Despite successes, new terrorists still popping up
WASHINGTON (AP) — The war on terror keeps rounding up terrorists, yet every day there appear to be more.
Some 3,400 al-Qaida-linked operatives have been captured or killed in 100 countries since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, the State Department said last week. Now, officials believe, a new wave of threats is coming from dozens of smaller groups only loosely connected to the network but inspired by al-Qaida’s message and methods.
In the last week alone, authorities made arrests in the Philippines, Britain, Turkey and France, but new threats have been reported in the United States and Spain and deadly attacks occurred in Uzbekistan.
The seemingly endless cycle of progress and setbacks stokes the debate over whether the Bush administration is using the proper strategy to fight the global battle.
Did it launch war in Iraq that only inflamed anti-American sentiment? Did it divert the U.S. focus, allowing terror cells around the world time to strengthen and evolve?
Is the United States using the military too much and other counterterror tools too little? Has it and the rest of the world failed to strike at terror’s root causes, leaving the world’s repressed or disenfranchised vulnerable to the lure of extremists?
“Are we capturing, killing or deterring … more terrorists every day than the (Islamic schools) and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asked in an October memo to other Pentagon leaders.
Europeans questioned U.S. strategy after last month’s bombings in Spain.
“It is clear that force alone cannot win the fight against terrorism,” European Commission President Romano Prodi said. “These dark days have shown us how the American approach itself has not been sufficient to deal with the situation completely.”
After the 2001 attacks, the administration began assembling an international coalition for the war against Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban militia and the al-Qaida fighters they harbored as well as to gather intelligence, cut off terrorist financing and coordinate international law enforcement around the world.
Although those efforts continue, two back-to-back wars have been the main U.S. focus for the past 2 1/2 years, consuming most of hundreds of billions of dollars spent on security.
President Bush has said repeatedly that the way to defeat terrorism is to take the battle to the terrorists before they can attack the United States.
In the fall of 2001, there was little taste in the United States for uncovering “root causes.” The first priority was to eliminate al-Qaida before it could carry out more attacks. It wasn’t seen as the time to dwell on whether the United States could undercut the extremists’ motivations.
To some, it still isn’t.
“I’m still in the retribution and war-planning stage,” said Bill Harvey, whose wife of one month, Sarah, was killed when al-Qaida operatives hijacked planes and flew them into New York’s World Trade Center.
“Now is not the time to talk about how do we help them,” he said of the radicals. “Now is the time to talk about exterminating them.”
But Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corporation, said the fight has to be two-pronged: the short-term effort to break the backs of terrorist organizations and the long-term goal of breaking the cycle in which new generations of extremists are recruited and existing ones replenished and strengthened.
“It has to be both” military and other efforts, he said. “The question is in what balance and what proportion.”
Critics say the U.S. approach is off-kilter.
“Despite the administration’s promises of a comprehensive approach to fighting terrorism, its budget concentrates seven times as many resources on the military as on all nonmilitary security tools combined, including homeland security,” said Miriam Pemberton of the research group Foreign Policy in Focus.
She co-authored a report released jointly by some dozen liberal think tanks that recommended paring weapons systems less suited to today’s battles and redirecting some $50 billion in budget money to diplomacy, development and other security efforts.
The Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner disagrees.
“The United States has taken exactly the right approach,” said Gardiner, once a foreign policy aide to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “The war on terrorism is primarily a military-driven operation combined with diplomacy and cooperation with key allies.”
In its diplomacy, the administration has pushed Arab governments to move toward democracy, better education, economic development and political change, lest future generations remain vulnerable to anti-Western ideology. At the population, it has aimed new U.S.-funded Arabic-language television, radio broadcasts and a cultural and lifestyle magazine as part of what U.S. officials call the battle of ideas.
Lawmakers urged the administration last week to commit more money to Africa as well, saying radical Islamic charities have long invested resources into helping the poor there.
The overall counterterror effort will take years and years.
“And it has to be dynamic,” said Hoffman, with a strategy that adapts, just as terrorism itself “is always evolving.”