The Terrorist Threat and Homeland Insecurity

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In a clear-eyed, book-length assessment of the Bush-Cheney administration’s post-9/11 counterterrorism policy one of the foremost security experts, Stephen Flynn, wrote a few years ago, “What was initially advertised as a two-front effort quickly became a lopsided strategy in which protecting our homeland has been neglected while the vast majority of our resources and political capital have been expanded in ‘taking the battle to the enemy.’” But the idea of fighting terrorists abroad so that they cannot hit us at home was flawed from the start. Flynn was right in the past and he is right today, when he concluded, “Despite all the rhetoric since September 11, 2001, and some new federal spending on homeland security, America remains unprepared to prevent and respond to acts of catastrophic terrorism on U.S. soil.”

In short, what the state of affairs through G.W. Bush’s presidency was—and is now—comes down to homeland insecurity rather than security. Former Vice President Dick Cheney can boast all he wants that on his watch no further attacks in the homeland occurred after 9/11, but the frightening growth of the global leaderless jihad was fueled during and by America’s so-called “war against terrorism.” The record number of foiled attacks by home-grown jihadis in 2009, the bloody strike by an Army doctor at Fort Hood last November, and the failed bombing of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day proved Stephen Flynn’s prediction right, namely, that in spite of the wars we fight abroad, “terrorists can still come here—and, worse yet, are being made here.”

While the Obama administration inherited this flawed counterterrorism policy, it is now high time for the president to recognize that he cannot follow the same path as his predecessor. Not at home and not abroad. Today’s meeting with members of the National Security Council must be the mere prelude to a comprehensive reassessment of homeland security and the adoption of more realistic and more effective policy priorities.

To be sure, the immediate focus will be on the multiple mistakes made by security agencies and personnel in Washington and abroad in the case of the would-be underwear bomber I wrote about earlier. We know now that the British government did share the name of the young Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the with U.S. agencies after they denied him entrance into the United Kingdom. Another clue that was missed by the intelligence community! Intelligence about the Fort Hood shooter, too, was not acted upon.

Obviously, the creation of the office of a director of national security and the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center after 9/11, both charged with coordinating intelligence for the sake of effective counterterrorism, did not overcome the traditional lack of intelligence-sharing by and the turf fights between the multitude of intelligence agencies. This must change. And it must change now. 

Perhaps, airport and aviation security can be tightened up--although terrorists triumph when we violate our fundamental values--including the right to privacy. Moreover, to continue to put preventative eggs mostly into the air traffic security basket at the expense of equally attractive terrorist targets would be a grave mistake. Think of vulnerable seaports, chemical plants, cruise and cargo ships, biological agents, and alike.

The American public must be told that there is not and will never be perfect homeland security, no complete protection against terrorist attacks. Just as there is no way to prevent car accidents. Such realistic assessments would be more helpful in preventing fear and anxiety than the terror threat alerts of the past and the silence today.

Abroad the problems are mounting and need to be addressed. The notion that wars can be fought and military forces deployed to defeat terrorist groups and cells and deny them safe havens in failed or failing states is wishful thinking. Unfortunately, there are too many failed states and brown areas that cannot be controlled by central governments to deny terrorists hiding places and training grounds. If the military surge in Afghanistan and intensified attacks on radical extremists’ strongholds in Pakistan were to succeed, there are plenty of safe havens in Yemen and Somalia and Sudan and in the South of the Philippines, and so on… And then there is the rising mobilization of susceptible people in the Muslim diaspora in Western Europe and in North America that surely cannot be fought with military might.

While we ought to think about long-term strategies to prevent the spread of inspirational terrorism contagion, there must be short-term measures in the most acute areas of threat abroad. Unfortunately, the U.S. military is overextended already because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s especially true for special operations forces which are most effective in fighting non-state actors.

The Obama administration must reverse its Iraq and Afghanistan policies—more rapid withdrawal from Iraq and no or less of a troop surge for Afghanistan. And aide money should not flow generously into countries, where Americans are dying while other foreigners pursue their economic interest. Just think of the Chinese company that recently began to extract from a mine in Afghanistan considered one of the richest untapped deposits on earth!

To remove or limit U.S. involvement there would free funds and special forces to fight—with and without allies--those jihadis that stir hate and violence against the United States in a multitude of states. Instead of closing down embassies (as the other day in Yemen) and yield to terrorists’ threats, countries should protect their missions. Acting otherwise would mean giving in to terrorists. After all, one of the main objectives of Al Qaeda and like-minded circles is the removal of Western interests from Arab and Muslim lands.

And, again, the key to effective prevention of terrorism and fighting those who plot and carry out this sort of political violence at home and abroad is good and shared intelligence.   

Comments

[Eric Chen]

Professor Nacos,

This post highlights the fundamental difference between a partisan pundit and a leader. A partisan pundit, unlike a leader, can criticize in certain tone without requirement to articulate a viable alternative course of action that seriously weighs goals and priorities, capabilities and limits, costs and benefits, risks and rewards. A partisan pundit can afford to be narrow-minded, a leader cannot. A leader must weigh all the factors and choose one course of action, even when every choice - as is the case in the War on Terror - is unattractive with a host of informed detractors.

"No silver bullets" - an Obama official said this to explain Obama's decision in his Afghanistan policy, which is virtually identical to the final Afghanistan policy he inherited from Bush. The quote neatly sums up all the Bush and Obama similarities; in other words, after exhaustively seeking viable alternatives, President Obama has discovered that given the hard realities, the best courses of action are the courses of action chosen by his predecessor.

Simply, the fundamental gulf between critic and leader is why President Obama has shed Obama the candidate and hardly deviated from President Bush in the War on Terror. President Obama has made the best decisions he could given all the factors a partisan pundit can ignore that a president must account for. It should be no surprise then that Obama has consistently arrived at the same or similar conclusions as Bush given both presidents arrived at them from the same careful presidential deliberations. In fact, reaching the shared conclusions was likely more difficult for President Bush since he was an anti-intervention realist who chose a progressive liberal strategy upon 9/11, whereas President Obama entered office as a progressive liberal who merely had to continue the progressive liberal strategy put in place by his predecessor.

Since popular narrative and popular will are key in the global competition of ideas and ideologies, we can only hope the American pundits who influence the world will eventually open their minds and hold themselves as accountable to the outcome as our Presidents must.