Military Affairs Fellow and Director, FDD’s National Security Fellows Program
Success in the GWOT has Made Us Unsafe
This week’s radicalization hearings called by Congressman Peter King raise one obvious question: what is there left for Capital Hill and the American public to learn as we approach the tenth anniversary of the 2001? The simple answer is: a great deal.
Soon after President Obama assumed office, his very top adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, the former CIA official John Brennan, made it very clear that the new administration understands the post-9/11 world very differently from Georg W. Bush’s White House. In a seminal speech he gave at CSIS, Brennan declared a definitive sea-change in national security policy.
No longer would government attitudes to the threat of terrorism be allowed to distort America’s foreign policy priorities, nor would counterterrorism be allowed to be the primary metric in the nation’s relationships with the other countries of the world. Instead, the president was committed to seeing America globally resolve the “upstream factors” that contribute to “violent extremism,” such as poverty, lack of education and unemployment.
This speech was just one obvious sign that the previous eight years of the ‘Global War of Terror’ (GWOT) was to be seen as another era, preceded as it was by other acts of demarcation and differentiation from the new administration, to include the President’s firm commitment to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and his much heralded Cairo speech. However, behind the scenes the reality of how al Qaeda would ‘welcome’ the post-Bush America did not reflect a sea-change on behalf those responsible for the original horrific events of September 11th 2001.
Although “GWOT” was formally jettisoned as the acronym used to describe America’s strategic approach to the world, our enemies did not lessen their efforts to kill Americans on US soil with the arrival of a new president, but increased them. From Najibullah Zazi, to Major Nidal Hassan; from the Times Square bomber to “Jihad Jane,” the pressure from terrorists associated with al Qaeda has increased.
Just as disturbing are the active measures taken by al Qaeda to recruit Americans that have no familial or ethnic ties to Islam or the Arab world, such as Carlos Bledsoe, the Little Rock recruiting center attacker, whose father gave moving testimony before Congress this week.
The proof of just how important such individuals have become to al Qaeda, is found in its first English- language publication, Inspire magazine, produced in Yemen under the guidance of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American al Qaeda cleric, who counts as his “students” both Major Hassan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber.
With its sleek color visuals and recipes for how to build Improvised Explosive Devices out of items found in any US home, Inspire – which is now already at issue no. 4 - proves that America has been successful in its war against the terrorists in so far as the usual recruiting pools for “mujahedeen” operatives (Yemen, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt) have become almost useless.
Today, our national security system is attuned to the threat of radicalized foreign nationals coming to the US to wreak havoc. Today another 9/11 scenario involving exclusively Saudi or Egyptian operatives is almost impossible to imagine. As a result al Qaeda must recruit Muslims already physically inside the United States if it is to be successful.
As a nation we have been, in part, very successful against al Qaeda. The fact that the Obama
Administration itself has brought more than 100 indictments in terrorist cases since 2008 proves this. As does the fact that of all the plots I have mentioned (and all the others that I did not), only one, the Fort Hood massacre, was not foiled or otherwise unsuccessful.
Nevertheless, another undeniable fact remains. None of these indictments were for individuals who were simply politically, or racially motivated, they were for individuals who believe, as Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, said in his final pre-sentencing statement, that they are fighting the US in order to make “the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system.”
The cold reality of national security leadership has forced the Obama administration to balance its former counter-GWOT rhetoric with a quiet toughness which at times has had to be even more hard- nosed that that of the Bush administration (the number of Predator kills being the most obvious yardstick).
Now the President, the legislature, and the American people must cope with the fact that we have made our country safer from terrorist attack by foreign nationals yet still remain vulnerable to terrorism born of the radicalization of our own citizens. The King hearings will not be the last word on this issue.
Dr. Sebastian L. v. Gorka is Military Affairs Fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and teaches US National Security at Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute. His is contributing co- editor of Toward a Grand Strategy Against Terrorism (McGraw Hill 2011) and welcomes comments as Gorka@defenddemocracy.org.