The 9/11 Attacks — America’s Evolution and Stagnation in the War Against al-Qaida (Opinion)

By: Joshua D. Filler on September 09, 2011

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Photo courtesy of Andrea Booher/ FEMA

What can be said about the 9/11 anniversary that hasn’t already been spoken? It seems every television channel imaginable has a 9/11 special or series leading up to the 10-year anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in recorded history. From the perspective of one who witnessed the attacks first hand and helped build the homeland security infrastructure of today, much has changed since that day and yet much remains the same.

Overall, we are better prepared and more secure today than we were 10 years ago. Our collective awareness level alone makes it more difficult for terrorists to attack aircraft as passengers now know the old-school rule of sit back and wait for terrorists’ demands is no longer applicable in the age of the suicide bomber. This new level of awareness led to airline passengers tackling both the shoe bomber in 2001 and the underwear bomber in 2009. While we have thwarted numerous plots from those involving the bombing of aircraft over the Atlantic to car bombs at Christmas tree lighting ceremonies, we have also been lucky when our enemy’s failures are all that stood between us and mass death and terror in Times Square or aboard aircraft over Detroit.

It is at the airport where life has probably changed the most. No longer can friends and family go to the airplane’s gate to greet or say farewell to loved ones, and of course we all must remove our shoes and limit our liquids, etc. before boarding the airline. These changes are a small inconvenience more so than a threat to civil liberties. However, the newest tools in the Transportation Security Administration’s arsenal such as full-body pat downs and body scanners at least cross the line into the illogical if not the illegal insofar as 2-year-old children are subjected to these measures with little or no basis and Nigerian men with no passport or boarding pass are allowed to board transcontinental flights.

For state and local governments, one of the biggest changes since 9/11 is the fact that foreign policy and events must be monitored and understood in ways never before seen in the history of our country. Prior to 9/11, foreign affairs was exclusively a federal mission and while the federal government still has exclusive jurisdiction over setting foreign policy, there can be no doubt that what happens in Libya and Egypt today can have a profound impact on the security of major urban centers across America tomorrow. After all, while the 9/11 attacks were conducted inside the U.S. homeland they were conceived of and managed from one of the world’s poorest and most desolate countries — Afghanistan.

We are once again a divided nation. It did not take long for the rush of unity and patriotism following 9/11 to fade. That division is stronger than ever today with the country deeply split over how to conduct homeland security. Unfortunately, these divisions sometimes break down along partisan lines with Democrats and Republicans favoring or opposing a policy depending on which president is proposing it. Democrats wailed when President George W. Bush used waterboarding on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but cheered when President Barack Obama put two bullets into Osama bin Laden (all indications are the May 2011 bin Laden mission was a “shoot on sight kill mission”) and were virtually silent when Obama earlier placed the first-ever U.S. citizen on the CIA’s kill/capture list. Republicans still cheered Bush’s Iraq invasion even when it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction and the administration’s plans in the days following the fall of Saddam Hussein were entirely inadequate, but later jeered at Obama for trying to take time to deliberate on how to handle Afghanistan. Perhaps we need a blind taste test for homeland security policy to determine what people really think.

Despite the TSA’s unnecessary groping, our civil liberties are still largely intact, but we must remain ever vigilant as it is the nature of government to overreach. Even so, much of the criticism of the homeland security and counterterrorism policies put in place after 9/11, such as the PATRIOT Act, is put forward in a vacuum devoid of any historical context. Before the PATRIOT Act, the federal government could use roving wire taps against drug cartels and the mafia but not against al-Qaida members. Such a discrepancy is not a civil liberties triumph but an irrational hole in homeland security.

Looking back, during World War II and the Civil War the federal government took extraordinary measures to maintain security. These historical actions include: the seizure of property and internment of American citizens of Japanese, German and Italian decent during World War II based solely on their race or ethnicity; and Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the absence of Congressional authorization and his placement of thousands of U.S. citizens under indefinite military detention, and his censoring and even closing of newspapers hostile to the Union cause. Hardly the high water marks in American civil liberties history.

Unfortunately, what has not changed since 9/11 is our inability to consistently articulate the nature of the struggle we find ourselves in and which the 9/11 attacks were a byproduct of — radical Islam, the place where rage, politics and religion form a toxic brew that can drive men to highjack and fly commercial aircraft into buildings knowing they and thousands of others will die. The inability to clearly understand radical Islam and counter it ideologically is our greatest weakness since discrediting such motives is what will ultimately lead to strategic “victory” over it.

Today we tread lightly on what this struggle is all about and who it is between in the false hope that by not confronting the issue head on or mixing it with other violent and radical movements (“violent extremism”) we can somehow lower the ideological temperature and stop the conflict from spreading as if our enemies are not clear in their intent and motivation. The struggle is for the heart and soul of Islam and whether a small fraction of Muslims will drive others to believe their religion requires them to rebuild the caliphate and convert or kill infidels through jihad to achieve this end.

All of the operational enhancements — such as greater intelligence on the enemy, security enhancements at critical infrastructure, interoperable communications, etc. — are vital but nonetheless tactical in nature and cannot achieve strategic victory. Even the killing of bin Laden, while a huge accomplishment, has not and will not end the fight any more than the death of a single Soviet leader ended the ideological basis of the Cold War. In the end, the people of the Muslim world, like the people of the communist world, must be the ones to throw off the shackles and place radical Islam where it belongs, alongside communism on the ash heap of history.

Joshua Filler is the founder and president of Filler Security Strategies Inc., a homeland security consulting firm in Washington, D.C. He served as the first ever director of the Office of State & Local Government Coordination for the U.S. DHS in Washington, D.C.

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