The Beating Goes On

Today's news brings yet more frustration with how the government, and the White House in particular, is handling the aftermath of the bin Laden killing. But at least the news is mixed. The good news is that the President has made the right basic decision not to release photographs that are gruesome, that would incite violence, that would be seen as trophy mongering, and that would not persuade real crazies that bin Laden is dead anyway, anymore than tapes of bin Laden taking credit for the World Trade Center destruction persuaded very large numbers of Arabs that Al Qaeda had anything to do with 911. If the President had to overrule members of his cabinet, then so much the better: that speaks well of his leadership.

The bad news is that we have still more cross messaging coming from the Administration. In this case it is composed of CIA director Leon Panetta saying that the photographs would be made public at some point, though he did not say when. What Panetta should be trying to do is bury this story, not say things to extend its life.

The decision to say no more about the raid, the other significant news of the day on this story, seems to me to be an obvious result of the embarrassments of yesterday's news. I can pretty easily imagine the President being quite annoyed by his subordinates' failure to tell an efficient lie, and simply ordering everyone to just shut up before they cause even more damage and look even more incompetent than they already do.

The responsibility for keeping everyone on the same sheet of music in and near the White House is not directly that of the President. It is the responsibility of his Chief of Staff. In this case, it seems to me obvious that this official has failed in that responsibility. The President reportedly does not like instability in his personal staff, but he needs to make a decision about whether failure in this case, if not others, ought to be overlooked or even rewarded. If he does not cashier his Chief of Staff, that, it seems to me, would be a poor reflection on his leadership.

I have been asked by a magazine different from my own what I think the death of bin Laden really means. My answer will be published as part of the symposium I think in a few weeks. In the meantime, lest anyone be forced to wait beyond the limits of their patience, let me summarize my views here.

First, the assertion that bin Laden's death ends what used to be called the war on terror is mainly not true. It is not true that his demise will cause all of the salafi terrorists in the world to say, well, that's the end of that – – let's think of something else to do with our time. The real sources of this form of terrorism, as I have written on several occasions before, reside in the blocked modernization of Middle Eastern societies, and the outwardly pointed chiliastic religious energies that have flowed from it. The deeply social frustrations that give rise to this form of religious violence, deposited into politics in a political age, will not end just because one charismatic leader has been taken out of the picture. Besides, there may be some truth to the argument that the diffusion of terror cells in recent years, the so-called franchising of al-Qaeda, may be a potent formula for more trouble. I have never been convinced by this argument, but I think it would be unwise to prematurely rule it out. Time will tell, I suppose.

So the problem we have with Islamist terrorism is not solved once and for all. But I think it has been exaggerated for much of the past ten years, and I think it is reasonable to conclude that bin Laden's death is a significant inflection point in our favor. Bin Laden was charismatic, able to raise large sums of money from wealthy Saudis and others, and able to tie together the raucous factions of an under-institutionalized organization made up of fanatics from many countries. It will not be easy for al-Qaeda replace bin Laden. If Ayman al-Zawahiri replaces him, or tries to, it may lead to the disintegration of any central command. Not many Arab terrorists who are not Egyptian want to take orders from someone who is. Of course, all this is speculation; we will have to pay attention, wait, and see what the future brings.

Second, it does seem to me, however, that the death of bin Laden is an important symbolic bookend on what began on September 11, 2001. If we are wise, we will take the opportunity of this psychological closure to re-examine many of the policies set in motion after 911 that, in my view, were either ill advised from the start or which have since run off the tracks.

We should, in my view, examine very closely the reasons why it took the CIA almost a decade to find this man. Something is not right with the way our very abundantly endowed intelligence community spends its money. And it is not right now very long after the end of the Cold War.

We should, as well, rethink the two supposedly major reforms of the post-911 era: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and of the National Intelligence Directorate. In my view, both of these reforms were poorly conceived and poorly implemented. They have created bureaucracies with thick new layers of gratuitous busywork to confuse and retard the functions of these organizations. At the very beginning of the 21st-century, we essentially created late-19th century organizations. These arrangements are not conducive to our security. They have created circumstances in which very ponderous organizations, organizations in which responsibilities, budget authority and staff are misaligned, can never keep up with the activity cycle of likely enemies. And the problems that these organizations may cause far transcend the problem of Islamist terrorism. In the future there will be other kinds of challenges, and I don't see that either arrangement is conducive to success.

