THOMAS C. SCHELLING: Whatever happened to Nuclear Terrorism?

Posted on September 6, 2011 by drovang

Thomas SchellingCOLLEGE PARK – In 1982 I published an article that began, “Sometime in the 1980’s an organization that is not a national government may acquire a few nuclear weapons. If not in the 1980’s, then in the 1990’s.”

I hedged about the 80’s but sounded pretty firm about the 90’s. It’s now the 2010’s, twenty-nine years later, and there has been no nuclear terrorism nor any acquisition of such weapons by any terrorist organization that we know of; and I think we’d know by now. I don’t know of anyone—and I knew many colleagues knowledgeable on the subject—who thought my expectations outlandish. Something needs to be explained!
I’ve thought about this and concluded that we all concentrated, back then and since, on how vulnerable weapons-grade fissile material was to theft, in Russia or in a few former Soviet Socialist Republics, and that despite significant efforts by the USA to help financially to secure fissile materials, remained frighteningly vulnerable. I think now that we failed to appreciate that theft of weapons-grade fissile material was only a first step in a difficult process of getting stolen material to a dangerous customer.

Imagine that you have succeeded in stealing a Picasso insured for many millions of dollars, and you know that there are people willing to pay several millions for it: how do you find your customer? You cannot put a want ad in the New York Times.

If you have weapons-grade uranium for which you know someone is willing to pay a high price you probably need someone able to get it out of the country, who can meet someone somewhere who can be in touch with someone who is in touch with someone who is known to be willing to kill to get the stuff, who may pay handsomely. At every stage someone has much money, someone has stuff worth much money, someone gets a commission, and somebody may be willing to kill for the money or for the bomb material.

Eventually, if all goes well, a “supplier” and a “customer” representing the terrorist organization may meet in a public place, each with a few unrecognizable body guards, to consummate the deal. At that point I fantasize that the seller and the buyer recognize each other, one is from the CIA and the other from the Israeli Mossad. Each is engaged in a “sting” operation, and they shake hands and go back to work.

Assume the sale succeeds. The terrorist organization needs the people who can convert the fissile material into an explosive. It needs several highly trained scientists in physics, chemistry, computer science, and metallurgy, and highly skilled machinists and others who can produce something technologically demanding. The fact that a bomb design can be found on the internet, doesn’t make it easy. Anyone can find out how to make a Chevrolet, or an MRI or a CAT scan; there’s no secret, but it’s not easy!

Recruiting must be a problem. There are three main avenues. Loyal terrorists, if they have the skills, may be happy to join. Pay may attract the needed people. Coercion—threatening family, etc.—may work. But there’s always the chance that the persons approached can become informants. Pay may be unattractive if the potential contractor suspects that any organization willing to kill thousands or millions wouldn’t hesitate to kill a nuclear scientists rather than pay him at the, end of his contract, especially to preclude his becoming an informant. As in the process of avoiding enemy intelligence in the chain of transactions getting the fissile material to the ultimate customer, there is the difficulty of “advertising” for participants in an enterprise that requires leaving job and family and going off to a secret location from which he may never return.

The foregoing thoughts may suggest why “terrorists” have not yet acquired a nuclear weapon: it’s more than stealing the fissile material. But they still may! What are we to suppose they will do with one, or a few, that they may yet acquire?

If a team is assembled that, in isolation, spends months making a workable bomb, or a few bombs, what will they spend their evening hours talking about? They are all concentrated on a nuclear weapon. Won’t they continually converse about what the thing is good for, what should properly be done with it, how it might be used to advance some important objective, and whether they might have any influence on its use? They will almost certainly have spent more hundreds of hours trying to think strategically about the possible uses of a few nuclear weapons than any head of government, or even senior government adviser has devoted to the question. It’s possible—I think likely—that they may be listened to. And what “strategy” might they propose?
I propose that they will conclude that exploding a weapon over Los Angeles or Vladivostok or Bremen will “waste” the weapon. They will think, “we are a nuclear power. There are the USA, Russia, France, Britain, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Maybe Iran, and now US. We have status, power, influence. Let’s use it!”

