Wrong diagnosis of terrorism; wrong cure

Rami Khouri, columnist for Lebanon’s Daily Star, is not impressed with the the US  addresses terrorism:

If media are a mirror of the political system in the United States – and I believe they are – then it is no wonder that the past two decades have seen a steady expansion of two related and symbiotic problems: the spread of terrorism in and from the Arab-Asian region; and the spread of the American armed forces and covert operations in the same region.

Yemen media coverage captures this very neatly. The mainstream American media, especially network and cable television, mainly report that the problems that spur terrorism from Yemen are poverty, religious extremism, and ineffective government. Charismatic Muslim preachers, often using the internet, are also widely mentioned these days as a real problem that exacerbates the terror threat. In every report I have seen, without fail, the thrust of the report is that terrorism is a consequence of Muslim religious extremism that is somehow connected with a visceral hatred of the United States or Western ways in general.

The flaw in this approach – and it was evident in President Barack Obama’s remarks Thursday on how the US would improve its intelligence defenses against terrorism – is that it refuses to acknowledge that terrorism in our age is largely a reactionary movement that responds to perceived threats against those societies from where terrorists emerge. It is striking that in most cases of successful or failed terror attacks, the perpetrators or the organizations that send them to kill explain that they carry out their deed in response to the deeds of others – such as Israel’s assault on Palestinians, US and British armies in Iraq or Afghanistan, American drone attacks against Yemeni militants, or some other such issue…

Mainstream American media coverage of terrorism, Yemen and related issues is, with very few exceptions in terms of quality analysis and reporting, a horror show of superficiality, selectivity and racist sensationalism. The latest culprits for the US media are “Muslim televangelists,” as they are called. A few years ago, the culprits were the madrasas, or Muslim religious schools. Before that the culprits were the folks at Al-Jazeera television. Before that they were Saudi-financed Salafists. Before that the problem was poverty and hopelessness. Before that it was that Muslims had trouble with “modernity.” Next month, the culprits will be someone else. When will this evasive nonsense ever stop, and when will mainstream American journalism executives grow up and act like adults, rather than adolescents, on this score?

For what it’s worth, I know Rami. We were both fellows at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the same time. Rami’s a reasonable and level-headed analyst, the type of moderate, modern democrat that the US State Department loves to support. If he’s got steam coming out of his ears about Obama’s policies towards terrorism, its a really bad sign about how little he has improved the image of the US in the Middle East.

The Stupid Terrorists Club

Andrew Potter hits the nail on the head on Security Theater writing in Macleans:

As a result of the crotch-bomber’s efforts, more suspicious people will now find themselves on no-fly lists, the U.S. will probably drop some bombs on al-Qaeda bases in Yemen, and international air travel will become an even more undignified endeavour. Will it make us any safer? Not much. In the end, the main reason there are so few successful terrorist attacks is that blowing up a plane is already pretty hard, and most terrorists aren’t that smart.

Domino Theory 2.0

From the 2008 National Defense Strategy:

The inability of many states to police themselves effectively or to work with their neighbors to ensure regional security represents a challenge to the international system…If left unchecked, such instability can spread and threaten regions of interest to the United States…

As if on cue, Voice of America reports,

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the problems in Yemen are a threat to regional and global security.

I am not sure that I agree with Domino Theory 2.0. As Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal puts it:

…the United States does not have a Yemen problem. We have a homeland security problem…One might actually think that making harder for folks like Abdulmutallab to get in the country in the first place would be a more productive use of taxpayer dollars [than]…seeking out another unstable Islamic country to try and stabilize.

How are things going in those other unstable Islamic countries? Apparently not to well. Back to Cohen:

We don’t have buy-in from the Pakistanis to go after Afghan Taliban safe havens; we don’t have support or even capacity in the Afghan government to support our efforts; the Afghan Army is nowhere close to being up to speed; our own military appears to have different tactical objectives than the civilian side; military intelligence is not serving the mission appropriately and top military intel officials are going outside the chain of command to make their concerns known; our enemy appears far more formidable than we seem willing to acknowledge; our additional troops are a long way from being on the ground in Afghanistan; our military is being asked to wage pointless battles in sparsely populated areas where we have no hope of holding territory in the near-term and it’s not even clear that we’re actually doing population centric counter-insurgency – and if we are doing it; we’re not doing a great job of it.

Osama bin Laden must be having a good laugh, as it seems he is in charge of US national security policy:

We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy…All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note.

Al Qaeda spent $200,000 planning 9/11 and we have spent well over $1 trillion fighting Al Qaeda. If the best Al Qaeda can come up with at this point is a guy who tried to start a fire on a plane, it suggests that Al Qaeda’s doesn’t have much capacity to pull off terrorist attacks inside the US. Abdulmatallab was no Mohammed Atta. Yes, we can howl for Janet Nepolitano’s head, decry the pathetic state of our national security, and demand mandatory screening for all Muslim men. However, this all seems to miss the point that Al Qaeda’s threat to the US appears pretty small. If people were blowing themselves up in New York and Washington, DC as they are in Peshawar, I could see the point. Yet this is not happening. I agree with Kevin Drum that the reason we don’t see more bombs going off in the US is because we actually do a pretty good job of not letting terrorists in the country. Instead, if we fight al Qaeda by chasing them all over the planet, they will bankrupt us and we will have achieved little in return, just like bin Laden said.