ASCF Report | 6.13.16
By Alan W. Dowd
Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper recently admitted that ISIS operatives mounting “a
raid like they did in Paris or Brussels” here in the U.S. is “something we
worry about a lot.”
To some, this seems like an
impossibility. They reassure themselves that the oceans and friendly allies
buffer us from the sort of influx of ISIS fighters that Europe is weathering. In
reality, our enemies are using our friendly neighbors and our open borders as
avenues into our country.
Networks and Skills
Consider what Adm. Kurt Tidd,
commander of SOUTHCOM says about the gathering jihadist threat in the Americas:
“We just have to recognize that this theater is a very attractive target and is
an attractive pathway” for what he calls “the extremist Islamist movement.” Tidd
reports that the Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL) has attracted 100-150
recruits from Latin America, and he confirms that an unknown number have
returned or attempted to return to the Americas.
Gen. John Kelly,
Tidd’s predecessor at SOUTHCOM, explains why this is so worrisome. According toKelly, while
the Islamic State’s Latin American recruits are in Syria, “they’ll get good at
killing, and they’ll pick up some real job skills in terms of explosives and
beheadings and things like that.” He adds that existing human smuggling
networks are “so efficient that if a terrorist or almost anyone wants to get
into our country, they just pay the fare.” He grimly concedes that “The amount
of movement and the sophistication of the network overwhelms our ability to
stop everything.”
Consider that Mexico is home to thousands of Syrian nationals, many of them
illegal immigrants who have been smuggled by drug cartels. Individuals affiliated
with Iran, Hezbollah and al Qaeda are known to swim among this group, as YNet (Israel’s
largest news outlet) reports.
YNet describes the restive Mexican state of Chiapas as “a hub of radical
Islamist activity.”
Consider that the Honduran
press has uncovered “a criminal network that paid Honduran officials to
illegally register foreigners as legal residents, which gave them access to
documents that could then be used to gain broader access to the Western
hemisphere,” as The Washington Times reports. At
least 100 Palestinians and Syrians obtained these fraudulent documents. (If
that number doesn’t raise concerns, recall that just 19 al-Qaeda operatives
maimed Manhattan and the Pentagon, or that a seven-man ISIS assault team laid
siege to Paris, murdering 130.)
Consider that in 2011, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano
raised concerns about collaboration between Mexican drug cartels and jihadist
terrorists. “We have, for some time, been thinking about what would happen if,
say, al Qaeda were to unite with the Zetas” cartel. As evidenced by Iran’s 2011
plot to subcontract out the assassination of a Saudi diplomat to the Zetas
cartel, concerns over collaboration between Middle Eastern terrorists and
Mexican drug cartels are anything but outlandish.
Consider a 2014 Texas
Department of Public Safety report warning that ISIS militants “are expressing
an increased interest in the notion that they could clandestinely infiltrate
the southwest border of U.S., for terror attack.”
Consider that leaked
diplomatic cables reveal the U.S. seeking international assistance to monitor “the
presence, intentions, plans and activities of terrorist groups, facilitators
and support networks—including, but not limited to, Hezbollah, Hamas…[and] al
Qaeda…in the tri-border area”—an ungoverned region where Brazil, Argentina and
Paraguay merge. The British newspaper The Guardiancalls the tri-border area “the beating heart of Islamic fundamentalism in South
America.”
Nor is the threat limited to
Latin America. Consider a 2015 Senate committee report that concluded, “The
nexus between known or suspected terrorists in eastern Canada and the northern
parts of the U.S. represents a significant national security threat…
Communities in Minnesota and New York, which are adjacent to Ontario and
Quebec, have recently experienced apprehensions of individuals on terrorist
charges,” including operatives “charged with recruiting and conspiring to
provide support to ISIL.”
Moreover, it is not a stretch
to say that we have already endured Paris-style raids—and that the enemy is
already here. Consider the soft-target attacks on Ft. Hood, the Boston
Marathon, the Chattanooga recruiting center, San Bernardino and Orlando. Or consider
that 71 Americanshave been arrested, indicted or convicted for joining or supporting ISIS;
250 Americans have attempted to travel to the Middle East to join ISIS; and the
FBI has 900 active investigations into ISIS-inspired operatives in all 50 states.
