A 9/11 Scorecard - John Tirman

INSIGHT Weekly commentary

September 7 , 2006

The Scorecard: Counterterrorism after 9/11

The rhetorical flourishes of recent weeks—and weeks to come, up to November 7th—indicate we are in another twilight struggle with evil and the nation must stand vigilant and active to save Western civilization.

"Free nations have faced new enemies and adjusted to new threats before -- and we have prevailed," said President Bush yesterday. "Like the struggles of the last century, today's war on terror is, above all, a struggle for freedom and liberty. The adversaries are different, but the stakes in this war are the same: We're fighting for our way of life, and our ability to live in freedom. We're fighting for the cause of humanity, against those who seek to impose the darkness of tyranny and terror upon the entire world."

Many have by now debunked the “Islamofascism” nonsense, the allusions to appeasement before the Second World War, the Osama/Saddam/Ahmedinejad/ Hezbollah-as-Hitler comparisons, and so on. We know better. And "freedom" is but one value at stake in the war on terror---human security and fairness being among the many others.

But it’s reasonable to ask how the United States Government has been doing in its responsibility to protect the American people, and its international obligations to promote peace and stability.

The scorecard is a mixed result, depending on how you calculate costs and benefits. But let’s make a few points that are sensible, empirically valid, and worthwhile for future policy and political action.

Al Qaeda has been weakened, but could have been destroyed. It pulled off one spectacular attack and a few, prior small ones. Since then, its involvement in violence seems confined mainly to Iraq. As an operational menace, it is greatly reduced, not least because it’s on the run. That’s a plus. But Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants should have been taken out at Tora Bora in December 2001. That five years later they still live on—goading others, speaking out, and organizing mischief—would have been hard to imagine in the first weeks after 9/11.
America itself has not been attacked. This is a plus. There isn’t any stated evidence that plots have been foiled, however, so it’s difficult to gauge if the lack of attacks is due to government action or the absence of a threat. There is very little to suggest that there was ever a domestic jihadi threat. It is plausible that tightening entry may have prevented another attempt at violence. It is equally plausible that al Qaeda concentrated its energies on Iraq, where it can attack Americans every day.
The costs have been very substantial, not only in dollars—probably approaching $300 billion or more, not including Iraq—but in civil liberties violations here and abroad, alienation of Muslims everywhere, diplomatic capital, distraction from other urgent issues, and a general sense of dread that is simply not warranted by the scale of the threat. Bush acknowledged much of this illegality yesterday (facts long denied when revealed by journalists like Dana Priest) without, again, proving that these methods yielded actual results for prevention.
The costs need to include the unraveling of the nation-building experiment in Afghanistan, which at this writing appears to be in peril. It is now producing record amounts of opiates, the government is barely clinging to legitimacy, and the jihadis are gaining ground. It could be reversed again, but the momentum is now in the wrong direction, with little apparent will in Washington to see it through.
The counterterrorism effort is global in scope, and this includes supporting—yet again—some nasty dictators and regimes in the name of “lesser evils.” So there is Pakistan, a military dictatorship with nuclear weapons that turns a blind eye to OBL and promotes jihad in Kashmir; the other “stans,” in the grip of horribly repressive henchmen; our long list of Arab friends, no more democratic or “free” than they were a decade or more ago; Turkey lapsing into old habits of blunt force; and so on. At the same time, places like Somalia and Sudan were ignored and fumbled away.
The Iraq war has to be counted in the “war on terrorism,” as its authors insist, and here the costs are colossal and mounting—in spent lives (numbering in the hundreds of thousands), dollars ($1-2 trillion, when all is said and done), a poor prospect for democracy in two of the three regions (the two that were “liberated”), a newly powerful Iran, and the lost good will of the world on September 11th, now squandered. A high toll indeed, possibly negating all the gains of post-9/11 counterterrorism, particularly if the tens of thousands of fighters in Iraq and several thousand other sympathizers around the world turn their anger directly on the American homeland.
A large-scale bureaucracy and police apparatus created in the United States for “homeland security” that is permanent, expensive, largely unnecessary in its current operations, and engaging in worst-case scenarios that have the populace relentlessly frazzled about security. While they’re body-searching little girls at the National Gallery, unmonitored container ships from Dubai and such slip into the nation’s harbors. The 9/11 Commission repeatedly gives the homeland security effort very low marks.
No sacrifice is asked of the nation overtly. Sacrifices come to the less fortunate economic classes who bear the brunt of tax cuts combined with high security spending, and who send their boys and girls in uniform to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Overall, the shifting of these eight categories does not lend confidence. The costs—moral, strategic, economic, political—have been enormous and clear. The benefits are less easy to state with confidence. We have survived. But we do not survive intact. And, one must ask, we have survived what? Is there a threat of the scale all this implies? No.

The post-9/11 counterterrorism juggernaut trades on one of the most self-pitying tropes of American politics—they hate us because we are so remarkable, and therefore we are in mortal peril. We are not in great peril. Be vigilant, alert, and active in arresting the bad guys and putting them away. The rest is waste and ruin.

—John Tirman

John Tirman has written widely on terrorism, the Middle East, and homeland security, including The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration After 9/11 (The New Press, 2004); the forthcoming Terror, Insurgenices, and States (Penn Press, 2007); and Spoils of War (1997). See Books.

Home

"Insight" archive

This is JohnTirman.com