Can they prove they have the weapon? I think they can. I’ve talked to American weapon experts who, when I inquired, would willingly go blindfolded to a terrorist organization’s site to examine the fissile material and the weaponization capability and return home to declare whether it was “real.” (If they couldn’t be attracted, they could be kidnapped, shown it all, and taken home to declare what they had seen.)

So what kind of thing might the “terrorist” (now a major diplomatic power) demand under what kind of nuclear threat? I’m not sure I want to give them any ideas, but I think I’d prefer they coerce us than kill a great many of us. A simple example might be that they say that have already introduced a weapon into one American city, and name ten cities that include the one: Port cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Houston, San Diego, Long Beach, San Francisco, Seattle, and will detonate it New Years Day if the United States has not by then . . . .

Do I think, if they pursue this strategy, they would explode it if the United States did not meet their demand by New Years Day. I’m not sure. I think they, whoever they are, might be severely inhibited by the sixty-six years in which no nation has, in the words of President Lyndon Johnson, “loosed the atom against another.”

Maybe, to avoid facing that decision, they would abstain from committing themselves.

But I have not yet given as many hours of thought to this subject as that team will have done by the time they’ve produced a nuclear bomb.

Thomas Schelling was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005, and is the Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.

See also: Robert Pape: The End of Fear
John Esposito: The Consequences of Islamophobia
Rami Khouri: The Middle East After 9/11
Mark Juergensmeyer: Is the War on Terror Finally Over?
John Mueller: The 9/11 Syndrome

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MARK JUERGENSMEYER: Is the War on Terror Finally Over?

Posted on September 6, 2011 by drovang

Mark JuergensmeyerSANTA BARBARA – On the 10th anniversary of 9/11 I will be in Cairo, on Tahrir Square, interviewing activists about the role of religion in the new movement for political change in that country. It strikes me that this is an appropriate place to be on this occasion, since Tahrir Square may in fact be the true graveyard of the jihadi movement that spawned such groups as al Qaeda.

For the past thirty years, the jihadi movement has crested on a wave of popular unrest and been propelled by the moral legitimacy given by their violent interpretation of the Muslim notion of ethical struggle. Though jihadi activists such as those associated with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network have been regarded from outside the region simply as immoral terrorists, much of their popularity within the Islamic world has been their moral appeal.

These activists thought only bloodshed would create political change, and only the jihadi ideology of cosmic warfare—based on Muslim history and Qur’anic verses—provided the moral legitimacy for the struggle. Ideologists such as Abd al-Salam Farad and Ayman al-Zawahiri have written as if violent struggle—including ruthless attacks of terrorism on civilian populations—was the only form of struggle that was advocated by Islam.

These assumptions have been proven wrong. The dramatic popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Islamic world have demonstrated that protests that have been nonviolent in their inception (and have become violent only in response to bloody attempts to repress them) have been far more effective, and supported with a more widespread moral and spiritual consensus.

What brought down the tyrants in Egypt and Tunisia, as it turned out, was about as far from jihad as one could imagine. It was a series of massive nonviolent movements of largely middle class and relatively young professionals who organized their protests through Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of electronic social networking.

There was also a religious element to the protests. The peak moments came after Friday prayers, when sympathetic mullahs would urge the faithful into joining the protest as a religious duty. But theirs was not the divisive, hateful voice of jihadi rhetoric. In a remarkable moment when the Muslim protesters were trying to conduct their prayers in the Square and Mubarak’s thugs tried to attack them as they prayed, a cordon of Egyptian Coptic Christians who had joined the protests circled around their Muslim compatriots, shielding them. Later a phalanx of Muslim protesters protected their Christian comrades as they worshiped in the public square, an urban intersection that was for that time transformed into a massive interfaith sanctuary.

