Future Threat of Terrorism: Five to Twenty Years in the Future

Terrorism and Counterterrorism

Is the United States "winning" the war on terrorism? Are we losing? How do you define winning? (300-400 words) to the following questions and post it to the discussion forum, "Winning." In your response, please cite examples from current events that support your answer.

As early as 2008, the Council on Foreign Relations noted that there was increasing evidence that the U.S. was 'winning' the war on terror: "al Qaeda has not managed to mount any major attacks on an American target, much less on the American homeland, since 9/11. Those attacks that have succeeded have been fairly minor compared with past al-Qaeda atrocities: a 2004 assault on the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, killed five local employees and no Americans" (Blake 2008). Since then, attacks on U.S. soil, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, while absolutely devastating to the individuals personally affected, have been relatively self-contained and no terrorist attacks have attained the scope and ambition of the 9/11 bombings.

The U.S. has made major inroads into depleting the resources of organized terrorist infrastructures like al-Qaida and has improved information and resource coordination domestically to more effectively respond to terrorist attacks. However, the evidence suggests that "even with the killings of bin Laden and nearly all senior al-Qaeda leaders, the generally optimistic and nationalistic American people still seem to see the war on terrorism as something of a stalemate. Such is the problem when you are fighting against a somewhat abstract concept and ideology rather than a defined nation. Progress is harder to measure when you can't quantify (or even see) the enemy" (Boot 2013). Fighting terrorism can feel like a game of 'whac-a-mole' whereby once one terrorist group is contained, another pops up somewhere else. Unlike a rogue state which can finally be overtaken and a new leadership installed, terrorism (even radical Islamic terrorism) is more of a diffuse philosophy and set of techniques -- radicalism can be justified by an ever-shifting ideology in the minds of America's enemies and even while the U.S. strives to fight terrorism, new techniques and approaches can pop up that can be hard to screen for or contain.