It is impossible to examine events that have not happened, but we can speculate.  Here are some plausible explanations for our safety.  First, what was done on 9/11 was most difficult and depended on dozens of distinct failures on our part.  The Terrorists who achieved so much terror and destruction are heinous, but also lucky. 

Second, we are better at homeland security.  What do you think the odds are today that 20 young Arab men with one-way tickets and carrying box cutters could get on three separate planes?  "Far, far less than in 2001" is a fair answer.  Our police and FBI teams have also become better.  The police and federal agents in NYC seem to be particularly good.  ICE and Immigration have improved too, some say to a fault.

Finally, we have taken the fight to the enemy.  Al Qaeda in 2001 was a movement and a global conspiracy, but it was also a functioning paramilitary organization, capable of training 20,000 riflemen and junior terrorists in what amounted to the Al Qaeda training and doctrine command in Afghanistan.  No such capabilities exist today, even in the farthest reaches of Pakistan. 

That said, water and terrorist movements seek their own level.  Barred from direct attacks on the great Satan and major training efforts, AQ has played a weakening hand well, attacking softer targets in "easier" countries, broadening their information operations, and fighting hard through proxies for old positions of strength in Afghanistan, and working hard on developing new ones in Yemen and Somalia. 

We have made progress against our opponents, but the contest continues.  It remains to be seen whether Americans, hearing the siren song of other priorities and tiring of being on the psychological barricades, will lull themselves into a false sense of security, providing an opportunity for another strike on the US homeland. 

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By combining dramatically improved intelligence collection, analysis and sharing; the building of effective partnerships; and offensive and defensive actions, the United States has proven adept at counterterrorism.  Unfortunately, al Qaeda recognizes our weaknesses: we are much better at counterterrorism than counterinsurgency but because counterinsurgency appears to be an effective method of counterterrorism (albeit a dangerously, perhaps even disastrously inefficient method), we conflate the two.  Hence al Qaeda has concentrated more on miring us in counterinsurgency, which bleeds, confuses, and divides us, than on direct strikes at the United States which unify, motivate, and focus us.

It seems we have three themes going on here, 1) it has only been through the tremendously hard and vigilant work of the U.S. military and civilian agencies that we have warded off another September 11-style attack;  2) that 9/11 was an unrepeatable bit of elegant terrorism so don’t worry too much;  and 3) Mike Scheuer’s provocative point, as I interpret it, that if we had, in addition to toppling the Taliban in Kabul in Nov/Dec. 2001, sent every Army Ranger, Green Beret, 82nd Airborne trooper, and 10th Mountain Division soldier and every CIA operative to swarm over the mountains of east Afghanistan and western Pakistan pretty much killing everything that moved in the months immediately after 9/11, regardless of any diplomatic niceties, we would have sent such a strong signal to the world to, uh, not screw with us, that that would have been the end of it all. 

But, alas, we didn’t do point three, and it is clear that Islamic insurgencies are flowering around the world, and we are bogged down in two grinding wars, regardless of right or wrong, and dipping our toes into Somalia now and then, too. Given that, how do in fact we protect America from further mass casualty events, and not drain our Treasury of gold, as well as our young military members of their lives and promise?

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Michael Scheuer is eloquent as he shakes us by the shoulders: That damn dog has been barking nonstop for eight years!

But what to make of the question — which is posed really as an all-American trope — That there was no next bark?

9-11 was a work of art the likes of which we have not seen since Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens. If war is a liturgy of identity, then war’s theater is truly religious art. Walking through its bloody gallery across the Anthropocene, it will be hard to find a more compelling and transcendental masterpiece. 9-11 shifted the trajectory of America in History.

Surely America’s relationship with the world has been darkly transfigured.

Until 9-11 the people of these United States were still (somewhat) passionately committed to the redemption of humanity. Today we are committed to the dog that didn’t bite.

In a sunlit September instant we jumped a passage from here to eternity. From the City on a Hill (John Winthrop, 1630) to a United Nations (Franklin Roosevelt, 1945) — our entire mythic passage of becoming — we ditched it all eight years ago. Bucked that baggage.

