In reading the “year in review” articles from around the media and blogosphere, I came upon a trend that may be shocking when put all together in a list: Joe Biden was right… in some ways.
Biden predicted that the world would test the new President. We conservatives took that as proof Obama was weak on foreign policy, but during this year it wasn’t a world crisis that faced Obama, it was terrorism right here on American soil.
For all of Homeland Security Sec. Janet Napolitano’s edicts early on in the year about “right wing extremists”, it was REAL terrorists that tried time and time again to attack and kill Americans this year.
(From a Time Mag article)
• In January, Bryant Neal Vinas, a Long Island convert to Islam, plead guilty to helping al-Qaeda in a plot to blow up a train in Penn Station.
• Late in 2008, Shirwa Ahmed, a Somali-American college student from Minneapolis, became the first American suicide bomber on record when he killed 29 people in an attack in Somalia. Earlier in the year, the FBI had revealed that at least 20 Somali-Americans from the Minneapolis area had traveled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab, a radical militia tied to al-Qaeda. Five Somali-Americans are believed to have died in fighting there this year, and Somali officials say at least one more unnamed American citizen has become a suicide bomber on behalf of al-Shabab.
• In June, Abdulhakim Muhammed, an Arkansas convert to Islam, was accused of killing one soldier and wounding another in an attack at a military recruitment center in Little Rock.
• In September, an Illinois man, Michael Finton, who converted to Islam in prison, was accused of trying to blow up a Federal building in Springfield.
• In October, David Coleman Headley, a Chicago businessman, was arrested for allegedly plotting a terrorist attack on a Danish newspaper that had published controversial cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammed. (Tahawwur Rana, a Pakistani-Canadian resident of Chicago was also arrested in connection with the same plot.) Headley was later additionally charged with abetting the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 2008.
• In November, Maj. Nidal Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants who had grown up in the U.S., was accused of going on a shooting spree at Fort Hood, killing 13 and wounding 30.
• Also in November, eight Somali-American men from Minnesota were charged with terrorism-related counts involving al-Shabaab. Six other had been charged previously. Most of the men were charged in absentia because they remain in Somalia, along with dozens of Somali-Americans who are believed to have joined the Qaeda-linked militia.
• And earlier this month, five men from the Washington, D.C., area were detained in Pakistan, where local officials say they had been trying to join the fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Ramy Zamzam, said to be the leader of the group, is a Howard University dental student; two others are sons of businessmen.
• Some other cases involve legal residents who are not U.S. citizens, such as Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan suspect arrested in Denver and charged with a plot to bomb targets in New York, and Jordanian Hosam Smadi, arrested in Dallas, accused of trying blow up a skyscraper.
And then on Christmas Day, another attempted attack on an airliner from Amsterdam to Detroit. Thankfully the attack failed due to the incompetence of the terrorist and the courage of the passengers.
This caps off a decade that redefined the word terrorism, and finally tasked us with substantively fighting it for the first time.
However, it seems over the past year and the post 9-11 decade that terrorists connected or homegrown will find any weakness and exploit any good will Americans have. They can recruit in ever evolving ways to evade our security. They will discover new and more devious ways of killing themselves and other that will be harder and harder to catch. They’ll continue to set up camps to train others that will be in more remote or more radical countries. Tighter security isn’t the ultimate answer. The shoe bomber forced all of us to take our shoes off after 2002. So the revelation that the Detroit plane bomber had explosive underwear beckons me to draw a line in the proverbial anti-terror sand. Fighting war after war, building up pre-industrial nation after nation is not the end game. So are we damned to a never-ending game of cat and mouse, murder and retaliation for decades to come?
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How do we win, then? While it’s an inevitability that this war on terror will last decades, we’d hope it could be tamped down in the second decade of the fight. Here’s my hypothesis… and I’ll warn you, it will be very philosophical.
As a stated by many others, even calling the fight a war on “terrorism” isn’t accurate, but I’ll use it out of consistency and to make a point. There is a point to be found in the announcement of a “war” on a tactic. That’s how we fought it for 7 ½ years and even more so today. Hence the “we catch a shoe bomber, everyone take off your shoes” mentality. Even more broadly the “If there’s a terrorist in your country we’ll invade” mentality. Not to say that we should do away with either because in the short term they do accomplish goals. The issue is they don’t end the conflict.
They way to end this war, after changing your own mindset, is to change the targets of radicalization. The truth is there are limited amounts of committed recruiters to the radical form of Islam but a large population of possible converts. It’s easy to deal with the committed people at the top, they must be killed or captured, period. But to prevent a generational conversion and thus a generational conflict is to fight on the same battlefield as the radicals, the mind.
There is an ideology that, regardless of your religion, one can latch onto and favor: freedom…Freedom to be a Muslim, or Jew, or Christian, or an atheist, freedom to wear a Hijab (headscarf) or not, etc. That underlying assertion, freedom, should convert into democratic governments and an overall more tolerant populace. This would give them the power to reject the arm of radicalism and/or throw off a ruling radical tyrant. All of this could lead up to a world in which American troops don’t have to defend against terror, we don’t have to keep them on the run. It will be second nature to everyone to resist tyranny physically or psychologically. This would make the few radicals left without recruits and without a base of support. That is where the war ends.
Now don’t get me wrong, a process like this could take years of commitment from multiple American and world leaders, but it would ensure that the next generation of the Muslim world doesn’t end up as bait for Osama bin Laden’s acolytes.
Muslim-American groups should also embrace this effort. If there is as they say, no radical elements in the Koran, it should be a simple transition in mindset for both Muslim and non-Muslim.
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