The religiosity of Tahrir Square is far from the religion of radical jihad. Rather than separating Muslim from non-Muslim, and Sunni from Shi’a, the symbols that were raised on impromptu placards in Tahrir Square were emblems of interfaith cooperation; they showed the cross of Coptic Christians together with the crescent of Egypt’s Muslims in a united religious front against autocracy.

Imagine what Osama bin Laden must have made of all of this as news trickled into the fortress-like mansion in Abbottabad where he has lived for the past several years before his death at the hands of an elite cadre of US Navy Seals. Imagine even more the puzzled chagrin of someone like bin Laden’s primary lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian medical doctor who joined the most extreme Islamist jihadi movement years ago, convinced that only violent guerrilla warfare would topple someone like Mubarak.

Though a few of the hardened activists associated with al Qaeda will linger on, the fate of the global jihadi ideology—or rather the world view of cosmic war that the jihadi rhetoric promoted—has been profoundly challenged. As Tahrir Square showed, God does not always have to fight, at least not in the terrorist ways that the jihadi warriors imagined. In a couple of weeks of protests, the peaceful resistors demonstrated the moral and strategic legitimacy of nonviolent struggle. And they succeeded, where years of jihadi bloodshed had not produced a single political change.

Yet the story is not over. Failures of mass resistance may lead to a terrorist backlash once again. Not all protests will end like Tunisia and Egypt. Others will be ruthlessly crushed, as was the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009. The protests in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Syria face an uncertain end. Failure of nonviolent revolution has, in the past, been the occasion for renewed acts of violence.

So the jihadi warriors may again have their day. For the moment, however, bin Laden is dead, and Tahrir Square has challenged both the strategic value and the moral legitimacy of the jihadi stance. The legion of young Muslim activists around the world have received a new standard for challenging the old order, and a new form of protest, one that discredits terrorism as the easy and ineffective path and chooses the tough and profitable road of democratic reform.

Mark Juergensmeyer is author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence and Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State.

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RICHARD N. HAASS: 9/11 in Perspective

Posted on September 6, 2011 by drovang

Richard N. HaassNEW YORK – It was a decade ago that 19 terrorists took control of four planes, flew two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, hit the Pentagon with a third, and crashed the fourth in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers resisted and made it impossible for the terrorists to complete their malevolent mission. In a matter of hours, more than 3,000 innocent people, mostly Americans, but also people from 115 other countries, had their lives suddenly and violently taken from them.

September 11, 2001, was a terrible tragedy by any measure, but it was not a historical turning point. It did not herald a new era of international relations in which terrorists with a global agenda prevailed, or in which such spectacular terrorist attacks became commonplace. On the contrary, 9/11 has not been replicated. Despite the attention devoted to the “Global War on Terrorism,” the most important developments of the last ten years have been the introduction and spread of innovative information technologies, globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the political upheavals in the Middle East.

As for the future, it is much more likely to be defined by the United States’ need to put its economic house in order; China’s trajectory within and beyond its borders; and the ability of the world’s governments to cooperate on restoring economic growth, stemming the spread of nuclear weapons, and meeting energy and environmental challenges.

Read More:

Richard N. Haass, formerly Director of Policy Planning in the US State Department, is President of The Council on Foreign Relations.

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RAMI KHOURI: The Middle East Ten Years After 9/11

Posted on September 3, 2011 by drovang

Rami KhouriBEIRUT – It is impossible to make a single, broad assessment of the condition of the Middle East ten years after the 9/11 events and their aftermath, because the region is so fragmented into disparate and often contradictory groups of people, political power centers, and ideological forces. Also, the first nine years after 9/11 and the past year since December 2010 are distinctly different from each other. I experienced 9/11 and the 9 months afterwards in the United States, and have since been back in the Arab world for the past 9 years. I would suggest that any useful analysis of that criminal act and its aftermath must examine three dimensions in two different time frames.

