Turning the Corner in the Fight against Terrorism

It has become an article of faith that American counterterrorism policy -- especially as practiced in Afghanistan -- is a failure, and that as a consequence a new approach is required. This perception served as a major justification for the escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan by the Obama administration, while the associated elevated sense of risk explains much of the resistance to closing the detention center in Guantanamo and holding terrorist trials in federal courts. Fortunately for the United States, the real story is quite different, as the American Security Project's latest annual report (.pdf) on terrorism trends documents.In Afghanistan, far from being a failure, our counterterrorism efforts have been a tremendous success. While there is a significant insurgency in that country, there is little evidence that any transnational terrorist organizations capable of striking the West operate there. There have been many terrorist plots over the past eight years hatched in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, but all of them came out of the Pakistan side of the border, rather than from Afghanistan. Our goal following the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 was to eliminate the terrorist threat in Afghanistan, and we've largely achieved that goal.True, we cannot be certain that no threat will ever emerge from Afghanistan, but nor can we control the future anywhere else in the world. Defeating actual threats is possible; preventing future threats from emerging is not. We've succeeded at the possible, and should not be surprised if we've failed to achieve the impossible.In a broader sense, we need to learn to recognize success when we see it. And right now, it looks as if the American approach to counterterrorism is and has been largely successful. Though violence by Islamist groups hit record levels in 2009 -- due particularly to insurgent violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia -- the threat from transnational Islamist radicals to the United States homeland is almost certainly diminishing. Three major developments account for this trend.First, the status of the al-Qaida "brand" has diminished. Support for al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden in the Muslim world has fallen into the single digits -- even in Pakistan -- after having hovered between 20 percent and 30 percent in many key countries for the past several years. This suggests that al-Qaida has largely managed to squander its image as a defender -- albeit a flawed one -- of the Muslim world against the West. It is not quite clear why this happened, though it is likely that the excesses of al-Qaida in Iraq contributed. But the result is a visible decline in al-Qaida's capacity. There is evidence that al-Qaida is facing both a recruiting and fundraising crisis, and al-Qaida's outreach through videos and on the Web has clearly diminished...more..http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=4846