ASHINGTON ・My mom wore a red satin blouse on Friday to please the president and insisted that I look in my closet for red, white and blue, too.

We're all burning with patriotism and pride and sorrow and anger. But beneath our determination to get through this, we're afraid, just as jittery as the kids who cling and cry and crawl into bed with parents.

The adults of this capital are jumpy, driving the wrong way on one-way streets rather than waiting for soldiers in Humvees to untangle traffic, flinching at the sound of planes. The young men and women who work at the White House confess that they are scared to return there each day.

We worry that the faceless enemy is still lurking nearby.

When the F.B.I. chief, Robert Mueller, was asked at a press conference about "a silver or gray minivan that may be carrying a chemical weapon" in Washington, we cringed at his answer: "I can't tell you anything about that."

We have been jolted by the realization that while those smart missiles we saw in Desert Storm could go down chimneys, they cannot protect us from a handful of guys with box cutters and plastic knives.

And the realization that we don't yet know how to fight this evil in the Afghan heart of darkness, a place that rebuffed the British empire and the Russians, described by Kipling in "The Man Who Would Be King" as "one mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and no Englishman has been through it. . . . The people are utter brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn't do anything."

And the realization that all our security systems failed. Terrorists could live among us as a fifth column, drinking beer in our bars and getting Americans to unwittingly train them to kill other Americans ・even when they drove a car sporting a pro-Osama bin Laden sticker.

Asked by a Congressional panel why the military didn't respond fast enough to stop two hijacked airplanes headed toward Washington, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers said, "We have many fewer aircraft on alert than we did during the height of the cold war." He admitted, "We're not so good at the threats coming from inside."

There have been plenty of warnings. In 1994, I covered the remarkable story of a small plane that crashed under President Clinton's bedroom without anyone trying to stop it. It turned out to be a coked-up truck driver on a suicide mission, but I remember thinking, What if this had been a terrorist with a bomb?

We've known for a long time that the terrorists are coming at us. We've known for a long time that the C.I.A. has spiraled into an identity crisis since the cold war and lost both its best James Bonds and stoolies. We've known for a long time that the F.B.I. is prone to bungling.

Former Sen. Pat Moynihan, a longtime C.I.A. critic, observed that Washington "was still worrying about intercontinental missiles when we had a wholly new set of threats, the fierce and unresolved Islamic antagonism over centuries of domination from the West."

"We have to start all over again in what we think we're dealing with," he said. "Perhaps organizations we had for another era will be able to do that. But it is more likely we'll have to create new institutions."

Why not start fresh ・and fast ・with a new security agency, unleashing an elite squad with plenty of human spies and putting Rudy Giuliani in charge of the global "Untouchables"? The president will have to forgive the mayor for having warm words for John McCain during the New York primary, but desperate times require desperate measures.

President Bush says we are in the first war of the 21st century. Until this point, he has inflexibly pushed his tax cut, the energy plan and missile defense, even when it was clear that they did not suit the times.

We will soon see whether this shattering crisis will make him more supple, complex and clever. Can he, Cheney, Rummy and Condi move past the cold war attitude and Star Wars obsession that has alienated the countries we will need to help us fight an enemy too shadowy to be stopped by a shield?

Mr. Bush has promised nothing short of wiping out terrorism. But first the young president, who often seems trapped in the past, must come to grips with the modernity of evil.