The two different time frames are the decade leading to 9/11, and the decade after that date. The three critical dimensions that define the world in which Al-Qaeda was born are the Al-Qaeda terrorists and the extensive grievances in Middle Eastern societies that they draw on, the policies of Arab governments, and the policies of non-Arab states, especially the United States and Israel. These three dimensions weave into each other in a seamless web of action and reaction, attack and counter-attack, aggression and resistance that operate in both directions, i.e., in some cases Al-Qaeda or various non-violent or less violent groups in the Arab-Asian region feel they are fighting back against Arab, Israeli and American government policies, and in other cases the governments see themselves fighting to rid the world of the scourge of terror.

The important factor that seems to me to remain elusive in the world of most analysts and governments is that the criminal terror act of 9/11, despicable as it was, did not emanate from a vacuum. It was part of a cycle of policies and attitudes by various actors in the Middle East that spawned this and other terrorist movements. This does not detract from the criminal nature of the 9/11 and other such terror acts; but it helps us understand their lineage, which is critical for taking action to stop such acts from recurring. Because they ignored this pivotal cycle of policies, reactions and attitudes, the responses to 9/11 in the United States and the Middle East probably exacerbated rather than improved the underlying poor quality of governance and citizen rights that had contributed in the first place to the rise of domestic discontent and opposition to foreign occupation that led to the birth of Al-Qaeda and other movements like it.

The biggest policy failure in the response to 9/11 in the West and the Middle East was the inability or unwillingness of governments to analyze Al-Qaeda terror in its full context for what it really was: a small fringe movement – a violent, marginal cult on the run – that consistently failed to resonate with publics across the Arab-Asian region, but that exploited widely held grievances against Arab and Asian governments and the foreign policies of the United States and Israel. Most significantly in my view, the United States refused to acknowledge the central awkward reality that Al-Qaeda and other such fundamentalist militant groups were largely born in Arab jails in countries that the United States saw as its closest allies, such as Jordan and Egypt (i.e., the radicalization of Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Mus’ab el-Zarqawi, among many others).

The exaggerated, security- and war-dominated, American-led over-reaction to 9/11 led to two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and increased political and technical support to Arab security services – exactly the two phenomena that led to the birth and growth of Al-Qaeda in the first place. It is important to recall that a foreign military presence in “sacred” Islamic soil twice before fuelled critical periods of Al-Qaeda’s birth and expansion: first when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, and second when the US remained in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf war against Iraq. So sending in the troops post-9/11 was a sure-fire recipe for stoking the fires of resistance against foreign occupiers of Islamic realms that were such successful recruiting themes for Al-Qaeda.

The American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the allied security policies in the Arab-Asian region after 9/11 resulted in a series of trends that were detrimental to the wellbeing of most societies in our region. The most obvious were: The wars and security policies fuelled intense new opposition to Washington’s policies in the region, and thus generated serious new tensions between Arab public opinion and Arab governments that were already deeply opposed on many issues; they catalyzed an entire new generation of perhaps thousands of radical militants and terrorists who fanned out from Iraq and Afghanistan to attack targets and destabilize societies across the Arab-Asian region; they provided opening for extremists like Al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Mus’ab el-Zarqawi to sow Shiite-Sunni tensions in Iraq, which quickly spread to other parts of the region; they enhanced many Arab governments’ focus on severe domestic security measures that further irritated their own disenchanted and politically degraded citizens, and thus delayed any transition to democratic rule and accountable good governance; they diverted resources to militarism that should have gone to socio-economic development; and they distracted from the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a leading and persistent source of discontent and radicalization among public across the region.

The successes in disrupting Al-Qaeda operations and killing or capturing some of its key personnel certainly have made it more difficult for the organization to carry out planned attacks, but this has had the effect in part of decentralizing the operation and perhaps leading to the growth of smaller copy-cat groups. The decade since the 9/11 attack has seen some limited successes in disrupting terror networks, but more widely it has aggravated the underlying socio-economic, political and foreign military occupation conditions that stoked the growth of Al-Qaeda and other such groups.

