We aren’t beating the terrorists — yet

Mississippi – Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks 16 years ago, herculean exertions by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have prevented another mass casualty attack on our soil, and U.S. military and intelligence operations have killed Osama bin Laden and thousands of hardened terrorists overseas.

Despite these successes, each time we have made apparent progress our adversary only moves, morphs and grows, and we cannot claim to be close to winning against this threat.

The answer for long-term defeat lies in understanding and winning the struggle of ideas. Defeating an ideology is hard, but not impossible: By the end of the Cold War, communism was utterly discredited as a governing philosophy. The U.S. and its allies must wage a similar battle against the ideas that animate Islamist terrorists, a battle that will be won only when the ideology that spurs many to violence today falls only on deaf ears tomorrow.

Last year, more than 25,000 people died in roughly 11,000 terrorist attacks in 104 countries. Compare that with the 7,000 deaths in fewer than 2,000 attacks in 2001(with nearly half those deaths occurring on a single day) and it is clear that the threat from terrorism has grown despite the U.S. government’s many post-9/11 efforts.

That relatively few of the more recent terrorism-related deaths have occurred in the USA should be of little consolation. Global terrorism has created a humanitarian and migration crisis — the political, economic and social cost of which America and its partners will be shouldering for years to come.

Now, with the United States and its allies on the brink of militarily vanquishing yet another terrorist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, we must avoid the temptation of confusing the defeat of one terrorist organization with victory against terrorism.

As we commemorate the anniversary of the worst terror attack on U.S. soil, policymakers should pause to reflect on what it would actually mean to defeat Islamist terrorism, and what a comprehensive strategy to achieve that goal would look like.

The basic challenge is that terrorist ranks are being replenished almost as quickly as the military can decimate them. In 2014, the CIA estimated ISIS had at least 20,000 members. Since then, U.S. forces claim to have killed 60,000 ISIS fighters, but in 2016, according to the State Department, the terrorist group was still 15,000 strong. As long as jihad maintains its overpowering appeal, even in the face of almost certain death, then terrorist movements will persist. ISIS will live on, even as its caliphate lies crushed amid the rubble of Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria. Al-Qaeda will reorganize and rebuild. New groups and new generations of terrorists will continue to emerge.

Defeating terrorism must entail weakening this magnetic attraction. To do this, we must discredit and supplant the jihadist ideology that legitimizes and incites people to violence.

Policymakers of both parties have long recognized this. “The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals,” President George W. Bush declared in 2005, “is the great challenge of our new century.” Four years later, President Obama called for “rolling back the violent ideologies that people of all faiths reject.” Most recently, President Trump argued that a peaceful “future can only be achieved through defeating terrorism and the ideology that drives it.” Yet the U.S. has struggled to make combating terrorist ideology an effective piece of its counterterrorism policies. If the current administration is to succeed where previous ones have failed, it should craft its policies keeping in mind the following principles first articulated by the 9/11 Commission and now reaffirmed by a Bipartisan Policy Center review of U.S. counterterrorism efforts:

• The threat is terrorism, not any one terrorist organization. We have fought al-Qaeda and we have fought ISIS; neither of these groups, nor any other, is the sole manifestation of the enemy the United States seeks to defeat. They are merely the embodiment of an ideological ambition, one whose banner can be taken up anywhere, anytime, by anyone so long as it is being promoted unchecked.
• Do not confuse terrorists’ means with their ends. As stunning as the violence that terrorists perpetrate may be, it is what they hope to achieve through their bloody tactics that attracts recruits and truly threatens U.S. interests. Islamist terrorism aspires to create a caliphate that unites the Muslim world under a fundamentalist version of Islamic law.
• While the majority of Muslims reject the jihadis’ violent methods, a non-trivial portion of the Muslim world nevertheless shares this ultimate objective. Jihadi groups heavily rely on the groundwork laid by non-violent Islamist groups. The explicit call to violence is not the sole reason for jihad’s appeal; focusing on it alone will not suffice to silence terror’s siren song.
• Supplant Islamist ideology with positive alternative visions of the future. Part of the strong appeal of Islamism — which is separate and distinct from the Muslim faith — is the absence of a strong competing ideology. For it to lose its appeal, it must be replaced by something more appealing.
• Prepare for a generational struggle. The damage that even a single terrorist act can wreak compels policymakers to focus on the most immediate and visible terrorist threats. The limited time horizon of most elected officials only reinforces this focus on short-term gains in the fight against terrorism. Ideologies, however, cannot be defeated in the short term. As in the Cold War, countering an ideology will require us to invest in programs and partnerships whose benefits might not be immediately visible.

The terrorists’ ideas, repugnant as they are, still attract far too many young Muslims to their ranks. We can, and must, do better in the struggle against their ideology.