In that instant our sacred narrative went from New Testament to Old Testament. Submit to us, convert to our faith — become like us — and ye shall prosper as our special wards.

Fight us — for whatever reason — and we will punish: Forever if need be.

We are so afraid now of another humiliation that we have made the entire world a source of threat — sot simply to our physical self, but also to our geist, our very identity.

This is the dog that keeps on biting, drawing psychic American blood daily, draining our national persona, making us thrash in the pain: That we cannot control those who heap us, who task us.

Like Ahab we have been baited into heaping and tasking ourselves: Boxing ourselves into a never-ending cul-de-sac national ethos.

No longer “We Are the World” — more like, we hate the world. Just graze American blogs and listservs: NATO slackers and girly-men in Afghanistan, evil bearded Muslims, conniving and treacherous Chinamen, tattooed Latin drug pushers, pathetic Africans for whom “we can only do so much” ...

“The dog that didn’t bite” is a pristine portrait of regnant American nativism not seen since the 1930s. But at least the isolationists of that other eight-year era (1932-1940) were honest and true to their tough religious take on American nationalism. Now, what masque and masquerade we offer to the world! Our new nativists cloak their xenophobia in the magical rhetorical raiment of “Liberal Internationalism” — all the while hewing to a zeitgeist that is everyday pushing our nation remorselessly away from the mission — the essential American altruism — that once defined our identity.

What does all this mean?

It means that 9-11 achieved it all: It is an enduring realization in war’s theater. It is History’s ultimate performance art.

To bark again would put all this at risk.

This dog has had its day.

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The real tragedy of the recent anniversary of 9/11 is that we had to commemorate it rather than the day on which we achieved victory over those who attacked us. But then, Americans -- especially sophisticated, well-educated Americans and their media -- love festivals of death, apparently preferring to mourn yearly rather than do the necessary but blue-collar job of annihilating the cause of their mourning. As a result, 9/11 assuredly will be joined in the future by other days of mourning caused by America's unannihilated enemies.

Although many have failed to note it, America has been successfully attacked each day since 9/11. War, as even the high-school educated know, is much more than counting explosions, and perhaps the best way of estimating the Islamists' success since 2001 is to look at the metrics they have established for measuring their success both against the United States and worldwide.

Regarding the United States, the Islamists' metrics -- publicly explained for almost a decade -- are three in number:

1.) Help push the United States toward bankruptcy

2.) Spread out U.S. military and intelligence forces until they lack reserves and flexibility

3.) Help create as much political dissent in the United States as possible over Washington's activities in the Islamic world.

I will leave it to the reader to determine whether Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants and allies have any reason to be the slightest bit discouraged as they enter the ninth winter of the war.

Regarding the world, al-Qaeda and its closest allies have always said that they are too few in number and lacking in military power to alone defeat the U.S. and Islam’s other enemies. Therefore, they have, since at least 1996, declared their main mission to be inciting and instigating jihad among Muslims worldwide. [NB: The ability to incite does not/not indicate any command-and-control link with al-Qaeda.] Probably the best means of judging how well they are succeeding in this goal is to enumerate the number of countries where Islamist insurgencies or consistent Islamist violence have begun or intensified since 9/11.

--Somalia

--Thailand

--Mindanao

--Afghanistan

--Pakistan

--The North Caucasus (all six republics)

--India

--China

--Algeria (with leakage into Mali, Mauritania, and Chad)

Again, the reader can determine whether there is any cause for al-Qaeda and its allies to be discouraged vis. the progress they have made in their goal of incitement.

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This past weekend, images of the tragedy of September 11, 2001, were played and replayed as our nation marked the eighth anniversary of those murderous attacks.  As we continue to fight the violent extremists who remain intent on killing innocent Americans, it is imperative that we never forget the images of that terrible day and the ultimate sacrifice that was made by so many. 

