The Paradox of U.S. Anti-Terror Anxiety

On July 11, a chain of explosions killed 74 people in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, including 13 foreigners. Afterward, the Muslim Youth Movement (al-Shabaab), a leading Somali anti-government militia organization, took credit for the attack. In the resulting U.S. media coverage, “anxiety” became the word of the day.

What does America have to be anxious about? To begin with, since America considers the Somali Muslim Youth Movement to be a terrorist organization, this cross-border disturbance makes it a previously localized tumor that has spread to other nations, indicating that its scope of activity has expanded into international terrorism. In addition, the method of the Muslim Youth Movement’s attack bears the imprint of al-Qaida, and the cooperation of the two groups is undoubtedly a cause for even more fear. Furthermore, terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Youth Movement rely on assistance obtained through the Internet and other new media to carry out their attacks, even to the point of bribing Americans to initiate attacks in their own country, all of which are nascent characteristics of the new terrorist organizations of the 21st century.

In the nine years since 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism has tended to fall victim to a kind of paradox. When America started the Afghan war, the clear goal was to capture bin Laden alive. However, Leon Panetta, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, confessed on June 27 that from the very first years of the 21st century, it was already very difficult to acquire any intelligence regarding the precise location of bin Laden. Thus, the question of why there are 100,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan has become a point of domestic debate in the U.S. Furthermore, the use of counterterrorism as an excuse to start the war in Iraq has long been proven by history to be nothing but a lie.

Meanwhile, America’s domestic counterterrorism net is woven so closely that it is nearly watertight. Nowadays, if you want to visit the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island in New York, you must pass through even more stringent security than at an airport. In the past, you could freely visit the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, but now it is sealed up as tightly as a steel drum by rings of armed guards. Despite this, there was still a failed bombing attempt in Times Square, the culprits of which may have resided in the U.S. for many years, or may even have been native-born American citizens. As the no-fly list grows longer, so does America’s international counterterrorism battlefront: from Iraq to Afghanistan, then to Pakistan and Yemen, and now we must also include Somalia.

The more you fight terror, the more terror grows, and this paradoxical phenomenon has long led the American people to feel dissatisfied and reflective. In a special column, one American wrote with some anger and indignity that America shouldn’t merely be “the United States of the War on Terror,” that America was “born on the Fourth of July, not on September 11th.”

Behind the blood and fire of terrorism, there lies a vast chasm of hearts and minds. There are many deep-seated factors behind this chasm, including history, religion, culture, politics and economics. As the U.S. media discusses the appearance of the Somali Muslim Youth Movement, it also admits that behind it lies Somalia’s poverty, hunger, economic collapse and the failure of the central government to operate normally for the last 20 years, as well as numerous layers of profound reasons, such as refugees, illegal weapons dealing and piracy.

The truth is, when one looks at everything from the declaration in Cairo that the U.S. is determined to use to improve its relations with Islam, to the avoidance of the term “Islam” in the new National Security Strategy, and further to the careful use of the term “War on Terror,” it is clear that the Obama administration really hasn’t come to grips with the causal relationship between the “blood and fire” and the “hearts and minds.” America’s security apparatus can rely on advanced science and technology to achieve rapid change in a short period of time, but the transformation of the aforementioned fundamental factors cannot be achieved by talk alone.

There are also some who suggest that the great banner of the War on Terror has simply become a wild card in America’s hand. As the counterterrorism battlefront grows longer, America’s reach throughout the world grows longer, and its so-called global strategic interests correspondingly become deeper and longer-lasting. This may be true, or it may not be, but that is the conclusion that some have reached for now.