10 Ways to Avoid the Next 9/11
The New York Times has a great series of op-eds up entitled "10 Ways to Avoid the Next 9/11". They put the question to 10 experts in security, terrorism, and public policy. Here is one of my favourites, by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton (chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission and co-authors of "Without Precedent":
Our most important long-term recommendations involve foreign policy. First, preventing terrorists from gaining access to nuclear weapons, especially by stepping up efforts to secure loose nuclear materials abroad, must be our highest priority.
Second, the long-term challenge is for America to stop the radicalization of young Muslims from Jakarta to London by serving as a source of opportunity, not despair. Too many young Muslims are without jobs or hope, are angry with their governments, and don’t like the war in Iraq or American foreign policy.
And here is one of my least favourites:
OFFENSIVE action abroad has protected the homeland. Our military presence in Afghanistan and our aggressive policies around the globe have seriously disrupted the enemy. Through a mix of military and paramilitary action, pre-emptive strikes, deterrent threats and surveillance we have captured many terrorist leaders, destroyed training camps and structures of communication and control, and uncovered valuable intelligence troves.
[...]
Going forward, we should more vigorously embrace technology as a tool for taking the fight to the Islamic terrorists. The same technological changes that help terrorists plot to deliver weapons of mass destruction, including low-cost information and communication over the Internet, also make it easier for the government to monitor and pre-empt terrorist plots. Libertarians overreact to the new technology, stoking fears of an Orwellian surveillance state. But properly designed programs can produce large gains in security in return for small losses of privacy and liberty.
Wow, I could not disagree more with this. Technology is not a silver bullet, and I do not ever buy the "large gains in security for small losses of privacy and liberty" argument. For a completely different take, Bruce Schneier was also asked to write a piece, but his did not make the final article due to space restrictions. So, as your link to his blog, I present his essay for your reading enjoyment:
Despite what you see in the movies and on television, it’s actually very difficult to execute a major terrorist act. It’s hard to organize, plan, and execute an attack, and it’s all too easy to slip up and get caught. Combine that with our intelligence work tracking terrorist cells and interdicting terrorist funding, and you have a climate where major attacks are rare. In many ways, the success of 9/11 was an anomaly; there were many points where it could have failed. The main reason we haven’t seen another 9/11 is that it isn’t as easy as it looks. Much of our counterterrorist efforts are nothing more than security theater: ineffectual measures that look good. Forget the “war on terror”; the difficulty isn’t killing or arresting the terrorists, it’s finding them. Terrorism is a law enforcement problem, and needs to be treated as such. For example, none of our post-9/11 airline security measures would have stopped the London shampoo bombers. The lesson of London is that our best defense is intelligence and investigation. Rather than spending money on airline security, or sports stadium security -- measures that require us to guess the plot correctly in order to be effective -- we’re better off spending money on measures that are effective regardless of the plot.
Intelligence and investigation have kept us safe from terrorism in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. If the CIA and FBI had done a better job of coordinating and sharing data in 2001, 9/11 would have been another failed attempt. Coordination has gotten better, and those agencies are better funded -- but it’s still not enough. Whenever you read about the billions being spent on national ID cards or massive data mining programs or new airport security measures, think about the number of intelligence agents that the same money could buy. That’s where we’re going to see the greatest return on our security investment.
posted by Josh Glover @ 9/11/2006 08:43:00 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
HUMINT. We've discussed it on this blog before, and it's just as important today (if not more so) than it was 5 years ago.
Technology is great for us Beltway Bandits. When the FBI, NSA, CIA, TSA, DHS, etc. buy technology products and services from the private contractors, who generally comes out ahead? You guessed it, the contractors. The U.S. public doesn't often get their money's worth. There are a lot of failed projects, cost overruns, bad software and ill-conceived hardware systems. There are kickbacks, influence-peddling, and worse. I can give citations, but I trust you believe and agree with what I'm saying here.
I say put 10,000 new covert operatives speaking Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, Syriac, Persian, Indonesian, Malay, etc. in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and beyond. Recruit from Over There, if you need to. Give scholarships to high school students to study these languages and immerse themselves in their cultures. Start a widespread training program for better understand Islam, and the foundations for its radical and violent factions.
See what we can Find Out. See what players we can Identify. See how many plots we can Uncover & Foil.
It would have been a helluva lot more useful than this asinine and ill-guided War in Iraq: Part II.
Seamus,
I could not agree more with you. In fact, if you would like me to bear your children, I am game.
I have just started reading Yossef Bodansky's "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America", which was written and published before 9/11. Two things have struck me about the book, 20 pages in:
1. I am amazed about just how much was known about Bin Laden before September 11, and even more amazed that none of this knowledge convinced the Bush Administration to take Islamic Fundamentalism in general, and Bin Laden specifically, seriously. WTF?
2. Frank Herbert was amazingly prescient. "Dune" predicted virtually all of the actions undertaken by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Herbert's brilliant literary investigation of the relationship between politics, power, and religion, and the motivations of fundamentalists should be a bloody college textbook on the subject.
As a teacher utilizing the principles of applied behavior analysis in the classroom, I am trained to view all behavior as learned. If I see a child exhibiting maladaptive/disruptive behaviors, my instinct is to analyze that behavior and try to discover the function this behavior is serving for the child. Once I have determined the function, I am then able to develop reactive (deciding how to deal with the behavior as it happens) and proactive (deciding how to teach a new, appropriate behavior that serves the same function) strategies. Applying these principles to the issue of terrorism, I believe that all of the views espoused in the posting are reactive strategies. We're looking at how to deal with terrorists in the here and now. But, if we really want to enact change and achieve some measure of peace, we need to address the root causes of terrorism. Lee and Hamilton touch briefly upon this when they speak of creating opportunity rather than despair. Put more simply, let's give them a reason to love us, instead of giving them reasons to hate us. Improved security measures, human intelligence, etc. may help to make us incrementally safer, but that's all it can do. It doesn't address the "why" of terrorism, and, therefore, we'll continue to see terror attacks. The scary thing is that, just like with my children, if you don't give them an appropriate way to satisfy the function of their behavior, they'll find new and possibly more destructive ways to satisfy it themselves.
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