of presiding over post-cold war complacency and laxity in military and intelligence matters. (During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush made much of the way Clinton had supposedly let the US military go downhill - but has made little mention that it is the same military that has been operating with much success in Afghanistan.) But there have also been reports of astonishing intelligence failures in the months when Bush was already president: the FBI was warned by the owner of a flight training school where one of the 11 September pilots took lessons that potential terrorists were planning to turn commercial airlines into flying missiles, but his warnings were ignored. Sandy Berger, as Clinton's outgoing national security adviser, warned Condoleezza Rice (his successor, appointed by Bush) that terrorism would take up an inordinate amount of her time. Zacarias Moussaoui, widely assumed to have been destined to act as the 20th hijacker on one of the 11 September planes, was arrested and imprisoned the month before the attacks - but although the FBI knew that Moussaoui was a big fish in al-Qaeda, the bureau still got no wind of the 11 September attacks.

Indeed, James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, says that the September attacks were "a systematic failure of the way this country protects itself". He went on: "Its aviation security . . . did a lousy job. It's a fighter deployment failure. It's a foreign intelligence collection failure. It's a domestic detection failure. It's a visa and immigration failure." That was said not by some wimpy "liberal" but by a former director of central intelligence.

So this will not be a comfortable year for America, I fear. It has had its fearful wake-up call following the deficiencies Woolsey listed, and must now start to live through the painful processes of righting them as the nation struggles to achieve normality. The country had the most subdued New Year celebration I can remember; even the president, taking a two-week break "clearing some brush, burning some brush" on his 1,600-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas, retired at his usual bedtime of 9pm. Far more people, fearful of a terrorist attack on traditional New Year gathering places such as Times Square in New York, stayed at home to see in the new year; one in ten Americans, we are told, cancelled holiday trips that they would otherwise have taken.

So welcome, good 2002; farewell, bad 2001. If only it was as easy as that.

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