Lessons from the Fifteen-Year Counterterrorism Campaign
October 25, 2016
Author(s): Andrew Liepman, Philip Mudd
Abstract: For the past 15 years since 9/11, fighting terrorism has been one of the United States’ top priorities. The low number of casualties from terrorism in the United States indicate that intelligence and law enforcement agencies have performed well—preempting attacks, killing terrorists, working with partners overseas, and reducing the threat more comprehensively than any observer would have judged likely after 9/11. But the United States still suffers from a hysteria about terrorism, fueled partly by a distorted national dialogue on issues such as the extent of the threat; steps the country should take in areas as disparate as migration and cyberspace; and how the country should deal with youth who choose a potentially violent path.
The attacks on 9/11 forced the United States intelligence community (IC) to pivot quickly and dramatically. Practitioners from that era had few experiences to draw on and little time to reflect on the decisions of the global counterterror campaign. In the weeks and months after the attacks, resources and people flowed in, expertise grew, and analysts and operators grappled with a shadowy enemy they did not fully understand. The evolution of that enemy—from centralized al-Qa`ida to its affiliates, the growth of its propaganda arm, and finally the appearance of the multi-headed beast that includes the Islamic State—required the IC to adjust, from chasing a terror leader to his hideout in Abbottabad to finding an Islamic State-inspired Twitter follower in California. Along the way, successes ranged from the dismantling of al-Qa`ida’s leadership to a largely unheralded but effective defensive screen in the United States that has limited attacks here. No one in the dizzying days after 9/11 would have believed that annual terrorism-related casualties leading into 2017 would number only in the dozens; experts might have predicted hundreds, even thousands. This rapid intelligence escalation also prompted now much-debated steps such as establishing CIA prisons, how the CIA treated al-Qa`ida prisoners, and to the mistakes that led to the near-catastrophic miss of a terrorist on board a plane over Detroit in 2009.
https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/lessons-from-the-fifteen-year-counterterrorism-campaign
