reporter2
11-09-21, 17:42
Why There Hasn’t Been Another 9/11
The U.S. remains a chief target for jihadists, but measures including drone strikes, special operations and intelligence sharing have kept terrorism at bay
Sept. 11, 2021
By Daniel Byman
Twenty years ago, the 9/11 attacks killed almost 3,000 Americans. Since then, the U.S. homeland hasn’t suffered any comparable terrorist assault, nor even one a tenth of the size. The total death toll from jihadist attacks inside the U.S. over these last two decades stands at 107—still too high but far lower than almost all of our leaders and counterterrorism officials feared it would be in September 2001, when visions of a follow-on strike, perhaps with weapons of mass destruction, loomed. The last jihadist attack on U.S. soil was well over a year ago, when a Saudi air force pilot with ties to al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen shot three American sailors at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida.
Yet jihadism itself remains strong, as the Taliban’s recent takeover of Afghanistan demonstrates. The U.S. has also suffered some scary near misses over the years, such as when the “underwear bomber” (who also worked with al Qaeda’s Yemen branch) almost detonated a bomb on a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. The vast majority of plots in the U.S. have been unsophisticated, however, involving untrained volunteers inspired by ISIS or al Qaeda propaganda. The shooter behind the worst attack— Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at a crowded Florida nightclub in 2016—pledged himself to ISIS at the last minute but had never met a member of the group.
Why has the U.S. been spared a repeat of 9/11, even as small attacks continue at home and jihadist conflicts rage around the world? The question has no single answer. Rather, an array of post-9/11 measures—some highly visible, such as the invasion of Afghanistan, and others behind-the-scenes but no less powerful, such as intelligence cooperation—have proved effective at stopping the most lethal violence. We have grown so accustomed to these measures that we easily forget the world in which al Qaeda and other terrorist groups once functioned.
The centrality of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to the 2001 attacks is hard to overstate. There and in parts of Pakistan, al Qaeda and other jihadist groups enjoyed a sanctuary from which leaders such as Osama bin Laden and his deputy and eventual successor, Ayman Zawahiri, could run a global terrorist organization, secure from arrest or assassination, while passing instructions to operatives around the world. The Taliban’s Afghanistan also served as a jihadist version of Rick’s Café: Jihadist figures such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 operation, traveled there seeking help. Mohammad proposed his brainchild to bin Laden because he needed the money, personnel and logistical support that al Qaeda could provide. For more than two years, the group planned the operation and communicated with cell members with little interruption, as other senior operatives came and went and as al Qaeda initiated other attacks, such as the suicide boat bombing in 2000 that killed 17 American sailors on the USS Cole.
Al Qaeda and other groups ran an archipelago of training camps and safe houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There they provided volunteers with basic training in small arms and other skills useful for fighting insurgencies, offering select recruits additional classes on bomb-making, passport forgery, counter-surveillance and other specialized skills useful for terrorist operations. Between 10,000 and 20,000 people went to Afghanistan to train in the 1990s, with both Pakistan and Iran serving as important transit routes. These trainees committed terrorist attacks around the world, and they also played important roles fueling insurgencies in Algeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Somalia, Yemen and other countries.
Al Qaeda not only trained but also indoctrinated recruits. Some, such as 9/11 cell leader Mohammad Atta and his compatriots, arrived from Germany determined to fight Russians in Chechnya, whose war was then the jihadist cause célèbre. Al Qaeda, however, convinced operatives such as Atta that they were part of a broader struggle that Muslims were waging against Russia, the U.S., Israel and various apostate regimes in the Arab world.
In 1998, al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa, killing 224 people (mostly Africans). At last, the U.S. was spurred to act, using force against al Qaeda for the first and only time before 9/11. But the U.S. cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan did little: They killed no leaders and merely enabled al Qaeda to appear defiant in the face of superpower pressure. Because the strikes occurred as Congress was gearing up to impeach President Bill Clinton, the administration’s critics claimed they were a “wag the dog” diversion to distract Americans from the president’s troubles.
