Even Hyped Threats Can Be Real

Responses to "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?"

Round 1 (posted September 7, 2006)

by Paul R. Pillar

Paul R. Pillar is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is a retired intelligence officer who served as deputy chief of the counterterrorist center at the CIA and as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

Terrorism has always been less about physical damage than about fear and the responses fear provokes. John Mueller has thus performed a service by pointing out how American responses to terrorist attacks can cause more damage than the attacks themselves and how one of the most powerful counterterrorist tools is tempering fear by putting the damage terrorism can cause into proper perspective. He provides a further service by reminding readers that there are other important values, such as civil liberties, at stake in the debate over counterterrorism policy.

Mueller shows courage in swimming so directly against the tide of commentary on this subject. Although he does not specifically predict there will be no more serious attacks on the United States, once such an attack occurs, some will undoubtedly castigate him for having been foolishly myopic. After any disaster, those who had been screaming that the sky is falling tend to get credit while those who had expressed a more temperate outlook tend to get criticized, regardless of whether the latter's analysis was better reasoned and more valid.

And some officials have unquestionably hyped the terrorist threat to the United States, as Mueller charges. A lot of the problem stems from the Herculean task the Bush administration set for itself of justifying the war-turned-quagmire in Iraq, and the couching of that justification in terms of a "war on terror." Poll numbers showing terrorism as the only remaining issue on which an increasingly unpopular president enjoys an edge over political opponents provide a powerful incentive for the administration to talk the issue up rather than down. And others outside government may also be guilty of exaggeration, including some in consultancies, academia, and the chattering class who have been part of the counterterrorist cottage industries that have sprung up after 9/11.

Nevertheless, just as paranoids can have real enemies, so too can a hyped threat be real -- as this particular threat is. There are sound explanations for the absence of major terrorist attacks in the United States over the past five years that are quite consistent with there being a serious threat that could manifest itself in such an attack tomorrow. Mueller attempts to dismiss several of those explanations by arguing that each one, by itself, is incapable of accounting for the absence of follow-on attacks. But each explanation may provide part of the reason for that absence, and considering several such explanations together should leave us unsurprised that the United States has not suffered a new attack even in the presence of a continued threat.

Yes, the enhanced homeland security measures cannot thwart all possible terrorist plots, but they have made many of them more difficult and probably have had a broader deterrent effect. Yes, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan did not remove the wherewithal for all jihadists worldwide to prepare new plots, but it did deal a significant blow to al Qaeda and made it appreciably more difficult for bin Laden to direct terrorist operations. And so forth.

Even some of Mueller's own arguments about the jihadists' being well on their way to the trash heap of history are hardly reassuring when placed in context. There has indeed been a welcome backlash against jihadist terrorism in some parts of the Muslim world, but the same Pew survey results that showed evidence of such a backlash in Jordan also showed bin Laden's continued and even growing stature in other countries -- such as Nigeria, where a clear majority of Muslims now express at least some confidence in him. And it is true that 9/11 was an act of desperation, in the sense that the jihadists had earlier failed to foment revolutions in the countries of most interest to them. But that is exactly why turning their fire against the United States -- bin Laden's strategic stroke of genius -- was, and still is, so attractive to them.

Regardless of the actual level of jihadist strength overseas, one of the main reasons U.S. leaders will continue to have to give high priority to counterterrorism is that most Americans, unfortunately, do not view terrorism in the rational way John Mueller does. If they did, the United States would be not only a less stressed-out society but also a less attractive target for foreign terrorists. But most Americans will almost certainly continue to place far more emphasis on deaths due to terrorism than on drownings in bathtubs or the like -- and they will expect their leaders to formulate policy accordingly.