Locating the Terrorist Threat

Dan highlighted an article by Dan Byman last week which suggested that we are safer than the current terror warnings might suggest. Terrorist arrests both inside and outside the United States since Byman’s article bolster his claim. The arrests highlight two different types of threats that we face—and raise the specter that we may be undermining our security by treating them the same. On the one hand, we have the arrest last week of Abu Issa al Hindi and the newly announced arrest of Qari Saifullah Akhtar. [Update: Thanks to reader Skip for pointing out that Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan was a very bad example.] These two exemplify the threat we must counter most urgently. Both men have in common that they are hardened al Qaeda operatives, involved in the logistics and planning of ongoing plots, one or two degrees from Osama bin Laden, and, significantly, were captured outside of the United States. They share these traits with other captured al Qaeda big fish like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al Shibh. On the other hand, we also saw last week the arrests of two mosque leaders, Mohammed M. Hossain and Yassin M. Aref, in Albany as a result of an FBI sting operation. The two are accused of helping a third man, an FBI informant, launder money supposedly generated by the sale of Stinger missiles. (Some Muslim groups and the men’s attorney are crying foul, claiming that they were victims of entrapment. Indeed, the Stinger sting has become a bit of a pattern and has been used in operations in Newark, San Diego, and Houston. In my view, entrapment is illegitimate because it takes advantage of our baser, but natural impulses to get us to commit a crime—supporting terrorist acts does not qualify as a natural impulse, however.) Leaving that aside, the Albany arrests also fit a pattern: the two men had no obvious terrorist ties and appear to be rather inept operators (trusting a guy who just shows up with a missile and so on). In this respect, they resemble the Portland terror cell (six people who tried to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban but got lost in Asia along the way) and the so-called paintball jihadists (who practiced for holy war in Kashmir by playing paintball in Virginia). I have studied the details of more than two dozen prominent terror arrests since 9/11 and we have apparently not broken up anything resembling a 9/11-style cell of al Qaeda operatives. Bottom line: the most serious threats appear to be people outside the United States, while within the country we face a more amorphous and apparently less severe threat of sympathizers or fellow-travelers with radical Islam. This suggests that with respect to the first threat we should keep doing what we’re doing: securing our borders and carefully screening entry into the United States, as well as working with foreign intelligence services to roll up al Qaeda’s worldwide apparatus. But with respect to the second threat, we can’t conduct sting operations offering to sell missiles to everyone who might be thinking malign thoughts about the United States. It seems to me that the only hope of policing this is to rely much more on Arab and Muslim communities across the country to identify “bad actors” (to use a Bushism) sitting in their mosques and coffee shops. There have been some attempts at community outreach by federal law enforcement, but I think they are in danger of being smothered by a deeply suspicious and harsh federal attitude toward Muslim-Americans and Muslim immigrants. The median sentence for “terrorism” prosecutions in the two years after 9/11 was an astonishing fourteen days—because most people caught up in the federal dragnet were not terrorists at all. The danger, of course, is that we alienate the very populations whose cooperation we need through ham-handed prosecutions that leave them afraid to talk to the government at all. Walter Russell Mead has a funny line that Europe created an angry, impoverished urban underclass in just 30 years, while it took the U.S. 300 years—and slavery—to do the same. We should not add to that underclass through misguided counterterrorism efforts at home.