Around the world, jihadists enjoyed a permissive environment. Many security services paid little attention to jihadist activity, seeing it as a problem for the Middle East, not their home countries. Zawahiri himself, operating under a pseudonym, fundraised in the U.S. in 1993. Such laxity proved vital: al Qaeda held operational meetings for the 9/11 plot in Malaysia and Spain, and money came from facilitators in the UAE.
Making the job of the terrorists easier, homeland defense in the U.S. was minimal, and the leading counterterrorism agencies coordinated poorly. The FBI focused on investigating the deaths of Americans in attacks overseas and missed potential clues about the 9/11 hijackers. The CIA failed to put several of the hijackers who were known terrorists on its watch list and didn’t provide the FBI with vital information about their possible entry into the U.S. Several hijackers who spoke little English and otherwise had difficulty operating here posed as students to receive help from members of the Muslim community in California.
Now consider all these factors in light of post-9/11 changes. The U.S. has become skilled at limited interventions: a drone strike to kill a terrorist leader here, a raid by special operations forces there, and so on. Not only have such operations killed terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden and ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi among many others, but they also have forced the enemy to hide constantly.
In war zones such as Iraq, Mali, Somalia and Yemen, jihadists still enjoy some degree of sanctuary, but the U.S. hasn’t hesitated to use force against suspected terrorists in these places. We have conducted drone strikes and special operations raids in Yemen, funded Iraqi fighters against ISIS, worked with allies such as Saudi Arabia against al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and supported France’s effort against jihadists in the Maghreb. In 2016, the U.S. killed more than 150 operatives from the al Qaeda-linked group al Shebaab when it bombed a training camp in Somalia.
Afghanistan will now pose particular difficulties, however. The Taliban’s defeat of U.S. forces is good news for al Qaeda, which remains close to the Afghan group. The U.S. will find it harder to convince local allies to risk the Taliban’s ire by providing information on jihadists. Raids by American special operations forces will be far more dangerous.
Still, sustaining large-scale terrorist training camps in Afghanistan or elsewhere would be risky for the Taliban. If Afghanistan was an opaque “black box” under the Taliban before 9/11, it is now far more transparent and vulnerable. Even without troops on the ground there, the U.S. can intercept terrorist communications, monitor activity from the skies and try to work with disaffected Afghans. And unlike the last time the Taliban held power, gathering intelligence on al Qaeda in Afghanistan will now be a priority.
Having paid a high price for the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban also have a strong incentive to avoid supporting international terrorism, as does Pakistan. The U.S. can still bomb Afghanistan, put economic pressure on the Taliban and otherwise make them pay a serious price if al Qaeda seeks to conduct international terrorist attacks. It is hard to imagine the Biden administration or any other White House working closely with the Taliban, but there are mutual interests in suppressing the ISIS branch in Afghanistan, which is now more of a threat to the Taliban’s rule than to the U.S.
There are not many alternative jihadist havens. In the 20 years since 9/11, al Qaeda has sometimes sought shelter in Iran, but the Iranian authorities tend to keep the jihadists on a short leash, and mutual mistrust runs high. Moreover, the Shiite regime is anathema to many die-hard Sunni jihadists.
Since 9/11, both government agencies and outside experts have raised concerns about the possibility of a virtual haven for jihadists, but bonds of trust are hard to forge online, and social media companies have grown more aggressive in removing jihadist accounts and materials. Intelligence agencies also monitor social media, leading to numerous arrests and making an online presence a vulnerability.
Around the world, police and intelligence services continue to disrupt jihadists, making it hard for them to plot, communicate and travel abroad for training. U.S. intelligence supplements the capabilities of foreign partners, by providing signals intelligence, for example, and acts as a force multiplier. A jihadist arrested in Morocco may have made phone calls to an operative in France, who received money from a funder in Kuwait, who is tied to cells in Indonesia and Kenya and operates under the instructions of a leader in Pakistan. The U.S. helps to assemble this giant jigsaw puzzle, encouraging the arrests of suspects and using drone strikes in places where arrests are difficult.
