 "Photo: Shaun Bevan")
Eight years after 3,000 people were killed in 120 minutes in Pennsylvania, New York and Washington D.C., the United States is still fighting the global war on terrorism and its changing threats.
UCF’s Global Perspective Office hosted “Global Terrorism in 2009: Assessing the Changing Threat,” Tuesday afternoon, which featured a four-member panel discussion where thoughts and concerns on the global war on terrorism, and its current problems, were shared.
The persons on the panel, which included members of governmental agencies as well as the academic community, each spoke for 15 minutes to a crowd of more than 100 in the Pegasus Ballroom, on their concerns with the war.
Sebastian Gorka, a professor of National Security Studies at National Defense University in Washington D.C., discussed the war’s lack of clarity and the weaknesses of the current and last administrations’ ability to plan.
Gorka said the U.S. has had a lot of wish lists in the past eight years in terms of the war — creating a national-state out of Iraq and making sure Americans aren’t killed on U.S. soil — but no defined strategy.
“Now, just these two aims are vastly different; creating a Switzerland in Central Asia or making sure 9/11 doesn’t happen again? These are two different goals that require very different plans,” he said. “We have to decide now, eight years later, which one of these things we want to do or perhaps, there is a third option out there.”
Gorka also said religion and ideology has been a topic no one wants to speak about even though it forms the nature of the enemy.
“If we don’t understand how this concept is evolved, if we don’t understand how it informs our enemy, how religion and the evolution of holy war is at the center of Al-Qaeda and associated movements, I can guarantee you that we will not defeat this enemy,” Gorka said.
John Schindler, professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., believes Americans should be looking at the West itself when determining the war’s central front.
“Have we really thought hard about the fact that radicalism per capita is a much bigger problem in the Muslim populations in the West than in any Muslim country?” Schindler said.
Schindler believes terrorists are placing roots in the West because they have more freedom and opportunity to do so in democratic nations than they do in their own countries.
Schindler said not enough is being done to monitor this problem because its officials are at a loss of how to deal with it.
“Extremists, bent on doing all of us no good at all, have made sanctuary in countries that are not just friendly, but countries that by their very nature afford them the religious liberty, freedom of speech, the ability to ‘as long as you’re not wittingly raising money for terrorism,’ you may proceed as you wish,” he said.
Jena Baker McNeill, a homeland security policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C., took a more optimistic view believing that the U.S. is a harder target today then it was Sept. 11. But also said that the U.S. needs to reexamine its counter-terrorism policies.
“There’s a rush to form policy over strategy,” McNeill said. “They rush to form policies before an articulation of goals and principles and I think that that’s where a lot of our trouble comes from in addressing new threats.”
The session ended with the panel answering questions from the audience ranging from topics such as weapons of mass destruction to how the U.S. is working with other nations to fight global terrorism.
Gorka believes politics often gets in the way of nations cooperating with one another successfully.
“You have to have a mass casualty event on your soil and, shockingly, 300 people in Madrid doesn’t count as a mass casualty,” he said. “It’s going to have to be bigger, dirtier and nastier for it to get serious.”
UCF professor Stephen Sloan, who teaches courses on terrorism and the changing nature of foreign intelligence, believes that establishing informal networks against terrorism is the most effective way to fight it.
“The bottom line for effective intelligence is an issue of mutual trust and interest,” Sloan said. “When you do that, it’s primarily through effective informal networks. You only can wrap up terrorism networks, which have unity of command, by having counter-networks.”
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