By John Farmer Jr.
It has now been 16 years since the chaos and bloodshed of the morning of 9/11, when an Air Force officer in Rome, New York, was recorded observing: "This is a new kind of war."
He was more right than he knew.
The struggle against Islamist extremism has proven to be our longest, most expensive war. It is without either boundaries or a fixed, nation-state adversary. It has engaged governments at virtually every level; its casualties have been inflicted from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq to the streets of hundreds of cities and towns worldwide. To an unprecedented degree, every citizen of the world is a potential conscript, potential casualty, potential first responder in this struggle.
How successful have we been? Tens of thousands of Islamist terrorists and foreign fighters have been hunted down and killed, including the original movement's leader, Osama bin Laden; hundreds of plots have been foiled through the diligence and aggressiveness of law enforcement and the military; and, the capacity of terrorist organizations to conduct far-flung, sophisticated operations like the 9/11 attacks has been disrupted if not totally degraded.
In a new report, however, a working group of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., offers a sobering assessment: "It is impossible to conclude that the enemy has been defeated." The report, "Defeating Terrorists, Not Terrorism: An Assessment of U.S. Counterterrorism Policy From 9/11 to ISIS," reaches this conclusion because "the threat of terrorism has metastasized. Last year, terrorists launched five times as many attacks as in 2001 . . . For each threat defused, another soon takes its place; for each terrorist group disrupted, another soon arises; for each terrorist killed, more eager recruits appear."
The numbers bear this out. In 2016, some 25,000 people were killed in 11,000 terrorist attacks in 104 countries. According to a RAND Corporation study, the number of jihadis more than doubled between 2010 and 2013.
How do we reconcile our many successes with this stark reality?
According to the Bipartisan Policy Commission working group, which was co-chaired by former 9/11 Commission co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton (full disclosure: I participated in meetings and contributed to the editing of the report), the answer is that "too often U.S. counterterrorism efforts have focused on a specific group or threat, while doing little to prevent new generations from taking up the banner of jihad."
Our successes have been significant, therefore, but largely tactical. "For all of its battlefield and intelligence successes," the BPC Report notes, "the United States has demonstrated little ability to degrade support for the ideology underlying jihadist terrorism."
That ideology rejects the idea of a nation state as a western creation foisted upon Islam by colonial powers. It advocates a world as a unified caliphate under a single Islamist banner, and rejects utterly the notion of the separation of church and state, believing that "the Koran is our constitution" and that religious law should inform all aspects of daily life. It offers the disaffected a simple answer to every grievance, a simple solution to the world's complexities: violent jihad. Its allure has proven extremely powerful as Islamic State has emerged from al-Qaeda.
The question that remains, then, is the first question: How do we defeat not just an enemy but an idea that rings true to alienated individuals and motivates them to move beyond estrangement to violence?
At a forum in Brussels co-sponsored by Rutgers University, the Egmont Institute and the Belgium Ministry of Interior, social workers, law enforcement officials and academics reached broad agreement that an effective counter-message must:
1) Expose the distortions of history and doctrine that underlie Islamist ideology.
2) Mirror jihadist messaging in grounding its messaging in the Quran and in Islamic tradition.
3) Exploit social media to deliver the counter-message.
4) Utilize the kind of sophisticated marketing techniques that have proven successful in recruiting young people to jihad;
5) Be tailored to the different Muslim communities living in different environments.
6) Not be delivered by government agencies, which are too easy to discredit.
Most important, there was consensus that any effective counter-message must emanate from within the Islamic community itself.
Contrary to popular perception, efforts are underway within the Islamic community to refute Islamism. To cite one example of many, writer Ed Husain, in his book "The Fundamentalist," describes his spiritual journey into Islamism and ultimately back to a "mainstream, moderate Muslim ethos," a spiritual form of Islam inculcated in him as a boy by his grandfather.
The rediscovery of a such a pluralist Muslim tradition is essential to strategic progress in the struggle against Islamism. As Husain states, "Muslims have a duty to stand up and reclaim their faith."
Just as only Muslims can be effective in countering the Islamist version of Islam, only America and the west can be effective in countering the Islamist totalitarian rejection of our freedoms and way of life.
As a culture -- not just as a government -- we must expose the Islamist sloganeering of "Democracy hypocrisy! Democracy go to hell! Freedom go to hell!" for the prelude to tyranny that it represents.
This will be no small task. Freedom in its American variant is under assault as an ideal all over the world. Not just radical Islamists, but politicians from Vladimir Putin to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Viktor Orban to the Venezuelan and Chinese governments are engaged in the totalitarian project of undermining freedom as an ideal.
Freedom, they claim, leads to chaos, to unworkable governance and moral decadence. They seek actively to foment these conditions in free societies. Too frequently, our conduct and culture have played into this narrative.
Sixteen years after 9/11, we stand at a critical juncture. Our tactics must match our strategy. We must respect and promote the efforts within the Muslim community to refute the toxic ideology of Islamism. Equally important, we must defeat the attacks on individual liberty as an ideal by recovering a sense of how precious and essential individual freedom has been. We must, as the Bipartisan Policy Center report concludes, defend aggressively the "modern political order founded on individual rights and nation states" or doom billions of people to repression from terrorist states and cynical autocrats.
There is no more urgent challenge
John Farmer Jr. was New Jersey's attorney general on Sept. 11, 2001. A former senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, he is a university professor and special counsel to the president of Rutgers University.
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