As a result of all this intelligence collection, as well as drone strikes, jihadists can no longer travel or communicate as easily as they did before 9/11. That confinement not only inhibits terrorist planning but also hampers al Qaeda’s ability to adjust to fast-changing circumstances in the Middle East or to manage leadership transitions. Indeed, al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been incommunicado for months and may be dead—hardly a source of inspiration to would-be followers.
China and Russia are in many ways hostile to the U.S., but they also have their own terrorism problems and share the U.S. goal of disrupting these groups. Russia suffered repeated post-9/11 attacks from groups based in Chechnya and nearby areas before getting the problem under control. China endured far fewer high-profile attacks, but overreacted with the construction of a vast surveillance apparatus and the detention of one million Chinese Muslims.
Homeland defense in the U.S., for all its imperfections, is far stronger than it was in 2001. New entities, such as the National Counterterrorism Center, integrate the CIA, the FBI and other agencies involved in tracking and disrupting terrorists. As anyone who has traveled internationally can attest, scrutiny at the borders is more intense, particularly for individuals traveling from countries with considerable terrorist activity. The FBI is aggressive—some would say too aggressive—in seeking out potential plotters. Perhaps most important, post-9/11 fears that the U.S. harbored a fifth column of hostile Muslims proved false. The Muslim community in this country has cooperated closely with the FBI and law enforcement.
To consider the cumulative impact of all these changes, let’s replay the 9/11 plot. No longer would al Qaeda have years to plan the attack from a haven in Afghanistan. Even if the Taliban were to give al Qaeda some latitude now, its leadership would be under constant pressure. Recruits such as Mohammad Atta couldn't easily travel to and from Afghanistan, and he and his fellow hijackers couldn't train there without considerable risk.
If plot members in third countries tried to ask questions of their superiors or otherwise communicate, they might be detected, and the same goes for sending money. In countries such as Germany, Malaysia, Spain and the U.A.E., intelligence agencies would be working with the U.S. to identify and disrupt jihadist planning and fundraising in their territories. Should the operatives somehow escape these efforts, they would then face greater scrutiny as they entered the U.S., and, once here, would be more likely to be discovered by the FBI or turned in by the American Muslim community.
Finally, al Qaeda itself has changed. Although the U.S. maintains numerous military bases in the Middle East and has waged war on jihadist groups for 20 years, al Qaeda has shifted its energies to local struggles. It has done so partly out of necessity, because striking the U.S. is far harder than it used to be. But opportunism has played a role too, with more freedom for local jihadist groups to operate in the Middle East in the disastrous aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring. Al Qaeda-linked groups are responsible for thousands of deaths in the region’s many civil wars. Embroiled in these conflicts, they have had little time to plot international terrorist attacks, and ISIS has shown that waging sectarian war in the region can motivate supporters even better than focusing antagonism on the West.
But make no mistake: The U.S. is likely to remain a target for jihadist groups and their supporters. The list of grievances against it is long. The U.S. still has a substantial presence in the Middle East, with small numbers of troops in Syria and Iraq as well as bases in Egypt and throughout the Persian Gulf. And the jihadist struggle has an inertia of its own, with years of fighting and indoctrination ingrained in the current generation of recruits. Some leaders, including bin Laden and Zawahiri, lost children in the fight against the U.S., adding a personal motivation to their ideological cause. Finally, the U.S. remains the world’s greatest military and cultural power, and attacking the most powerful country is always sure to grab the headlines that all terrorists crave.
The global pandemic has made many Americans familiar with the “Swiss cheese” model of protection—layered defenses in which inevitable holes in one tier are plugged by action at the next—and the same approach applies to counterterrorism. None of the measures I have described can prevent terrorism by itself. But together they have had a devastating cumulative effect on the capacity of jihadists to strike the U.S., and they have helped to keep the homeland remarkably, if not completely, safe for the last 20 years.