It is also imperative that we remember the two most important lessons learned that day:  we can no longer treat terrorism primarily as a law enforcement matter and our intelligence apparatus was woefully inadequate to stop the worst terrorist attacks on United States soil in history.

That our nation has not seen another 9/11 is not the result of terrorists throwing in the towel.  In fact, we know from newly declassified documents that al Qaeda and their violent allies plotted to attack more American cities, such as the planned strike on the West Coast. 

Rather, it is the result of unceasing efforts by our terror-fighters, toiling anonymously, piecing together intelligence to detect and disrupt deadly terrorist plots before more lives are lost. 

It is the result of important reforms to our intelligence community and its structure.  Preventing terrorism is the priority in practice, not just on paper.  Information is shared more freely among agencies, without the turf battles of the past.  Strengthened intelligence capabilities ensure that our military, intelligence, and law enforcement professionals have the tools they need when they need them to keep our nation secure.

And it is the result of recognizing that we are a nation at war and responding aggressively.  We abandoned the “prosecute-first” mindset and took the fight to the streets of the terrorists so that our own streets would remain safe.  By doing so, our troops and intelligence professionals have kept on the run, captured, or killed thousands of al Qaeda terrorists and their allies. 

At the same time, left-wing extremists, like Moveon.org, have waged their own battle, with the help of many in the media, to dismantle the very tools and techniques that our terror-fighters have used successfully for the past eight years to prevent another deadly attack.  Media leaks and endless litigation have told our enemies valuable information about how we conduct surveillance and the techniques that have been used to obtain intelligence, rendering these tools virtually worthless.  Recently, we learned that pictures of our intelligence operatives were being shown to terrorist detainees, jeopardizing the lives of every one of these operatives. 

Unfortunately, the Administration, too, has taken some steps over the past eight months that have made our terror-fighters’ task even more difficult.  It is naïve to believe that we can declassify our most sensitive sources and methods and still stay ahead of our enemies.  It is dangerous to treat terrorist detainees the same way we treat our own citizens.  And it is blatantly unjust to launch a criminal investigation of our interrogation professionals so many years after the fact and without any new evidence to support such action.  While it may make for a good soundbite at the next ACLU fundraiser, these actions have done little to ensure the safety of our nation.      

Our terror-fighters go to work each day firm in their resolve that 9/11 will remain the last terrorist attack on American soil.  Our own resolve should be to do whatever it takes to support them and stop playing the same old Washington politics with our national security. 

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Know Your Enemy

Since 9/11, 23 terrorist plots or conspiracies that would have killed Americans on American soil have been thwarted. This number only includes cases where individuals have been arrested and charged with a crime. This count does not include threats that have been squelched by covert intelligence and military operations. I am told that number would substantially add to the total. What does that tell us? It says there are terrorists out there trying to kill us and we have to stop them. So far, counterterrorism operations have proven good enough. What works is operations and intelligence sharing that gets terrorist leaders, breaks-up networks, thwart plots, frustrates fund raising and recruiting, and undermines the legitimacy of their cause.

Indeed, not only is the “West” (broadly defined as including North America, Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea) a harder target for terrorists, worldwide the numbers of acts of global terrorism (outside of combat zones) have been in decline. Just ask the Canadian-based Human Security Report Project who tracks these trends pretty effectively.

It is also worth noting most of the people killed in the war of terror have been Muslims and they have been killed by Muslims in Muslims land…and Muslims are getting pretty tired of it. Islamist terrorism is not on the march…anywhere.

The bad news is that there is still plenty to worry about…not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but some spots in North Africa as well. Likewise, we need to be worried about “blowback” from stupid policies, as well as the detrimental affects of poor homeland security measures (like 100 percent screening mandates that homeland security experts say is both wasteful and unlikely to catch any terrorists).

If we take our eye off the ball we could be back at 9/11 in a few years. If we play politics with homeland security and counterterrorism, we can do more damage to the nation than the terrorists. Such public policy challenges pose a real problem for Washington. Battling terrorism calls for steady, sensible leadership….something in Washington has a poor track record on.  

