Blog Briefing Presentation Sept 8 2005

Rayburn House Office Building

By Michael Kraft

ARE WE SAFER FROM TERRORISM NOW THAN 4 YEARS AGO?

Thank you, Andy Cochran and Chairman Sensenbrenner's staff for helping arrange this important briefing and discussion.

We are not as safe as we could or should be—partly because of the evolving nature of the international terrorism threat, and partly because we do not pay enough attention to the nuts and bolts of our counterterrorism efforts. I also want to talk a bit about the psychological aspects of fighting terrorism, for the terrorist are not motivated solely by reaction to our foreign policies and operations in Iraq.

During the election campaign we heard a lot of rhetoric from the White House that we must fight the terrorists overseas so they do not hit us at home. We were told that we will spend what is necessary to achieve victory in the war on terror. (President Bush Speech, Oakridge Tenn., July 12, 2004.)

But when it came to the hard work of providing the actual funding for key counterterrorism programs, both the Executive Branch and Congress have fallen short.

A prime case is the Antiterrorism Training Assistance Program (ATA) which the State Department runs to help improve the capabilities of foreign civilian law enforcement Agencies. The courses range from training dog team to sniff out explosives, to airport and maritime security, hostage negotiation, crisis management and other skills. The program is important not only top the host countries but bolstering the capabilities of these governments in helping protect Americans who travel or live abroad.

Yet OMB keeps cutting the budget requests, even after 9/11 before they went to Congress where future cuts are usually made. In the pending FY 06 Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill, the House cut $11 million dollars from the Administration's $133.5 million request. It also cut funds from some smaller programs, such as the Terrorist Interdiction Program used at international airports. These programs are buried deep in the Nonproliferation, Antiterrorism, Demining and Related Agencies (NADR) account and few House members or staff probably were even aware of the cuts the Appropriations Committee made in approving the bill.

Now $11 million may not sound like much in the greater picture of US government spending, but it can help train a lot of persons in countries which need to strengthen their capabilities to counter terrorist threats. And as the al Qaeda threat seems to be evolving into a somewhat decentralized movement and attacks can pop up anywhere—Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey-- to name a few countries, it is important that we try to bolster the capabilities in a wide range of countries. Each course costs something like $300,000 to $500,000 for two or three weeks, depending on the nature of the training and duration. Thus $11 million can go pretty far.

The Senate Appropriations Committee fortunately approved the full Administration request. It is important that the conferees accept the Senate mark and provide the full funding request for the ATA and related counterterrorism programs.

This year's House cut comes against a background of budget cuts, even after 9/11. The pattern goes like this. OMB consistently cuts the State Department‘s request for the various counterterrorism program -- an average of 20 per cent for the first three years after 9/11 according to a calculation I once made. Then the Congressional appropriators impose additional cuts. Last year the House mark cut 13% from the request.

The budgeters in both OMB and on the Hill are engaging in what I call the baseline mentality. The tendency seems to be to look at the previous year's budget as the baseline and say to the program managers, for example “you should be happy, we are giving you a five or six per cent increase.“ Instead, they should be looking more carefully at what are the requirements—how many countries need and are willing to take part in training programs and what are the capabilities of the US Government in providing the courses. We should look at the budget on the basis of needs, not what was appropriated the previous year. But this takes, to cite one of the President's phrases, hard work.

Helping other countries strengthen their counterterrorism laws, in coordination with the United Nations, and train their investigators and prosecutors in implementing the law should be another important part of our counterterrorism efforts. But a proposed State Department-Justice Department program to do so has been languishing for a couple of years because of budget, staffing and bureaucratic inertia. The programs would cost less that $1 million a year.

Other programs have also been hurt by budget cuts, including the Treasury Department as well as the State Department components involved in countering terrorism financing. Some of my colleagues are addressing the issue and problems of cutting off terrorism funding. But we need a flow of funding to our investigators and trainer to do a more effective job in this very difficult area. Even the FBI has suffered from funding shortages, and there is a description of this in the 9/11 Commission report.

Meanwhile Congress siphons funding into favorite port barrel projects and complicates good existing programs. The US Government has had for about two decades a good functioning interagency program to coordinate and fund counterterrorism research and development projects. This Technical Support Working Group (TSWG) tries to make sure the various agencies are not duplicating their R&D efforts and also it funds R&D for potentially promising projects that could be useful for more than one agency but are not already being funded. But Senators and others have directed funds to their own favorite universities, to the tune several years ago of $10 million each for at least two universities. By contrast, the State Department budget for the R&D program has remained frozen at about $1.8 million for half a dozen years. DOD and some other agencies make up the rest of the budget, about $70 million. The TSWG also has been conducting joint R&D programs for years with three allied countries and is about to add a fourth. Along comes the Homeland Security Department and which starts off trying to set up its own program, including projects with some of the same foreign partners. Finally, with some effort and expenditure of time, the efforts are being coordinated, at least to some extent. But here is a case of the nuts and bolts being in disarray, at least for a time being.

