20 years after 9/11, are we safer?

Twenty years have passed since 2,977 innocent people from 78 countries perished in what the 9/11 Commission judged to be the consequence of  “failures in imagination, policy, capabilities and management.” No human on this planet has been spared the impact of shock waves from the 9/11 terrorist attacks that spanned generations. I was among the 1,200 people the 9/11 Commission interviewed, posted thousands of miles from where the four planes would strike that day and handling one of the CIA’s sensitive al Qaeda sources. A day since hasn’t passed when I don’t question what we might have done differently. Today, my concern is heightened by the dramatic turn of events in Afghanistan that enable a resurgent al Qaeda and its partner groups to plan, organize, recruit and train free from Western counterterrorism pressure. 

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s 2021 Annual Threat Assessment observed that while al Qaeda and ISIS have suffered significant setbacks and been degraded, they still aspire to attack the homeland. Secretary of State Antony Blinken carefully navigated along these lines when Fox News anchor Chris Wallace rebuked President Biden’s observation that “al Qaeda was gone” as “flat wrong.” Blinken’s defense reaffirmed that even prior to the Taliban’s sudden victory in Afghanistan, the U.S. was not immune. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged that the U.S. would have to “reassess” the two-year timeline he testified in June that al Qaeda would require following a U.S. military withdrawal to threaten the U.S. Austin neglected to clarify how that assessment, which actually provided for one to two years, was made with the assumption that the U.S. would be able to rely upon and complement the capabilities of local Afghan partners still fighting the Taliban.            

Images of Khalil Haqqani accepting loyalty oaths in Kabul suggest it’s even worse. Khalil, ironically depicted as the Taliban’s security chief, was the group’s principal emissary to al Qaeda leadership, approved mass casualty suicide attacks that plagued Kabul and Afghanistan’s other major cities, and represented Taliban and Haqqani interests with Islamabad’s military and intelligence leadership from inside Pakistan. The problem, however, runs deeper. And America’s vulnerability lies less in the realignment of national security priorities to great power competition than in a mindset that impedes accountability, encourages tunnel vision, and treats the symptoms, rather than the causes, of a disease.

The intelligence community ultimately will always be vulnerable to pressure in providing policymakers the answers they have predetermined. But intelligence is examined more rigorously than ever, and even withstood the withering assault of the Trump administration’s politicization. The risks of groupthink or dominating personalities are realities, but today’s default is rigor and inclusiveness.

Interagency rivalries such as those the 9/11 Commission highlighted will always exist as a product of competition. But at an operational level, the intelligence community dramatically improved collaboration and became increasingly co-dependent, as the U.S. military and the CIA found in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. The CIA depended on the Pentagon for infrastructure and security, and the military on the agency’s intelligence and transparency. 

The imperative to avoid even the perception of withholding actionable intelligence or acting without coordination is drilled into the collective consciousness. Scarred from 9/11, the CIA took on an almost obsessive predisposition to share regarding U.S. persons, law enforcement and “duty to warn.” And the FBI depended on the CIA’s intelligence, as well as facilitation with foreign partners, to secure critical evidence for prosecutions and vital leads to begin homeland investigations. Representatives from across the 18 agencies are not only collocated across the community; some hold command responsibilities among their hosts. 

Still, intelligence agencies are government bureaucracies. Particularly for the CIA in 9/11’s ashes, survival meant circling the wagons, deflecting blame and showing an immediate impact to overcome its sins. In contrast to the Department of Defense and FBI, the CIA is an exceptionally agile organization whose smaller size, flatter management and unique authorities enable quick course changes and fewer bureaucratic hurdles in realigning resources and developing technology. The downside is how such strengths can narrow the focus to what’s directly in front of you and is decidedly tactical.

The Pentagon and the intelligence community not only have been fighting yesterday’s war since 9/11 but the same war 20 times over as leaders and those in the trenches collectively rotated, taking their lessons learned with them while our adversaries remained and adapted. It became a holy mission of revenge, preemption and, for the CIA, survival. The U.S. went all in kinetically against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and gave little thought to second- and third-order consequences. The key was our failure to employ a broader, synchronized and dynamic whole of government campaign that also neglected developing threats elsewhere. 

The intelligence community developed impressive capabilities in geolocational intelligence and platforms, whose success made their ease of use seductive. “Forward preemption of attacks through sustained [counterterrorism] pressure,” a euphemism for “Whac-a-mole,” was the rule. The national counterterrorism strategy was therefore dictated by tactical capabilities and military metrics, rather than political, social and economic conditions. And predominantly focused on al Qaeda’s “strategic defeat,” the intelligence community neglected the Islamic State’s growing threat in Syria and Iraq and our vulnerability to cyber attacks and disinformation from state and non-state actors, not to mention great power threats from Russia and China. 

Two decades since 9/11, we have concluded that terrorism is not an existential threat, yet we  treated it as such and now reap the consequences from having approached the phenomenon as if it existed independent from all other geopolitical issues. U.S. national security strategy has a predilection for transactional remedies. But, while this approach appears simpler and easier to sell to the public than would be the broadening in scope, effort and costs for transformational solutions, it treats symptoms rather than causes.

The intelligence community made laudable advances against the failings that contributed to 9/11. We have hardened our defenses, improved collaboration, added resources and created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, albeit perhaps a somewhat double-edged sword bringing increased bureaucracy and expense. But terrorism does not grow independent of political, social and economic conditions nor great power competition, the threats from climate change, pandemics, or the rule of despots. Despite our lip service to the contrary, U.S. counterterrorism strategy was based on “scorched earth” that contributed to a deeper bench of decentralized terrorist actors and set in motion forces that further destabilized the Middle East and South Asia.  

Defending the U.S. from terrorism as well as a surprise attack from any adversary requires not just the imagination and collaboration that was missing for 9/11, but strategic thinking. The U.S. needs a national security culture that places greater weight on long-term consequences, rewards patience, avoids shortcuts, employs a whole of government approach and dispenses the belief that we can surgically remove malignancies through brute force without treating their causes.  

Today’s greatest homeland threat is arguably domestic terrorism from white supremacists and ultranationalist militias, fanned by external disinformation. These groups prospered as the Islamic extremists had by leveraging victimization and fear, often nurtured by political opportunists in the U.S., Europe, Ukraine and elsewhere. Will our National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism truly strive for a sustainable effort to address the conditions that lead to violence? Or will we revert to a tactical, heavy-handed attrition of its instigators that feeds fuel to the fire?    

Douglas London retired from the CIA in 2019 after 34 years as a senior operations officer. He teaches at Georgetown University, is a nonresident fellow at the Middle East Institute, and is author of the book “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence,” concerning the CIA’s post-9/11 transformation. Follow him @DouglasLondon5.