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As I drove by the Pentagon the other day, in a hurry to reach an appointment for which I was late in the rainy and clogged DC traffic, I caught out of the corner of my eye the 9/11 Memorial. Benches washed by the rain on a gray, sad day. All of it brought upon on us unexpectedly eight years ago by fanatics whose goals were to destroy and humble us and establish a fantasy world of caliphates and 12th century morality.

In the final analysis, the reason there has been no attack against America since September 11th, 2001 is a simple one. We have fought back fiercely and tenaciously at home and abroad.

First and foremost, Al Queda never expected us to react with an exacting swiftness and vehemence of a people on a mission of justice and revenge. We, the wagging tongues, often give too much credit to this group of vipers. They are neither geniuses nor master strategists. They are ideological thugs who suckered punched us and expected us to roll over in a perceived decadent heap. That did not happen.

To the everlasting credit of the Bush Administration, our military and intelligence services were allowed to successfully prosecute a full-scale war against Al Queda. We have sought them out around the world and killed and captured them wherever we could find them.

 As with all guerilla war, it was not an easy battle nor will it ever be. We have had to adapt our strategies to deal with them; and some of those actions have made us uncomfortable and queasy. Others, such as the invasion of Iraq, were questionable. The bottom line is Americans like clean wars and clear victories. Nothing of the kind will be found in this kind of struggle. And, I believe, when it is all said and done, Americans will understand this.

Americans have also accepted the fact that this struggle was going to require action at home. For the first time since 1865, we suffered mass casualties in our major cities, on our home soil. In reaction, we have been willing to adopt and adapt a form of homeland security unprecedented in scope, reach and speed. From the agencies of the Federal government to the 17,000 plus police and first responders organizations throughout America, we have formed a stronger bond of law enforcement and intelligence cooperation than could have been imagined in the days before 9/11. Like good Americans, we complain about the security lines at airports, justifiably fret about bureaucracies and how much security is really needed – but we have done it all in the knowledge that it makes us generally safer.

Going forward, I have two concerns about this struggle and our success in it. America is an inpatient society – its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. America has to be reminded that this struggle, like the Cold War, is a generational one against an enemy that is willing to adapt and is implacable. Make no mistake; they will try to attack us at home again. And, as the IRA said in its battle with the British, they only have to be lucky once. But, make no mistake that we are vastly better prepared to preempt and react than before September 11th -- if we keep our guard up.

My greater concern is that the current Administration is going to pull back too far from the rough and tumble tactics that are necessary to prosecute this war; tactics that do not suit their view of the world. 

Don’t get me wrong. No one will or should dismantle all the architecture of our initial efforts. Understandably, there is need to review and reflect upon the effectiveness of the policies and strategies in this struggle. That is logical as time moves ahead and circumstances change. And there will be differences in approach.

However, the recent effort to retroactively punish some of those people in the Intelligence Community who prosecuted the war against Al Queda is simply wrong headed. I will not debate the merits of what was or was not done at this time. 

Whatever your beliefs, the unintended effect of this ex-post judgment is appalling in both effect on those who proceeded in good faith and is inadvertently supportive to our enemy. You cannot tell your public servants to proceed with all measures, assured legally that they are in the bounds of right, and then turn around and say they are criminals. The undermining of morale and the cost of time and money to these public servants is appalling. And that it says to our enemy, we are less than implacable, is a true danger.

This is a long term, dirty war that requires strength and resolve. We are going to have to take actions that in a time of perfect peace would never fly. But make no mistake, Al Queda wants rid of us and all we represent. We can give them no quarter.

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  9/11  was a unique event. The perpetrators were a transnational network without a national affiliation who used hijacked civilian aircraft to attack monumental buildings in the homeland of the world’s greatest power located across an ocean – and did so with devastating effect. To describe what happened is to evoke the audacity of the project and the intensity of the reaction.  Any serious appraisal, therefore, must detach itself from the powerful emotions of fear and dread as well as the horrific imagery – to separate actuality from legend.

