The Boston Herald September 9, 2011
Safer, vigilant but wary of next attack
By Chris Cassidy
Americans are safer today than on 9/11, and a crippled al-Qaeda has failed to carry out another attack on U.S. soil, but the war on terror — now entering its second decade — is far from over, national security experts told the Herald.
Threats still loom in the Middle East, Libya and within our own borders, they said. Last night the government reported a credible but unconfirmed terror threat ahead of the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
“There will be another catastrophic attack in the U.S. at some point, and these guys will eventually get it right,” said terrorism expert Neil Livingstone, a Republican candidate for governor in Montana. “They’ll strike at a very critical target. They may have a dirty bomb or radioactive dispersion device, or they might have some type of crude nuclear biological weapon. That day is going to come.”
But sweeping progress has been made, experts said.
Heroic Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden and seized his computer files. The al-Qaeda network he heavily recruited for has shriveled. And American intelligence — touted as the first line of defense against terrorist attacks — has vastly improved.
“I think personally, we are safer,” said retired Lt. Gen. Tad Oelstrom, the director of the National Security Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “And I base that on the opinion that the agencies we’ve charged for our public safety have become so much more knowledgeable.”
But America is still a nation at war, the experts say.
“As long as you have the ideology of jihadism existing — and it is a violent ideology — you’re going to have people conducting attacks,” said Scott Stewart, a former State Department special agent, now at Stratfor.com.
“Where we’re going to win is when the ideology is really marginalized and fails to get traction and gain new recruits, when we stop having kids from Minneapolis going over to Somalia to fight.”
The death of bin Laden, whose charismatic salesmanship of jihad drew recruits and donors, may have dealt a crushing blow to the mission statement.
“I don’t think they have a message to sell, ” said Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation. “I don’t think they have a plan to sell other than violence.”
Al-Qaeda on the Arabian peninsula remains a real threat, as well, he said. Weapons from post-rebellion Libya — including mustard gas and surface-to-air missiles — for instance, could fall into the wrong hands.
But Brookes worries as well about threats that lie within our own borders. “The biggest concern is the lone-wolf, homegrown terrorist,” he said, “the guy building a bomb in the basement kind of thing.”
But not everyone agrees we’re still prone to a 9/11-style attack.
“Bin Laden sleeps with the fishes, doesn’t he?” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. “I think we’ve won.”
Pike believes the country can’t do much about the lone suicide bomber or terrorist who drives a car bomb into a hotel lobby, but he is convinced a large-scale attack simply isn’t possible.
And if the war on terror ends in our lifetime, the exact time of its demise may be hard to pinpoint.
“It’s probably going to be like T.S. Eliot,” Livingstone said. “It will end not with a bang, but a whimper.”
© Copyright 2011, The Boston Herald and Herald Media.
