Bin Laden's Legacy: Why We're Still Losing the War on Terror Hardcover – August 1, 2011

I needed this book to complete this era of history between the West and the rise of the Muslim threat today,and to show how it was enabled to do so by the Obama administration.

pulled together a lot of things I had been thinking in a very thoughtful way. He defined the problems with our country's counter-terrorism policies & actions; explained how they came about; and outlined a plan to change and improve for the future. Very worthwhile read for a defense/military/counter-terrorism dilettante like myself and a must-read for anyone in a real position of power & influence.

TEN YEARS HAVE passed since terrorists hijacked airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In that period, America has fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, carried out hundreds armed drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen (among other locations), and conducted covert operations around the world, all in the name of what President George W. Bush termed the "Global War on Terror." Terror plots and attempted attacks have been foiled, terrorist leaders have been killed or captured in massive numbers - including the world's most wanted terrorist himself, Osama bin Laden. All of this has combined, in the words of President Barack Obama, to "put al Qaeda on the path to defeat."

Given all this, is it possible that America is actually losing the war on terror? In Bin Laden's Legacy: Why We're Still Losing the War on Terror, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues not only that we are losing, but that we as a nation still fail to understand what kind of a war we are fighting, and what our enemies' actual goals are. This is a powerful indictment, and Gartenstein-Ross painstakingly lays it out in a book that is both sharply analytical and accessible to any audience.

A KEY PROBLEM with America's attempt to wage a War on Terror while safeguarding itself from future attack, Gartenstein-Ross writes, is that our ignorance of the enemy we are facing has allowed us to pursue both goals in a profligate fashion that plays right into the hands of an enemy that sees America's economy as the long-term target. To understand the reasoning behind this, we must look to the Soviet Union. Though myriad factors contributed to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., its collapse so shortly after its withdrawal from a decade-long quagmire in Afghanistan helped convince Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen that they had been the cause of its ultimate defeat.

Now, al Qaeda has taken this strategy of embroiling a much larger and wealthier enemy in a long and costly war of economic attrition and has aimed it at the United States, with no small measure of success gained over the last decade. "Even though it has lost Osama bin Laden and its safe haven in Afghanistan," the author writes, al Qaeda's "fight against America is broader, and al Qaeda and its affiliates are key players in more regions than they were engaged in a decade ago...Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is shattered, it faces an almost unthinkable debt burden, and its policy makers have largely been consigned to arguing with each other on the sidelines while the country's traditional allies...are overthrown or see their power erode" (p. 200).

IN BIN LADEN'S Legacy, Gartenstein-Ross frequently employs an Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" analogy, suggesting that America's post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy, such as it is, has taken on the character of a superpower exhausting its expansive but finite resources in a fight against an enemy that is largely resting against the ropes and waiting for the opportune time to strike. One area in particular in which this strategy can be seen is airline and airport security, an area in which the U.S. has made massive expenditures over the last decade.

"After the 9/11 attacks, the United States poured enormous sums of money into bolstering aviation security," Gartenstein-Ross writes. "Yet time and again, terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda have shown how just a bit of technical ingenuity can thwart these expensive defenses" (p. 4). Examples of this span the post-9/11 period, from the 2001 `shoe bomber,' Richard Reid, to the 2007 sports drink suicide plot in the U.K., to `underwear bomber' Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's 2009 attempt to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit. This ability of "al Qaeda's operatives...to find vulnerabilities in aviation security, which has been hardened far more than any other set of targets," speaks to the impotence of America's current strategy of throwing money and technology at our problems (p. 203).

THAT THIS PLAYS right into our enemies' hands can be seen, for example, in the aftermath of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's (AQAP) successful attempt to slip bombs disguised as printer cartridges past airport security and onto FedEx and UPS cargo planes bound for the U.S. Though the bombs were found before reaching their destination and being detonated, Gartenstein-Ross writes, AQAP still considered the effort a success, as their mere $4,200 investment (a number that was splashed across the cover of a special issue of the group's English language magazine Inspire) would likely cause Europe and America billions in additional security technology and manpower to ensure such an attempt did not succeed again. As AQAP itself acknowledged, their current strategy against the West is the "strategy of a thousand cuts," each of which costs them very little to produce, but provokes a massive and costly response. In sum, the author writes, "al Qaeda's strategy is...to make the United States collapse under the weight of its own defenses" (p. 203).

Read the rest of this review here: [...]

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross's 'Bin Laden's Legacy' makes a very important point - that al-Qaeda, despite Osama bin Laden's death, remains a significant threat because we continue to allow it to sap our economic and military strength. This was one of bin Laden's original declared objectives (saw this as key to undermining our military strength), and has recently been repeated by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in its English-language 'Inspire' on-line magazine. The 11/2010 issue states that 'Operation Hemorrhage' (bombs hidden in printer cartridges sent to U.S. synagogues) cost only $4,200, but will cost the U.S. etc. billions in on-going security measures. (The plot was foiled by Saudi Arabian intelligence, not U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.) Similarly, neither Richard Reid's shoe-bomb nor the underwear bomber were stopped by U.S. security measures, cost very little to implement, and 'refuel' anti-terrorism expenditures.

Al-Qaeda believes its prior efforts against the Soviets in Afghanistan helped bankrupt the USSR; author Gartenstein-Ross, however, contends that the Soviets were already in deep economic trouble without the Afghanistan 'misadventure' - it had been having difficulty feeding its population for years already, and the final blow was the fall in the price of oil, courtesy of Saudi Arabia's ramping up production in the late 1980s.

The U.S., however, has played into al-Qaeda's strategy by over-reacting - expanding the 'War on Terror' into Iraq and other locations, inefficiently managing TSA screening efforts, and politicizing anti-terrorism to the point where efficiency/effectiveness discussions are impossible. Thus, massive waste, taken advantage by countless private companies and local governments to obtain funding for marginal anti-terrorism programs - eg. a Washington Post investigation found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private contractors were involved in national security alone._ (Gartenstein-Ross defends the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan - however, none of the terrorists came from or received significant training in Afghanistan.)

The author's recommendations center around reducing our dependency on oil, emphasized unsuccessfully by every president since Nixon, and easing partisan tensions (good luck on that!). My suggestion - simply stop our obviously biased support of Israel, and withdraw American forces from most overseas locations - especially Muslim lands.

Bottom-Line: The author's point is important, and its publication is welcomed. However, it could and should have been condensed into a magazine article.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross knows and explains the background, history, religious basis and strategy of jihad, and spells out in painstaking detail how we have done just what AQ's strategy hoped for -- leaving ourselves open to economic defeat despite our undoubted military superiority and successful erosion of AQ Central personnel.

Highly recommended.

this was a really good read. It kept me completely enthralled from New York to LA and then some. It takes an interesting view in a culture and way of the life that is hard for us to comprehend. It can be hard to read in places, because the subject matter is difficult but definitely an eye opening informative book.