[Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald]
Terrorism is not designed to overwhelm. It is designed to undermine. In that context, whatever it does to cause or initiate anxiety in populations, it relies on the reaction of those populations equally as much to achieve its final goal.
The reaction of the Bush administration to the slaughter of 9/11, largely continued under Obama, was precisely what bin Laden and al-Qaida would have prayed for as it created an environment which made life for Americans difficult, induced levels of paranoia and ultimately resulted in the loss of many of its citizens’ basic human rights in the name of the fight against terrorism. Terrorism has now been fully planted in our collective psyche. To wit:
We have lived for almost a decade with an insane, multicolored “terrorist warning system” designed primarily to cover the posterior of the administration that designed and implemented it.
Transportation has become a nightmare. The simple preparation for air travel takes infinitely longer now than it did 10 years ago. Controls in airports have become so repressive and intrusive that air travel now proceeds at a crawl.
We have become paranoid and morbidly suspicious and distrustful of anyone we think might be a Muslim.
Our government has been able to get whatever it wanted in terms of surveillance rights. We have been subject to warrantless surveillance of all kinds.
We have watched our government torment, torture and incarcerate people without any regard for human rights or international law and convention.
The sad thing is that we have acquiesced to all of this because of our concerns about our own personal safety. But will we ever get our human rights back or will we lose more? In the dark days of 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote perceptively, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The key here is that without the active, witless involvement and effective acquiescence of our government, al-Qaida terrorism would have caused us far less pain than it ultimately has.
When it came to planning the attack on 9/11, most of the al-Qaida operational management was dead set against it. The plan prevailed solely because Osama bin Laden, their oracle, was its champion.
Ultimately, those in al-Qaida who opposed the 9/11 plan were proven correct. The 9/11 attack was the beginning of the decline of al-Qaida, who did just about everything wrong. They provoked a nasty, powerful and retributive America which turned on them full force. We invaded Afghanistan, denying them their operational base and stability. We methodically began to eliminate their senior and mid-level operational management. We pursued bin Laden so relentlessly that it completely changed al-Qaida’s modus operandi.
Al-Qaida became a franchise operation, the McDonald’s of terrorism. All a wannabee jihadi had to do was get a group of like-minded folks together and find a building from which to operate. At that point, visits to training facilities in Pakistan or Yemen or wherever, would teach them how to make bombs and how to run a business. Just like McDonald’s.
This progression was largely the result of the environment in which al-Qaida lived. As they ramped up their operations, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and later in Yemen and in North Africa, they created another entire category of enemy — those Muslims who objected to their killing of other Muslims. Since they were killing Muslims in droves, that meant that they could no longer be sure that their living environment was benign.
Worst of all from the Muslim point of view, they began to justify those killings by indiscriminately and in Muslim eyes, inappropriately employing takfir, the practice of branding other Muslims as unbelievers and making them thereby “legally” executable by al-Qaida.
Add to that the fact of lethal Western pursuit of their members, and we see al-Qaida going underground and paranoid. Bin Laden hid in the open in suburban Pakistan. But he was so paranoid that he had no phone, no Internet connection. Under those circumstances, there ceased to be an “al-Qaida Central.” All that was left were the franchises around the world. Given his personal circumstances, bin Laden could not conceivably have exercised classic command and control over them.
Which is precisely where we are now. We see disparate groups freelancing on their own in whatever operations appeal to them and doing so in operational environments that are increasingly hostile to them. Osama’s death hasn’t changed much.
If we could only bring ourselves to mitigate those of our activities, like our Middle East military operations, that provoke moderate Muslims and therefore strengthen al-Qaida, we might find ourselves in a far stronger counterterrorist position than that in which we find ourselves today.
Rural Ruminations 