The dramatic counter-point to Al-Qaeda terror was not American-led militarism since 2001, but rather the populist revolutions that have swept through half a dozen Arab states since December 2010. If those revolutions achieve more democratic governance with a focus on greater social justice and equity, and true national sovereignty, they are likely to be the key to wiping away the scourge of Al-Qaeda-like terrorism that has only persisted and even expanded since 9/11.

Rami G. Khouri is the Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

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ADMIRAL GARY ROUGHEAD: Offshore Balancing

Posted on September 3, 2011 by drovang

Admiral Gary RougheadHere, Admiral Gary Roughead discusses the use of Offshore Balancing techniques at the Cutting the Fuse Conference on Capitol Hill, October 12, 2010.

Admiral Gary Roughead – Cutting the Fuse Conference, Oct. 12, 2010 on Vimeo.


Admiral Roughead is the 29th Chief of U.S. Naval Operations.

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JOHN ESPOSITO: The Consequences of Islamophobia, in the U.S. and Abroad

Posted on September 3, 2011 by drovang

John EspositoWASHINGTON, D.C. – The July 2011 massacre in Norway was a tragic signal of a metastasizing social cancer — Islamophobia. The Norwegian assassin, Anders Behring Breivik’s, 1500-page manifesto confirmed the dangerous consequences of hate speech that has been spread by American and European xenophobes and websites that are quoted hundreds of times in his fear-filled tract.

Because the small number of extremists responsible for 9/11 and terrorist attacks in Europe and the Muslim world legitimated their acts in the name of Islam, we have seen an exponential increase in the past ten years of hostility and intolerance towards fellow Muslim citizens. This hatred threatens the democratic fabric of American and European societies and impacts not only the safety and civil liberties of Muslims but also, as the attacks in Norway demonstrate, the safety of all citizens.

The broad spectrum of preachers of hate that include politicians, media commentators, Christian Zionist ministers, and biased media and internet sites exploit legitimate concerns about domestic security and engage in a fear-mongering that conflates Islam and the majority of Muslims with a small but deadly minority of militants. The Gallup World Poll revealed that 57% of Americans when asked what they admired about Islam said “nothing” or “I don’t know.” So. too, a Washington Post poll revealed that a shocking 49% of Americans view Islam unfavorably.

In the US, the 2008 presidential elections and the 2010 Congressional elections were marred by politicians like Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle who grabbed headlines, using Muslims as convenient scapegoats. Gingrich created a reality that doesn’t exist by calling for a federal law barring US courts from considering Islamic Law as a replacement for U.S. law. Sharron Angle nearly topped him when she falsely suggested that Frankford, Tex., and Dearborn, Mich., were subject to a “Sharia” regime. Park 51 (the so-called “mosque at ground zero”) and anti-mosque and anti-Shariah hysteria across the country revealed the extent to which Islamophobia has gone mainstream in communities from New York to California. In the wake of this irrational emotion and fear, major polls by Time Magazine and The New York Times in August 2010 reported that 33% of those polled believed that Muslim Americans were more sympathetic to terrorists and, in general, 60% of those polled have negative feelings about Muslims.