Worrisome
The picture is just as
worrisome overseas. The number of foreigner fighters aligned with ISIS in Iraq
and Syria doubled between mid-2014 and the end of 2015. After almost two years
of hamstrung U.S. airstrikes, ISIS controls some 20,000 square-miles of Iraq and
Syria. Thirty-four militant groups from around the world—from the Philippines
to Uzbekistan to Nigeria—have pledged alliance to ISIS. And 10 countries are
ISIS “provinces.” A CNN analysisreveals ISIS and its disciples have murdered 1,390 people in 90 terrorist attacks in
21 countries outside Iraq and Syria.
Why is this happening? It’s
at least partly a function of a White House that refuses to admit America is at
war. In 2009, the Obama administration expunged the “war on terrorism” phraseology from
official pronouncements. In 2011, after the takedown of Osama bin Laden, the president
declared that “The tide of war is receding.” In 2013, he said “core al Qaeda”
was “on the path to defeat.” In 2014, he assured the American people that
it was time “to turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our
foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” and comparedISIS to a “JV team” in “Lakers uniforms.” And by 2015, U.S. defense spending
had tumbled to 3.1 percent of GDP (down from 4.7 percent of GDP in 2010).
All of this was strangely at
odds with the views of key national-security figures inside the administration.
In 2009, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta said, “There’s no question this is a
war.” In 2010, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “We are a nation at
war.” In 2014, Brett McGurk, President Obama’s envoy to the anti-ISIS
coalition, called ISIS—which, it pays to recall, reconstituted from the
remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq— “worse than al Qaeda.” Far from confirming that
the tide of war was receding, Gen. Michael Flynn, head of the Defense Intelligence
Agency from 2012 to 2014, argued: “We have to energize every element of
national power—similar to the effort during WWII or during the Cold War—to
effectively resource what will likely be a multigenerational struggle.” In
2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter reported, “We’re at war…There are American
troops in combat every day.”
Indeed, after Navy SEAL
Charles Keating IV was killed in a gun battle with
ISIS fighters in northern Iraq, Carter confirmed the obvious: “He died in
combat.” Yet according to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest,
Keating “was not in a combat mission” but was “engaged in a mission to offer
training, advice and assistance to Iraqi forces.”
It’s difficult “to energize
every element of national power” if the White House insists we’re not at war.
Given that there are 41
jihadist groups in 24 countries today (up from 21 in 18 countries in 2004);
that Clapper reports there are more terrorist safe havens today “than at any
time in history”; that al Qaeda is resurging in Afghanistan; that ISIS controls 20,000
square-miles of real estate in the heart of the Middle East; that ISIS has spread
into Saudi Arabia, the Sinai, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria and Afghanistan; that
sequestration is shrinking the reach and resources of the U.S. military, can
anyone honestly say Washington is heeding Flynn’s counsel?
The hard truth is that fighting
the enemy over there is preferable to fighting it here at home. That’s why the
U.S. military’s post-9/11 campaign of campaigns—what some troops called “the away game”—was
so crucial. By taking the fight to the enemy, U.S. forces took away its
sanctuaries, shifted the battlefront and forced the enemy to expend its
resources on survival. By pulling back and pulling out, Washington has taken
pressure off the enemy. “The moment they cease to be fought against, they
grow,” as Prime Minister Tony Blair observes.
President Bush (43) made his
share of mistakes; all presidents do, especially wartime presidents. But his
post-9/11 policies put America on the offensive—and the enemy on its heels.
That’s not the case any longer. Instead, as Gen. James Mattis observes,
it’s the United States that has withdrawn into a “reactive crouch.”
In short, there is a direct connection
between what happens—and doesn’t happen—over there and what happens over here.
As FBI Director James Comey warns
of ISIS and other jihadist groups, “Their ability to have a safe haven from
which to gather resources, people, plan and plot increases the risk of their
ability to mount a sophisticated attack against the homeland.”