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  • Fighting Terrorism*
  • Lee H. Hamilton (bio)

It is my pleasure to be with you today. I want to share some thoughts on the work of the 9/11 Commission and how we can pursue a more effective counter-terrorism strategy.

Terrorism is the primary national security challenge confronting the United States and will be for many years. We have not been attacked, at home, since 9/11. But that does not mean the threat is fading. There have been twice as many terrorist attacks since 9/11 as in the three years prior to 9/11.

To win the war on terrorism, we must focus on five essential elements-the "five I's"-identification, integration, international, intelligence, and implementation.

By that I mean:

  1. 1. identifying the threat, so that the strategy is designed to confront the enemy;

  2. 2. integrating all of the tools of American power, so that the strategy is comprehensive;

  3. 3. getting international cooperation because every single action that we take in counterterrorism is strengthened by international help;

  4. 4. getting better intelligence, so that we can prevent attacks; and

  5. 5. implementation, so that policy is effectively carried out. [End Page 379]

I. Identify

First, how should we identify the threat? Who is the enemy?

It has been several years since 9/11, and it is still not clear who we are fighting. Many hard questions are not fully answered:

  • • Are we fighting an enemy that poses a lethal and ongoing threat to Americans? Or are we fighting a phantom enemy-a vastly overrated extremist group, mortally wounded by our assault on Afghanistan?

  • • Are we fighting an enemy acting out of hatred for America and our values of freedom and democracy? Or an enemy acting out of hatred for American policies: our support for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel, and our invasion of Iraq?

  • • Are we fighting a single, global organization, uniquely powerful and coordinated by hidden leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan? Or are we fighting countless organizations around the world-acting on their own, but drawing inspiration from Osama bin Laden?

Pick up a newspaper and you see the problem. In Iraq alone, you'll see references to terrorists, insurgents, Saddam-loyalists, al Qaeda-affiliates, Islamists, Baathists, foreign fighters, and Iraqi nationalists-just to name a few. No one can be all of those things at once. The outgoing Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, puts it bluntly: "We can't even agree on who we are fighting."

The same is true globally. Is somebody who blows up a nightclub in Bali trying to change something in Indonesia, or are they part of a global conspiracy against the United States? What about somebody who sets off a bomb in Pakistan, Israel, Madrid, Morocco, or Chechnya?

Getting this right is critical. We have limited resources. How we define the enemy affects how we attack the enemy. If al Qaeda is simply a group of people intent on destroying America, then we can hunt them down and capture or kill them-one by one. If al Qaeda is part of a kind of jihadist international-a consortium of groups with grievances against the United States that wants to drive the United States out of Islamic nations, overthrow governments, and establish fundamentalist regimes-then killing one terrorist does little good if another always rises to take his place.

We spent a lot of time looking at these questions on the 9/11 Commission. We found an enemy motivated by disagreement with specific U.S. policies, and [End Page 380] by the desire to create theocratic government in Islamic lands-a present day Islamic "caliphate."

This enemy can be identified as:

  1. 1. al Qaeda, a stateless terrorist network, led by Osama bin Laden, that hit us on 9/11. The inner core of al Qaeda is a relatively small group of several hundred, with perhaps a cadre in the few thousands who are closely affiliated; and

  2. 2. a radical ideology, inspired in part by al Qaeda, that has spawned terrorist groups and attacks around the globe. These people identify with the jihadist cause and its ideology, and may number in the millions.

Beyond these groups there are 1.3 billion Muslims around...

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