Despite all the paranoia, what objectively do we know about Muslim Americans? What does empirical evidence tell us? In contrast to the charges that Muslims cannot integrate and cannot be loyal citizens, a major Pew Research Center study (2007) found that most Muslim Americans are “decidedly American” in income, education and attitudes, rejecting extremism by larger margins than Muslim minorities in Europe. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/483/muslim-americans Similarly, a 2009 Gallup report found that 70% of Muslim Americans have a job compared with 64% of the US population. Muslim men have one of the highest employment rates of religious groups. After Jews, Muslims are the most educated religious community in the US. Muslim women are as likely as their male counterparts to have a college degree or higher. 40% of women have a college degree as compared to 29% of Americans overall. http://www.gallup.com/poll/116260/muslim-americans-exemplify-diversity-potential.aspx And how do these Muslims in their communities fight terrorism? Not only did tips from Muslim Americans provide information that helped authorities thwart terrorist plots, but also, as the Triangle Centre on Terrorism and Homeland Security’s study noted, “Muslim Americans have been so concerned about extremists in their midst that they have turned in people who turned out to be undercover informants.” This study also found that the number of Muslim Americans who were arrested for perpetrating terrorist acts dropped from 47 in 2009 to 20 in 2010. (pdf)

Despite much evidence to the contrary, Congressman Peter King, Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, held controversial hearings on “Radicalization of Muslim Americans,” using legitimate concerns about national security for political gain. King has been consistent in his undocumented claims. In a 2004 interview with Sean Hannity he charged that “no American Muslim leaders are cooperating in the war on terror,” and that “80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.” When challenged, he staunchly insisted, without providing any data or citing any government reports: “I’ll stand by that number of 85 percent. This is an enemy living amongst us”.King and others like him also ignore statements by key government officials like FBI Director Robert S Mueller III, US Attorney General Eric H Holder, and Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, who have all praised the Muslim American community for playing an instrumental role in assisting law enforcement agencies. As Denis McDonough, Deputy National Security Advisor to the President commented to Muslims in a speech framing the Obama administration’s strategy to successfully prevent violent extremism:

“You create jobs and opportunity as small business owners and executives of major corporations. You enrich our culture as athletes and entertainers. You lead us as elected officials and Members of Congress. And no one should ever forget that Muslim Americans help keep America safe every day as proud Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen. Indeed, some of these heroes have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation and now rest in our hallowed national cemeteries.”

Like other Americans, Muslims also were victims; they too lost loved ones and friends in the 9/11 attacks. Moreover, they have seen their religion vilified and many in the mainstream Muslim majority have been victims of serious abuses — racial profiling, overzealous and illegal arrests and detentions, surveillance, wiretapping and trials using “secret evidence”. A campaign of ethnic profiling followed 9/11. Five thousand Arab and Muslim foreign nationals detained, 8,000 sought out for FBI interviews, 82,000 called in for special registration, not because they were terrorists, but because they were foreigners from Arab or Muslim countries. And still today, the use of tactics such as aggressive informants to “manufacture” crimes in Muslim communities, wiretaps, surveillance and monitoring of mosques without probable cause also remain a source of intimidation and fear. Yet, despite these extreme measures, as the FBI and Homeland Security have stressed, the majority of Muslims remain an integrated part of the American mosaic. It is time to digest the real, verifiable facts, to stop wasting energies on the wrong “enemies” and to use our collective strength to focus, together, on solving the very real problems that America is facing in the 21st century.

John Esposito is a professor of International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is also the director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.

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JENNA JORDAN: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation

Posted on September 3, 2011 by drovang

Jenna JordanFrom the Cutting the Fuse Conference held on Capitol Hill, October 12, 2010. Here, Jordan reviews her data regarding the strategic effectiveness of removing the leadership in a given terrorist organization.

Jenna Jordan – Cutting the Fuse Conference, Oct. 12, 2010 on Vimeo.

Jenna Jordan, When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation, Security Studies, 18 (2009): 719-755. (pdf)

Jenna Jordan is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.

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CHRISTOPHER PREBLE: U.S. Security and Nation Building

Posted on September 3, 2011 by drovang

Christopher PrebleWASHINGTON, D.C. – As we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it is natural that we survey the range of actions taken, and government policies implemented, that were all aimed at preventing a similar attack — or something worse — and ask, “Did they?”

But an obsessive focus on plots foiled and near misses averted tends to distract from the big picture.