There is more. Over the past decade we have either allowed or abetted the institutionalization of paranoia. The subculture of American media has contributed to this, for its technology conduces to present orientation and an almost complete lack of context in all it reports. But this has been a failure of leadership and of government primarily, not of the media which, for the most part, knows not what it does except to follow its sponsors and their money. Taking off our shoes at airports before boarding a plane, frisking elderly nuns so as to avoid being accused of profiling, putting messages on large signs above our highways saying "report suspicious activity", and all such pointless nonsense has got to stop. The routinization of fear is very foolish. It actually diminishes the attentiveness of the public over time; it banalizes the problem, turning it into white noise. Nor does it contribute to the deterrence of attack. The institutionalization of paranoia actually invites attack. It tells would-be enemies how easy it is to terrorize Americans, and also how inexpensive since we do most of the psychological set up ourselves. The fact that we have not been attacked much since 911 here in the United States, and that nothing we have experienced has been on anything like the scale of September 11 itself, is more testimony to how much we have exaggerated the problem than it is to anything we have done in terms of homeland security to prevent follow-on attack.

Of course it is true that before 911 we were much too lax in our precautions. It is true that we needed a department of homeland security of some sort, because our three main border security organizations – – the Coast Guard, the Border Patrol, and Customs – – were in three separate executive departments. This made absolutely no sense. We had facilities on the border, in Arizona for example, that housed both Customs and Border Patrol personnel, and they did not have interoperable communications equipment. Clearly, something needed to be done. But what we did was not it. (This is a long story, and it has been told elsewhere; so no need to repeat it here.) All I am trying to say is that while we do need to be vigilant, and we do need to redesign government to align with changes in the security environment, we need to do these things intelligently, and we need to adjust when we see that initial efforts have been suboptimal. Bin Laden's death provides an opportunity, and not just a pretext, to get busy.

This does not exhaust all the policy fixes we should be making. Just to take one other example, few Americans realize it but there are jihadi websites whose home bases are in the United States. Our government knows they exist, and it allows them to exist. You no doubt want to know why. One reason is that there are some people in the government, mainly in the Department of Justice, who think that by monitoring these sites, and by sifting through data of those who come and go to them, we can gain important intelligence information. Those of this view believe that there is more value in this monitoring process for national security then there is in shutting these sites down. I respectfully disagree. Our purpose should be to put an end to these activities, not to play games with them. I think I have the law on my side in this case as well, because those who host websites must sign an agreement pledging, essentially, that they will not be responsible for allowing the incitement of violence. But that of course is what these websites do.

Just as we should be turning down the volume on jihadi websites in our own country, and trying to cooperate with others to eliminate them abroad, we should finally, after nearly a decade of flailing around, get serious about our own counter-messaging strategy. As an article that will appear in the next issue of The American Interest argues, we have the perfect model: How al-Qaeda soiled its own laundry in Iraq. A very high-level terrorist even went to the trouble, for reasons that are still not entirely clear, to tell us how to harm his colleagues and their organizations in this regard. He knows what he's talking about. We need to take his advice.

Alas, the problem here is not only or even primarily an intellectual one. Prestigious reports identified the essential problems many years ago; one by Ambassador Ed Djerejian stands out in my memory as being particularly important and well-crafted. The problem is really an organizational one focused on the absence of effective leadership. As with many aspects of American policy in recent years, not least the non-kinetic aspects of the effort in Afghanistan, we have not enjoyed unity of effort, let alone unity of command, in this area. There have been multiple organizations in multiple departments trying to do more or less the same thing and, not surprisingly to anyone who has ever worked in government, they have been tripping over each other and arguing with each other and trying to seize budget share from each other now for years on end. To the best of my knowledge, no one has even tried to assemble a functional budget for US counter-messaging strategy. We don't know what we're spending, how we're spending it, and what we're getting for our money. This is a failure of leadership, and it is a failure that falls on both Republican and Democratic administrations. We will not fix this problem until someone, probably the President himself, realizes that it is important and focuses attention on it.

Now, with the death of bin Laden, is a logical time to expect and to push for a renewed focus, one that can take stock of the situation after an important achievement, and that can conceive a strategy to capitalize on our success and drive al-Qaeda altogether out of business. This is a time to be pressing our advantage, but instead, what are we doing? We are arguing about photographs of a dead man. There are Republicans in the Senate who are even trying to take partisan advantage of the White House's missteps. How pathetic.

I wonder if I'll be brave enough to read tomorrow morning's newspaper.