Exactly, Mr. President! That’s why we should maintain a residual presence there. Does anyone really believe for one second that empowering the freak’n Taliban is going to move us closer to preventing a terrorist attack on the American homeland?  Seriously?

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Months before our withdrawal, CIA Director William J. Burns told the Senate Intelligence Committee that there is “significant risk” associated with withdrawal. “The U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish.  That’s simply a fact.”

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As Marc Polymeropoulos, a veteran intelligence officer who served as a CIA base chief in Afghanistan told The Washington Post, “The counterterrorism posture went from problematic with the U.S. withdrawal to extraordinarily bad with the Taliban in full control.  Suddenly one wonders if we will go entirely dark.  It’s like a bad dream.”

 

The Washington Post also reports that another intelligence officer, who withheld his/her name over safety concerns, said the successful Taliban takeover “is encouraging many jihadists to think about traveling to Afghanistan now instead of Syria or Iraq.” Indeed, one al-Qaeda fighter named Abu Khaled said, “God willing, the success of the Taliban will be also a chance to unify mujahideen movements like al-Qaeda and Daesh.”  Well, that’s just awesome, isn’t it?

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A senior counterterrorism official in the Trump administration, Nathan Sales, adds this piece of good news: “We are now back to 1998, where the Clinton administration was launching missiles at desert camps and hoping to hit something.  That wasn’t enough to prevent 9/11 and returning to that is not a recipe for success.”  Seriously, guys. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

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Without question, it is great news that ten years after we finally got Osama bin Laden, the threat from terrorism has weakened around the world.  In the Institute for Economics & Peace’s 2020 Global Terrorism Index, they report that, “In 2019, deaths from terrorism fell for the fifth consecutive year, after peaking in 2014. The total number of deaths fell by 15.5 percent to 13,826. The fall in deaths was mirrored by a reduction in the impact of terrorism, with 103 countries recording an improvement on their Global Terrorism Index (GTI) score, compared to 35 that recorded a deterioration (the full GTI score takes into account not only deaths, but also incidents, injuries, and property damage from terrorism, over a five-year period.)”

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This is good news!  And it’s also our entire point. The momentum is finally going in our direction!  We should use it to diminish terror organizations even more, not give them a golden opportunity to regroup and thrive.  Why in the world would we let up on the gas now?

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Another interesting way we can take advantage of this momentum involves a concept we rarely hear anyone talk about: Counter-Ideological Warfare.

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For decades, the United States has allowed terrorist organizations to frame America’s image for a large section of the Muslim world. Seizing every opportunity, terrorists have done a masterful job of making sure their audience knows all about the “evil” that is America:  The brutal, wealthy bully that uses power, might and military strength to repress and oppress Muslims around the world.  Naturally, in their version, the terrorists are the good guys, who fight bravely and unselfishly to protect Islam and Muslims on a global scale. These groups often base a story on half-truths or outright lies, then fill in the blanks with America’s actual failures like the catastrophes of U.S. torture, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib — and now, of course, our humiliating capitulation to the Taliban.

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Conspiracy theories like The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion (a fraudulent document that served as a pretext and rationale for anti-Semitism in the early 20th century) and the 9/11 Truth movement (a conspiracy theory that disputes the conventional wisdom of the 9/11 accounts, specifically the part where al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners and crashed them into the Pentagon and Twin Towers) are exploited mightily.

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Terrorist groups have achieved great success with their America is Evil narrative primarily through Information Warfare, or “using truth, intelligence, propaganda, psychological warfare, and media in a unified effort to control the way an enemy’s own ideology or policies are perceived by the global public.”  In the past, terrorists have waged their extremist propaganda war by using everything from CDs to television to radio. Now they have the enormous benefit of the Internet, which gives them the opportunity to reach into unlimited parts of the world.