Attacks In U.S. Aren't the Only Concern

Responses to "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?"

Round 1 (posted September 7, 2006)

by Jessica Stern

Jessica Stern is Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill.

John Mueller has written a compelling essay that makes a number of important points. He is correct that since 9/11, Bush administration officials have issued a near-constant barrage of overly dire assessments about the catastrophic threat Americans face from terrorism. Mueller is right to question both the accuracy of these statements and their motivation. And he is right about there having been no successful terrorist strikes against the American homeland since 9/11.

I have four main problems with his argument, however. First, in evaluating the terrorist threat, we need to be concerned about not just the strikes that terrorists have managed to carry out, but also those they might be preparing or plotting. As Mueller suggests, we should indeed be skeptical consumers of the government's claims regarding sleeper cells and thwarted plots. But his claim that there are no or almost no terrorists within the United States is based on no sounder informational basis that the opposite claims of government officials.

Second, we need to be concerned about terrorist strikes around the globe, not just in the United States -- and the picture there is not reassuring. The most accurate and up-to-date figures for international terrorist incidents make it clear that such attacks have risen every year since 2001, and have increased sharply in the three years since the United States invaded Iraq. The most recent State Department report on the subject includes attacks in Iraq, which previous reports had largely excluded and which inflates the numbers somewhat. But even leaving Iraq out of the picture, it would be hard to defend the view that terrorism has been vanquished. And data collected by the private organization MIPT show a similar upward trend.

Third, al Qaeda is interested in more than simply killing Americans in American cities. Bin Laden has described his goal as bringing America into conflict with Muslims along "a large-scale front" which it cannot contain and al Qaeda strategists report that they want to expand what they call the "jihadist current," eroding American power and prestige and separating the United States from its allies. So a proper evaluation of the terrorist threat should consider events on these fronts as well.

Finally, while the U.S. approach to the war on terrorism has been principally military, the enemy has been fighting a war of ideas. When I first started interviewing members of bin Laden's international Islamic front in the late 1990s, only zealots and terrorists found the jihadist idea appealing. In the last few years, however, I have been interviewing Muslim youth in Europe, and it is clear that jihad has now become a "cool" way to express dissatisfaction with the status quo, even for new converts to Islam. Most of the youth attracted to the jihadist idea will never become terrorists. But only a few of them need to in order for the danger to be quite real in a variety of ways, particularly if American policy plays into their hands.

Footnote #1: See Abu Bakr Naji, "The Management of Savagery," an al Qaeda strategy manual translated by William McCants, available at http://www.ctc.usma.edu/naji.asp.