Although a number of terrorist attacks have occurred around the world since 9/11, very few attacks have even been attempted on American soil, and even fewer have succeeded. More Americans lost their lives during a single weather pattern this past weekend — Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene — than have been killed by terrorists on American soil over the past decade.

In the days after 9/11, few would have dared predict such a thing. But while we can and should be thankful that terrorism has proved less deadly than seemed likely, this simple fact shows that our counterterrorism policy is still failing. Americans are neither as secure as they should be, nor do they feel that their lives and liberties are well protected. We remain, to some degree, terrorized. And to the extent that we are, the terrorists are succeeding.

It doesn’t have to be that way. And perhaps the tide is turning: more Americans are willing to ask hard questions about policies and procedures put into place since 9/11. It has taken a decade to discover that calm, targeted counterterrorism is best. The flawed, reactive approach that began immediately after 9/11, though generally well-intended, is often counterproductive, and it should be abandoned.

We should apply particular scrutiny to the claims that we need a large and obtrusive military presence worldwide in order to be safe from terrorism. The open-ended nation-building missions in Iraq and now Afghanistan have sapped our strength, and distracted us from the vital task at hand: protecting U.S. citizens from foreign threats.

Obviously, military force is a powerful tool, for good or ill. The potential effect on terrorist capabilities is immediate and unqualified, but we must always consider the limitations and potential drawbacks of using the military. In particular, the presence of large numbers of foreign troops in a given country, can — and often has — provided terrorist groups with an important recruiting tool. Though our troops exercise an extraordinary degree of skill and restraint in trying to avoid civilian casualties, even to the extent of exposing themselves to great risk, they cannot be expected to be perfect. Terrorist groups will cynically exploit every unfortunate incident, every stray bomb or bullet, and attempt to turn the survivors against the foreigners. We would be wise to keep that in mind as we contemplate large-scale military operations in the future.

In this context, the killing of Osama bin Laden in late April was an important moment in the United States’ largely successful effort against al Qaeda since September 11, 2001. As details of the raid were released to the media, it became clear that the United States retained an important advantage over al Qaeda and similar terrorist organizations: the ability to conduct lightning raids against high value targets, without the need for a risky and costly ground presence. Simply put, U.S. security does not require the U.S. military to engage in nation-building missions abroad, and it may ultimately be undermined by it.

More generally, U.S. counterterrorism policy must be re-centered on the idea that overreaction does most of the work of terrorism. Instead of implementing a raft of costly policies and invasive procedures to deal with remotely possible—or impossible—threats, the nation should address real threats steadfastly and confidently. The watchwords should be vigilance and resilience. Targeted operations that disrupt terrorists’ plans, and impede fundraising and recruitment, should continue. We should focus our efforts on preventing those attacks that we can, and recovering quickly from those that we can’t. The ability of states to bounce back after an attack will discourage would-be terrorists from believing that they will ultimately be successful. And many will simply walk away.

The alternative is more of the same: spending huge sums on dubious security measures, shedding liberties, and sacrificing American lives to attack overhyped threats. The danger of terrorism is real, but so is the danger of overreaction to it. Instead of indulging fear, we must stop terrorizing ourselves.

Christopher Preble is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

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THE HON. THOMAS KEAN: Are We Safer?

Posted on September 3, 2011 by drovang

The Hon. Thomas KeanHere, The Hon. Thomas Kean discusses the work and recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, how they have been implemented and to what degree, and his thoughts on security issues of the future. From the Cutting the Fuse Conference on Capitol Hill, October 12, 2010.

The Hon. Thomas Kean – Cutting the Fuse Conference, Oct. 12, 2010 on Vimeo.

