Despite the death of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda remains a significant threat because bin Laden's strategy for combating the United States—sapping its economic and military strength while expanding the battlefield on which America has to fight—lives on. In fact, this strategy has evolved over the past decade, it's working, and because U.S. planners never took the time to understand it, many of our responses have actually helped al Qaeda achieve its goals while undermining our own.
In Bin Laden's Legacy, counterterrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross explains why al Qaeda's "death by a thousand cuts" strategy has been effective. He shows how such well-publicized plots as the "underwear bomber" and printer cartridge bombs achieved their primary goals, despite being foiled. He notes how we have played into al Qaeda's hands with two costly, unpopular wars and by setting up an expensive homeland security bureaucracy that has difficulty dealing with a nimble, adaptive foe. He explains how many of our antiterrorism efforts are inefficient by design, suffer from a lack of coordination between the government and an array of contractors, and lack any obvious means to evaluate the return on our enormous investment in them. He explores how domestic politicization of the terrorist threat has skewed U.S. priorities, led to the misallocation of counterterrorism resources, and created flawed counterterrorism paradigms and bad policies. Meanwhile, public morale has been weakened by measures ranging from color-coded terror alerts to invasive, full-body searches in airports.
If bin Laden's death is to truly represent a turning point in the war on terror, it won't be due just to his importance to al Qaeda. It will be because his death allowed the United States to reevaluate its paradigms for protecting itself from and defeating this adversary. But to do so, it is first necessary to understand the key errors that the country has made along the way and why these mistakes occurred. Gartenstein-Ross shows what we've done wrong, then proposes a practical plan to start doing right.
For if we mistakenly believe that bin Laden's death signifies the end of al Qaeda's threat, or that it vindicates our previous policies, bin Laden may well experience even greater success in death than he ever did while among us.
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