Mr. Byman is a professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His latest book is “Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad.”
The U.S. remains a chief target for jihadists, but measures including drone strikes, special operations and intelligence sharing have kept terrorism at bay
Sept. 11, 2021
By Daniel Byman
Twenty years ago, the 9/11 attacks killed almost 3,000 Americans. Since then, the U.S. homeland hasn’t suffered any comparable terrorist assault, nor even one a tenth of the size. The total death toll from jihadist attacks inside the U.S. over these last two decades stands at 107—still too high but far lower than almost all of our leaders and counterterrorism officials feared it would be in September 2001, when visions of a follow-on strike, perhaps with weapons of mass destruction, loomed. The last jihadist attack on U.S. soil was well over a year ago, when a Saudi air force pilot with ties to al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen shot three American sailors at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida.
Yet jihadism itself remains strong, as the Taliban’s recent takeover of Afghanistan demonstrates. The U.S. has also suffered some scary near misses over the years, such as when the “underwear bomber” (who also worked with al Qaeda’s Yemen branch) almost detonated a bomb on a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. The vast majority of plots in the U.S. have been unsophisticated, however, involving untrained volunteers inspired by ISIS or al Qaeda propaganda. The shooter behind the worst attack— Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at a crowded Florida nightclub in 2016—pledged himself to ISIS at the last minute but had never met a member of the group.
Why has the U.S. been spared a repeat of 9/11, even as small attacks continue at home and jihadist conflicts rage around the world? The question has no single answer. Rather, an array of post-9/11 measures—some highly visible, such as the invasion of Afghanistan, and others behind-the-scenes but no less powerful, such as intelligence cooperation—have proved effective at stopping the most lethal violence. We have grown so accustomed to these measures that we easily forget the world in which al Qaeda and other terrorist groups once functioned.
The centrality of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to the 2001 attacks is hard to overstate. There and in parts of Pakistan, al Qaeda and other jihadist groups enjoyed a sanctuary from which leaders such as Osama bin Laden and his deputy and eventual successor, Ayman Zawahiri, could run a global terrorist organization, secure from arrest or assassination, while passing instructions to operatives around the world. The Taliban’s Afghanistan also served as a jihadist version of Rick’s Café: Jihadist figures such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 operation, traveled there seeking help. Mohammad proposed his brainchild to bin Laden because he needed the money, personnel and logistical support that al Qaeda could provide. For more than two years, the group planned the operation and communicated with cell members with little interruption, as other senior operatives came and went and as al Qaeda initiated other attacks, such as the suicide boat bombing in 2000 that killed 17 American sailors on the USS Cole.
Al Qaeda and other groups ran an archipelago of training camps and safe houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There they provided volunteers with basic training in small arms and other skills useful for fighting insurgencies, offering select recruits additional classes on bomb-making, passport forgery, counter-surveillance and other specialized skills useful for terrorist operations. Between 10,000 and 20,000 people went to Afghanistan to train in the 1990s, with both Pakistan and Iran serving as important transit routes. These trainees committed terrorist attacks around the world, and they also played important roles fueling insurgencies in Algeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Somalia, Yemen and other countries.
Al Qaeda not only trained but also indoctrinated recruits. Some, such as 9/11 cell leader Mohammad Atta and his compatriots, arrived from Germany determined to fight Russians in Chechnya, whose war was then the jihadist cause célèbre. Al Qaeda, however, convinced operatives such as Atta that they were part of a broader struggle that Muslims were waging against Russia, the U.S., Israel and various apostate regimes in the Arab world.
In 1998, al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa, killing 224 people (mostly Africans). At last, the U.S. was spurred to act, using force against al Qaeda for the first and only time before 9/11. But the U.S. cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan did little: They killed no leaders and merely enabled al Qaeda to appear defiant in the face of superpower pressure. Because the strikes occurred as Congress was gearing up to impeach President Bill Clinton, the administration’s critics claimed they were a “wag the dog” diversion to distract Americans from the president’s troubles.