The Gov. Kean’s National Security Preparedness Group has issued a report card of their assessment, ten years after 9/11.
Tenth Anniversary Report Card (pdf)

The Hon. Thomas Kean is the former Republican governor of New Jersey and Co-Chair of the 9/11 Commission. He is currently working with the National Security Preparedness Group, a subsidiary of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

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KORI SCHAKE: Winning the Long War

Posted on September 3, 2011 by drovang

Kori SchakeSTANFORD – One of al Qaeda’s stated goals for the September 11th attacks was to provoke an American response that would discredit us, and to some extent, they succeeded. However necessary some elements of our government’s reaction might have been in protecting Americans, they reinforced for many the caricature of an America unwilling to be restrained by the rules we impose on others, unconcerned with the damage we cause and hypocritical in claims about our values.

The 9/11 attacks certainly provoked a disproportionate response. A terrorist attack costing in the tens of thousands of dollars to execute has precipitated the willingness to remain continuously at war for a decade, an astronomical increase in spending on military and intelligence forces, closer links between domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, creation of a behemoth homeland security agency, development of nationwide first responders networks, imposition of significant permanent burdens on travelers, and numerous other effects.

And whereas the Bush Administration came into office arguing against involvement what are now known as counterinsurgencies, they articulated a doctrine and committed U.S. forces to the two largest and most expensive nation building exercises of the past half century. Reading the 2002 National Security Strategy now, it is striking how frightened it sounds. Its analysis is that terrorism creates a new paradigm, in which organizations don’t need to have the resources of a great power to inflict strategic damage, warning time has evaporated, and enemies no longer have territory or populations that can be held at risk for deterrence. It struggled to find ways to hold states accountable for activity that occurs within their borders or emanates from them, and settled for threatening overthrow of governments that did not.

I think it is not inconsequential that the attacks occurred at a time when societies around the world were struggling with a round of globalization as monumental as the 16th century’s columbian exchange. The current round of globalization has been eroding societies’ ability to shield themselves from external influence. The United States exemplifies these changes — in fact, for many is seen as the stampeding cause of the changes, because we are home to so much technological innovation, the center of gravity for financial markets and commercial entertainment, our language is literally the lingua franca of the age. States and communities that feel imperiled by the pace and type of change resent our ability to act with impunity.

The visible signs of our failures — hooded prisoners at Guantanamo, worse at Abu Ghraib — compounded a longstanding concern with the assertiveness of American foreign policy. This resulted in critics of the policies both at home and abroad claiming we had become worse than the threat we were concerned about. What the critics underestimated was America’s ability to correct its mistakes, to fix its problems, to build better mousetraps.

The al Qaeda narrative is that the United States is an unwelcome empire, forcing our demands on the weak, ignorant of the desires of the faithful, and rapacious of foreign lands. Even before homegrown revolutionary movements in countries like Tunisia and Egypt began demanding freedom and opportunity, American actions had dispelled those notions. Even in the countries that have had the most grievous costs of American interventionism — Iraq and Afghanistan — both governments and publics make the distinction between the hopeful vision we are working for in their societies and the nihilist vision and actions of what we are fighting against.

Most importantly of all, muslims throughout the middle east and north africa are engaged in the great debate about why their societies have not prospered in this modern era. And they are taking responsibility for changing them.

Publication of the United Nations’ Arab Development Reports, beginning in 2002, mark a hugely important milestone in the struggle. The Reports are the work of scholars and civic leaders from the countries surveyed and they reveal a remarkable willingness to criticize their societies’ failings. They also paint a clear path for addressing the region’s developmental deficits in three crucial areas: knowledge, women’s empowerment, and freedom.

Among the many hopeful signs of the Arab spring is the extent to which new leaders thrown forward in revolution are adhering to the recommendations of the Reports to remake the societies and states of the region whose failings prompted such an enormous perturbation in American foreign policy after 9/11. Even before we have succeeded in killing the al Qaeda leadership, muslims in the middle east and north africa have destroyed their power by choosing a path with values and political choices we share.

Kori Schake is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of international security studies at the United States Military Academy. She was also the director for Defense Strategy and Requirements on the National Security Council during George W. Bush’s first term.

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