Before the 1990s, the US national security organs—the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), US military, and so on—evolved to counter the actions of nation-states and their agents. The standard operating procedures, protocols, philosophy, and “rules” behind it all developed over decades of preparing for conventional and nuclear wars with a nation-state.
The Cold War concerns over nuclear exchanges and the ‘arms race’ between superpowers have transformed into the threat of attacks with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), car bombs, IEDs, and suicide bombers on civilian populations by ostensibly deficient, third-world renegades.
If ever there was a culture and mentality that the US government does not understand, it is the Middle East and the Islamic world. In the Middle East, from which our current enemy hails, the United States does not have sufficient intelligence personnel who can speak and read the languages and understand their nuances.
If ever there was a culture and mentality that the US government does not understand, it is the Middle East and the Islamic world.
In contrast, during the Cold War, the US invested heavily in personnel who could speak, read, and write Russian. My husband was one such linguist. Proof of our Arabic-language deficiencies came out after September 2001 (9/11), when the FBI itself scrambled to recruit Arabic-speaking people just to help it “read the other guy’s mail,” much less divine his intentions.
Though we focus on the choice of weapons used by terrorists, more worrisome are the terrorists’ agility, adaptability, determination, and rabid dedication to their cause. There is a surge in non-conventional conflicts, where one or more of the belligerents is a non-state actor driven by diverse (though interconnected) ideologies. Add the shadow support of nation-states such as Iran and the difficulty of addressing the issue becomes exponentially more difficult.
Are government policies affected by terrorist attacks? Naturally, terrorists aim to send political messages through attacks. The very focal point of terrorist attacks is to change government policies. Terrorist activities are considered a means of transmitting political messages to policymakers, and the political nature of it makes it different from other crimes.
In most cases, terrorists have agendas and want governments to take their agendas into account in policy-making and government actions. That is to say, terrorist groups attack their targets to damage and show their disobedience or disapproval of current governmental policies and implementations.
Some political analysts defend the violent nature of terrorist groups and interpret it as justification for free speech since they argue that these attacks usually influence policies and most of the time predicate improvements.
The international community has struggled to prevent, resolve, and in some cases even respond to the changing and unpredictable nature of violent conflict and terrorism in recent decades. Governments need to pay particular attention and not allow terrorist attacks to set the policy agenda, diffuse specific policies, and cause dramatic policy changes.
In the nascent beginnings of the 21st century, terrorism has emerged as one of the primary drivers of domestic and international policy agendas in the United States.
Public policy, from this standpoint, has a close relationship with terrorist activities. Terrorist attacks are intimately related to public policy because of several reasons. In one sense, terrorist groups want to change policies for the benefit of specific groups of people or a specific ideology. Terrorist attacks can function as punctuation to incremental policy-making. Terrorist incidents can be an influential agenda-setter and/or a sign of the failure of policies.
And finally, terrorist attacks facilitate innovation and diffusion of strategies all across the world. There is, in short, a constant and close connection between terrorism and public policy in which both parties affect and cause changes in each other. It works as a way to extort concessions because government officials and policymakers often make or refrain from making controversial decisions based on the threat of violent reactions.
The public expects government officials to implement specific policies toward terrorism to avoid losses since government policies can reduce the impacts and risks of terrorist attacks. Policymakers are expected to do something to prevent terrorist attacks; nevertheless, trying to prevent terrorism through just making policy changes that terror groups desire could yield more severe problems and a vicious cycle.
Any dissatisfied group who cannot reach its political goals may see terrorism as a legitimate way to force desired political moves from the government. Counter-terrorism policies and strategies are usually unique to any given country and require profound analyses to understand each specific terrorist group.
Policymakers need to seriously analyze solutions and systems to handle terrorist attacks. That is the reason governments must be very skeptical about giving what terrorists want. Doing so can create a cycle of ever-increasing demands and violence.
In the nascent beginnings of the 21st century, terrorism has emerged as one of the primary drivers of domestic and international policy agendas in the United States. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, terrorism has dominated the political discourse of the United States and has emerged as an active policy agenda within the federal government.
Can modern diplomacy serve as an effective tool? Diplomacy has been utilized for centuries and continues to be the primary way for states to conduct their international affairs. Toward preventing violent conflict, states can use diplomacy to undertake mediation, facilitation, fact-finding, consultations, and monitoring, among other initiatives.
This approach is understood to be the correct path when dealing with nation-states, but it has had little effect when dealing with a hidden disjointed terrorist organization. Many times those organizations and those who can direct their focus are deliberately isolated from each other. This exacerbates the difficulty in any dialogue.
However, as the protracted and devastating conflicts in Israel, Palestine, Syria, and elsewhere demonstrate, diplomacy is in practice failing to prevent the outbreak, escalation, and re-occurrence of conflict.
The academic and policy-oriented literature has attempted to keep up with the attempts to reform. At the more skeptical end of the spectrum, former British diplomat Carne Ross contends that the “diplomatic machinery and modes of thinking about international relations have hardly changed at all” and that “what is very odd about our globalized world of the 21st century is that we still use 19th- and 20th-century ways of arbitrating it.”
Intelligence is key to conducting our war on terrorism. The US government has developed intelligence gathering by technological means to a high degree of sophistication. But the terabytes of data we collect are well beyond human means to wade through, and our human intelligence is at times deficient.
Protecting a nation or community against acts of terrorism can come at the expense of rights to liberty and privacy.
Close cooperation with foreign intelligence services constitutes our most important and effective tool by expanding the intelligence, police, and internal security resources directed against terrorist targets. The most valuable tool in fighting terrorism is human intelligence (HUMINT), and the US HUMINT capacities were vastly curtailed by President Clinton in the 1990s. With the imploding of Libya, Yemen, Syria, and other areas where the US once had assets, our HUMINT capacities are limited.
In the broader context of US foreign policy, a counter-terrorism strategy should be integrated into all foreign policy decision-making to maintain national security. Counter-terrorism policy should be designed as but one part of a broader effort to maintain national security and should be integrated into all foreign policy decision-making. In national security, a good defense relies on an active offense, both unilateral and multilateral.
Perhaps the most fundamental problem raised by the threat of terrorism is this: How can liberal democratic society and all its fruits be protected against terrorism without intruding on the very properties of liberal democracy that make it worth protecting?
Protecting a nation or community against acts of terrorism can come at the expense of rights to liberty and privacy. America’s great challenge is achieving security and safeguarding cherished freedoms. If we act rashly in response to further terrorist attacks, we endanger our Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
Our greatest threat is how government agencies may restrict us in the pursuit of security, which will have far more significant long-term consequences than anything that the terrorists can do.
The real lesson we have to learn is that bloated, ponderous government bureaucracies frustrate the speedy decisiveness and responsiveness required for intelligence analysis, information dissemination, and potential responses to terrorist attacks.
Nonetheless, we cannot ignore or dismiss the threat of extremist fundamentalist Islamic terrorists arrayed against the United States.
That doesn’t mean that US officials should stop trying. Terrorism achieves its ultimate objective by inducing a targeted population to change its behavior. If we cower in fear, stop traveling, or avoid public places, then the terrorists really will have won.