Around the world, jihadists enjoyed a permissive environment. Many security services paid little attention to jihadist activity, seeing it as a problem for the Middle East, not their home countries. Zawahiri himself, operating under a pseudonym, fundraised in the U.S. in 1993. Such laxity proved vital: al Qaeda held operational meetings for the 9/11 plot in Malaysia and Spain, and money came from facilitators in the UAE.
Making the job of the terrorists easier, homeland defense in the U.S. was minimal, and the leading counterterrorism agencies coordinated poorly. The FBI focused on investigating the deaths of Americans in attacks overseas and missed potential clues about the 9/11 hijackers. The CIA failed to put several of the hijackers who were known terrorists on its watch list and didn’t provide the FBI with vital information about their possible entry into the U.S. Several hijackers who spoke little English and otherwise had difficulty operating here posed as students to receive help from members of the Muslim community in California.
Now consider all these factors in light of post-9/11 changes. The U.S. has become skilled at limited interventions: a drone strike to kill a terrorist leader here, a raid by special operations forces there, and so on. Not only have such operations killed terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden and ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi among many others, but they also have forced the enemy to hide constantly.
In war zones such as Iraq, Mali, Somalia and Yemen, jihadists still enjoy some degree of sanctuary, but the U.S. hasn’t hesitated to use force against suspected terrorists in these places. We have conducted drone strikes and special operations raids in Yemen, funded Iraqi fighters against ISIS, worked with allies such as Saudi Arabia against al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and supported France’s effort against jihadists in the Maghreb. In 2016, the U.S. killed more than 150 operatives from the al Qaeda-linked group al Shebaab when it bombed a training camp in Somalia.
Afghanistan will now pose particular difficulties, however. The Taliban’s defeat of U.S. forces is good news for al Qaeda, which remains close to the Afghan group. The U.S. will find it harder to convince local allies to risk the Taliban’s ire by providing information on jihadists. Raids by American special operations forces will be far more dangerous.
Still, sustaining large-scale terrorist training camps in Afghanistan or elsewhere would be risky for the Taliban. If Afghanistan was an opaque “black box” under the Taliban before 9/11, it is now far more transparent and vulnerable. Even without troops on the ground there, the U.S. can intercept terrorist communications, monitor activity from the skies and try to work with disaffected Afghans. And unlike the last time the Taliban held power, gathering intelligence on al Qaeda in Afghanistan will now be a priority.
Having paid a high price for the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban also have a strong incentive to avoid supporting international terrorism, as does Pakistan. The U.S. can still bomb Afghanistan, put economic pressure on the Taliban and otherwise make them pay a serious price if al Qaeda seeks to conduct international terrorist attacks. It is hard to imagine the Biden administration or any other White House working closely with the Taliban, but there are mutual interests in suppressing the ISIS branch in Afghanistan, which is now more of a threat to the Taliban’s rule than to the U.S.
There are not many alternative jihadist havens. In the 20 years since 9/11, al Qaeda has sometimes sought shelter in Iran, but the Iranian authorities tend to keep the jihadists on a short leash, and mutual mistrust runs high. Moreover, the Shiite regime is anathema to many die-hard Sunni jihadists.
Since 9/11, both government agencies and outside experts have raised concerns about the possibility of a virtual haven for jihadists, but bonds of trust are hard to forge online, and social media companies have grown more aggressive in removing jihadist accounts and materials. Intelligence agencies also monitor social media, leading to numerous arrests and making an online presence a vulnerability.
Around the world, police and intelligence services continue to disrupt jihadists, making it hard for them to plot, communicate and travel abroad for training. U.S. intelligence supplements the capabilities of foreign partners, by providing signals intelligence, for example, and acts as a force multiplier. A jihadist arrested in Morocco may have made phone calls to an operative in France, who received money from a funder in Kuwait, who is tied to cells in Indonesia and Kenya and operates under the instructions of a leader in Pakistan. The U.S. helps to assemble this giant jigsaw puzzle, encouraging the arrests of suspects and using drone strikes in places where arrests are difficult.