At times I am reminded of the Pogo cartoon saying: We have met the enemy and he is us.

TERRORIST PSYCHOLOGY

Turning to the real enemy, the terrorists, I just wanted to make a couple of points:

One hears far too many clichés about terrorism -- hat we have to address the root causes, that the terrorists are terrorists because they are poor, desperate, and/or oppressed.

First of all, many of the terrorists, especially the leaders, are from middle class backgrounds with formal education. Second, the phrase”dealing with the root causes” is so superficial. As one writer – I don't remember who --once remarked, there are almost as many causes of terrorism as there are terrorists. For some of the terrorists, their root cause is the destruction of a country, or a government or even the Western Judeo-Christian civilization as we know it. For others, their goal just seems to be killing as many of the “other” as possible, regardless of the practical fallout consequences on their own people.

Most observers and pundits seem to focus on the political motivations of the terrorists: they do not like our foreign policy, our involvement in Iraq, or the regimes they consider repressive. But I think there is a psychological and sociological aspect that is often overlooked.

I still remember watching a television interview with a middle-aged Pakistan man shortly before we invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban hosts of Bin Laden.

“Everything that is wrong in the world in the fault of the Americans and British,” he said emphatically. This approach of blaming the outside powers for every problem in one'sown country is all too common. The Middle East and South Asia newspapers, particularly, are full of this. In early 1983 I was on a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff trip to Lebanon to look at proposals for large US economic assistance to the largely Shiite areas of the south. For several days, our four man team had heard local officials blaming the Israelis, the Americans, the Christians, the Muslins, the Druze (fill in the blanks) for their problems. Finally, after one local Lebanese official was blaming the French—who had been out of there since WWII, one of my teammates—an economist who was on his first visit to the Middle East, answered back in exasperation “don't you people ever take responsibility for yourselves?.”

I was struck by the video statement of one of the British-born bombers of the London underground that he acted because the West had been killing and “gassing” Muslims.

The only gassing of Muslims that I am aware of in recent decades has been Saddam Hussein's gassing of his own Iraqi citizens in the Kurdish areas and the Egyptian use of gas in the war with Yemen in the 60's. Yet there is a tendency to see themselves as victims. The recent bombings against the London transport system have prompted a greater effort to understand what motives these angry young men, and so far it seems to be a combination of frustrations—social, status and even sexual as well whatever political slogans they are mouthing—to rationalize attempts to murder and maim people on a large scale.

Dealing with these attitudes and channeling them away from violence is not going to be easy, Anger is not easily dealt with rationally. But the governments here, and overseas, must pay attention, and so must the moderate elements in the Islamic communities. Putting out Madison Avenue glossy pamphlets or trying to tell a “happy story” about the US to persons overseas is not going to work. It will take a long hard educational and cultural effort that needs to be sustained over the long haul.

Finally, I want to comment briefly on legislation –which was my specialty before I retired from the State Department counterterrorism office. An important part of the US counterterrorism law in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. It includes provision that makes it a criminal offense to knowingly provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations designated as such by the Secretary of State, or for specific acts of terrorism. Material support includes funding, financial services, weapons, training etc. One area that was not really considered at the time the legislation was drafted a decade ago was the use of the internet by terrorists. Consideration should be given to whether providing internet services ought to be added to the definition of material support. This is, admittedly, a tricky area because of free speech concerns and the availability of foreign servers.

Finally, there has been a great deal of emotion about some aspects of the Patriot Act, which is before Congress for renewal. Some of the anti-renewal campaign has largely been focused on the issue of access to library records. This is unfortunate. There may well be times that knowing who has been checking out books on how to make explosives could be useful in preventing terrorist attacks or investigating attacks. There was no intention of tracking what the general public might be reading. But knowing who is interested in making a terrorist weapon can be important. I'll leave it to the Justice Department to discuss the details, but I mention the issue because there are times when our rightful concern about privacy and civil liberties does run into legitimate security concerns. The issues are difficult enough without becoming clouded with emotions and jumping to conclusions. Unfortunately, in terms of the information about bomb making or other weapons, the genie is already out of the books and onto the internet.