At the New Yorker‘s public policy blog, Think Tank, Steve Coll assesses Al Qaeda’s military resilience in light of its political marginalization, and asks how American counterterrorism policy should respond to this paradox:
American intelligence officials believe that Al Qaeda’s military capacity is considerably diminished today compared with what it was even a year ago, as a result of the pressure it has come under in Pakistan. Even if that is true, bombings like the ones in Jakarta will recur for an indefinite time.
This, then, is the conundrum facing American counterterrorism policy and the Obama Administration: in a strategic sense, Al Qaeda is contained, and yet it can continue to make enough noise and attract enough media attention to shape political discourse in the United States and elsewhere. The correct response to this paradox is to develop in the United States a posture of strategic patience about terrorism that is durable, vigilant, and proportional to the actual threat. Achieving this, however, would require a much stronger national political consensus about terrorism and American responses to it, so that this subject is no longer a legitimate arena for the manipulative and demagogic politics of the Cheney school.
The United States did find such strategic patience—and such politics, for the most part-during the Cold War. As for terrorism, there are encouraging examples in other democracies. Britain eventually found a politics-proof consensus to outlast the Irish Republican Army. Indian voters just resoundingly returned to office a Congress government that responded to the Mumbai attacks with extraordinary restraint. Indonesia has already rejected the violence of the Jemaah Islamiya, and these bombings will only reinforce that national consensus. If only something similar were afoot in Washington.
Read the full post here.