As a result of all this intelligence collection, as well as drone strikes, jihadists can no longer travel or communicate as easily as they did before 9/11. That confinement not only inhibits terrorist planning but also hampers al Qaeda’s ability to adjust to fast-changing circumstances in the Middle East or to manage leadership transitions. Indeed, al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been incommunicado for months and may be dead—hardly a source of inspiration to would-be followers.
China and Russia are in many ways hostile to the U.S., but they also have their own terrorism problems and share the U.S. goal of disrupting these groups. Russia suffered repeated post-9/11 attacks from groups based in Chechnya and nearby areas before getting the problem under control. China endured far fewer high-profile attacks, but overreacted with the construction of a vast surveillance apparatus and the detention of one million Chinese Muslims.
Homeland defense in the U.S., for all its imperfections, is far stronger than it was in 2001. New entities, such as the National Counterterrorism Center, integrate the CIA, the FBI and other agencies involved in tracking and disrupting terrorists. As anyone who has traveled internationally can attest, scrutiny at the borders is more intense, particularly for individuals traveling from countries with considerable terrorist activity. The FBI is aggressive—some would say too aggressive—in seeking out potential plotters. Perhaps most important, post-9/11 fears that the U.S. harbored a fifth column of hostile Muslims proved false. The Muslim community in this country has cooperated closely with the FBI and law enforcement.
To consider the cumulative impact of all these changes, let’s replay the 9/11 plot. No longer would al Qaeda have years to plan the attack from a haven in Afghanistan. Even if the Taliban were to give al Qaeda some latitude now, its leadership would be under constant pressure. Recruits such as Mohammad Atta couldn't easily travel to and from Afghanistan, and he and his fellow hijackers couldn't train there without considerable risk.
If plot members in third countries tried to ask questions of their superiors or otherwise communicate, they might be detected, and the same goes for sending money. In countries such as Germany, Malaysia, Spain and the U.A.E., intelligence agencies would be working with the U.S. to identify and disrupt jihadist planning and fundraising in their territories. Should the operatives somehow escape these efforts, they would then face greater scrutiny as they entered the U.S., and, once here, would be more likely to be discovered by the FBI or turned in by the American Muslim community.
Finally, al Qaeda itself has changed. Although the U.S. maintains numerous military bases in the Middle East and has waged war on jihadist groups for 20 years, al Qaeda has shifted its energies to local struggles. It has done so partly out of necessity, because striking the U.S. is far harder than it used to be. But opportunism has played a role too, with more freedom for local jihadist groups to operate in the Middle East in the disastrous aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring. Al Qaeda-linked groups are responsible for thousands of deaths in the region’s many civil wars. Embroiled in these conflicts, they have had little time to plot international terrorist attacks, and ISIS has shown that waging sectarian war in the region can motivate supporters even better than focusing antagonism on the West.
But make no mistake: The U.S. is likely to remain a target for jihadist groups and their supporters. The list of grievances against it is long. The U.S. still has a substantial presence in the Middle East, with small numbers of troops in Syria and Iraq as well as bases in Egypt and throughout the Persian Gulf. And the jihadist struggle has an inertia of its own, with years of fighting and indoctrination ingrained in the current generation of recruits. Some leaders, including bin Laden and Zawahiri, lost children in the fight against the U.S., adding a personal motivation to their ideological cause. Finally, the U.S. remains the world’s greatest military and cultural power, and attacking the most powerful country is always sure to grab the headlines that all terrorists crave.
The global pandemic has made many Americans familiar with the “Swiss cheese” model of protection—layered defenses in which inevitable holes in one tier are plugged by action at the next—and the same approach applies to counterterrorism. None of the measures I have described can prevent terrorism by itself. But together they have had a devastating cumulative effect on the capacity of jihadists to strike the U.S., and they have helped to keep the homeland remarkably, if not completely, safe for the last 20 years.
Mr. Byman is a professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His latest book is “Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad.”