INFERENCES

The operation did not depend critically on a fixed location although facilitated by a stable base in Afghanistan. It was multinational: conceived in Afghanistan; organized in Germany and the US; and executed here by Saudis and Egyptians.

The plan’s stunning success should not obscure its simplicity. No innovative technology was designed, no complicated logistics were entailed, no special opportunity available or created, no great amount of cash needed. Most impressive was the dedication and emotional resiliency of the hijackers who kept their sense of suicidal purpose despite living in an alien environment.

A key to success was the equally stunning incompetence (and, let’s face it, sheer stupidity) of security agencies in the target country. The 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that nothing reasonable could have been done to prevent it is utter nonsense, just scanning the transparent facts makes that embarrassingly obvious. The most egregious failure was the FBI’s in not following through on the two agents’ reports of Middle Easterners taking flying lessons without concern for take-off or landing.

We perhaps have to live with the possibility of a conspiracy by similar extremely motivated persons. We cannot accept similar self created vulnerability.

FUTURE THREATS

Freedom to use large swaths of territory is not an absolute precondition to doing something of the same order.

Technological thresholds are low whether we think of airplanes, conventional explosives, chemicals. It is fairly easy to commit terrorist acts that kill at least hundreds.

Assuming the truth of the two previous statements, the question that stands out is why so little has happened over the last eight years. Superior intelligence/police work? In the United States, not one serious plot has been exposed. The few, over- publicized cases were embryonic schemes involving marginal persons lacking the mental and morale capacity to do much of anything. In Europe, there have been a number of instances (Germany, UK, France) where plots were disrupted at very early stages– but none came close to approximately 9/11 in capability or organization. They, too, involved marginal young men of limited competence. Major successes were scored in Pakistan to diminish severely al Qaeda’s original group. 

We should also note that the superior recruiting and training facilities we provided in Iraq over the past six years (plus motivation given to potential bankrollers) has not had any demonstrable effect insofar as major threats outside the Greater Middle East are concerned.

Logically, it follows that we either have overstated the size and scope of the al-Qaeda network; mistakenly assumed that the prominence of the U.S. as a strategic target relative to Middle Eastern governments was a constant for the relevant persons or groups; and/or exaggerated the ease of marshalling persons with the requisite combination of emotional strength and discipline to even consider doing something like 9/11.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan made sense. It was a partial success. Everything else that we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq (Somalia, too) has been an enormous waste of resources: human, financial, technical and political.

Enhancing classic intelligence/police work in close cooperation with the services of other governments is far more valuable, far less costly – and avoids the counter productive consequences of endless wars and occupations.

The negative effects of our policies are pronounced, in the well known respects: motivating possible terrorists from across the region, providing the proving grounds for them to hone their skills, motivating potential funders, and alienating deeply the general population of the regime which not only favors terrorist groups but also endangers incalculably other vital interests of the United States.

Those negative effects also register at home - financial, constitutional, ethical and in feeding a dangerous mood of anger, fear and frustration.

AFTER THOUGHT

The exploiting of free floating feelings of dread among Americans for political and ideological purposes has both obscured real dangers and contributed to them. Let’s drop the childish game of scaring ourselves with the likes of high school drop-out Jose Padilla and similar I.Q. challenged riff-raff. In doing so, we are behaving like kids who conjure monsters lurking in the stairwell so as to get a thrill by toying with their self-generated fears. 

The guy to think about is the reputable scientist/technician who visits the U.S. regularly, who may have an institutional tie there, who has a friend or relative in the shipping business, who has become deeply alienated and aggrieved by things we have done. He may have a close relative (direct or by marriage) who was a victim of some American atrocity in Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine. He may have developed an overwhelming urge to act destructively – even if it is in the form of a symbolic act punctuated by an exclamation point! None of our rampaging around Southwest Asia will protect us against that scenario becoming real. Indeed, the more rampaging we do the better the odds on it happening.

When it does, Richard Holbrooke, David Petraeus, Barack Obama et al will not need 50 performance measures to “know it when they see it.”

cheers

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