As the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks approaches, terrorism experts say that while America is safer, the threat from Islamist terrorism remains potent.
“Safer is the right word; we’re not truly safe,” former CIA director Michael Hayden told The Daily Caller. “And the dark side is the growth of franchises — Yemen, Somalia, Maghreb, Iraq. They continue the al-Qaida brand, but they are less capable than the al-Qaida we faced 10 years ago of doing … [a] mass casualty event.”
Hayden says the U.S. has been particularly successful in targeting al-Qaida’s top leadership since 9/11.
“The senior leadership, the ones who are really running show, up there in the tribal region of Pakistan, that has been decimated, and decimated at a rate that they can’t be replaced,” he explained.
Echoing Hayden’s assessment, Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said that while al-Qaida has been battered, they can still deal a blow to the American homeland.
“I’d assert the al-Qaida core is weaker today and our counterterrorism capabilities are much greater today and in that sense we are safer and it is harder for them,” Levitt said. But, he added, “There could be an attack this afternoon or tomorrow … the real answer is that the threat has changed and it is ever-changing in relation to the adversaries we’re dealing with.”
Pointing to al-Qaida franchises in Yemen, North Africa and elsewhere, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton expressed his concern that the terrorism threat has “metastasized” and that the threat of an attack utilizing weapons of mass destruction remains very real. (RELATED: Napolitano: US not aware of any specific terror threats against 9/11 anniversary)
“Not only has the threat spread, but the threat that focuses my attention more than anything else is terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction,” Bolton told TheDC. “I think [the threat] is increasing,” he added, pointing to, among other things, the instability on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and the potential for nuclear-armed Pakistan to fall into radical hands.
Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute fears that America is reverting to a pre-9/11 mentality.
“We’re going headlong into the pre-9/11 era,” Rubin forecasted. “I think we are becoming progressively less safe both because we haven’t learned the lesson that you can’t give terrorists a safe haven and, number two, the accessibility of high-end technologies to terrorists is on the rise.”
Homegrown extremism is another threat that has “grown without questions” since 9/11, according to Levitt.
“Beyond the formal al-Qaida affiliates and the al-Qaida wannabes, the greatest threat I’d argue today is of homegrown violent extremism,” he said. “People who haven’t necessarily gone to a training camp but are recruited in the West, are drawn in by online radicalization — sometimes in person, sometimes online — these are people who don’t turn up on trackers and haven’t traveled to the Pakistani badlands and may not come up on our radar until they’re well into the plotting stage or in some cases after.”
Asked to reflect on what we got right in responding to the terrorism threat in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, many of the experts contacted by TheDC pointed to how the Bush administration recognized that there needed to be a strong military response.
“The thing we got most right was understanding that we had to deal with terrorism militarily,” said Rubin. “What we also got right after 9/11 was understanding the confluence of state sponsors and terror groups is very dangerous and that you can’t allow terrorists to have a safe haven.”
“The best thing we got right is we decided that this was a war [and] we were going to treat it as a war,” Hayden stated. “That has been the single most transformational thing that’s happened post-, as opposed to pre-, 9/11.”
“I think we got most right in going after the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan,” echoed Bolton. “I think we got Iraq right. I think Saddam Hussein was a menace,” he added.
Levitt pointed to the rebuilding of America’s intelligence capabilities as a success.
“We have invested in our intelligence capabilities which now are truly impressive,” he said. “I think we are on the right track, especially in terms of this administration refocusing us so that not everything is seen through the lens of counterterrorism, but rather counterterrorism is one of the key lenses among others.”
Contra Bolton, Levitt said the timing of the Iraq war was a “strategic error” in our post-9/11 response. (RELATED: CNN analyst: Americans preoccupied with the Kardashians, not terrorism)
“I think the biggest mistake we made — and it might have been something we would have had to have done anyway at some point — but I think that going into Iraq when we did, in terms of the War on Terror, was a strategic error,” he said. “A war takes up to 80 percent or more of your intelligence network at a time when we should have been spending time and resources on al-Qaida.”
Bolton said the biggest mistake in America’s post 9/11 response was not “follow[ing] through on our own logic.”
“Having overturned the regime in Afghanistan and Iraq, we still saw regimes in Iran that were pursuing nuclear weapons and terrorism around the world, in Syria, in North Korea,” he said.
Rubin said that America’s biggest failure has been a failure to recognize what motivates the Islamist terrorism threat.
“What we’ve gotten wrong is our inability to recognize that terrorism itself is just a tactic and what we need to recognize is some of the ideology that motivates it and not be afraid to talk about such ideology,” he said.
Levitt sees a lot more room to grow in terms of figuring out our approach to combating international terrorism in the years ahead.
“I do think that there is a lot more to be done, especially when it comes to some more complicated things,” he said. “There’s nothing complicated or sensitive about, you know, taking out someone who is pointing a gun at you. How do you deal with someone who is perpetuating a dangerous ideology in a country that has 1st Amendment rights, the Establishment Clause and the like? How do you counter dangerous ideologies without undermining our basic fundamental rights and beliefs? These are serious questions.”
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