Success in the War on Terror

In wars past, victory involved ticker tape parades, celebrations in the street, and a sailor kissing a young woman.

Anyone expecting such things in the war on terror is sadly mistaken. Success will not come heralded by the roaring crowds. There will be no articles of surrender. Anyone looking for the end of all terrorism against the United States will be sorely disappointed. There have always been terrorists, and there always will be.

What, then, will success in the War on Terror look like? It will look a lot like what we have right now. There will still be attacks, some broken up ahead of time, some foiled due to incompetence, and every now and then a successful one. Short of making this country into a police state that would make Soviet Russia look positively like anarchy, there is no way to prevent a lone extremist from driving a car bomb into New York, or flying a plane into an IRS building.

Success in the war on terror means that large groups such as Al Qaeda are so scattered that they cannot draw together to produce the sophisticated, devastating attacks like we saw on September 11, 2001, not that terrorism is gone forever. Israel has some of the best anti-terrorist intelligence capability in the world, and they are still hit with terrorist attacks. There is no way to eliminate terrorism completely.

Success means that the terrorists are reduced to these simple, unsophisticated attacks. A little trouble, in a small, mean way, capable of killing to be sure, but being few and far between, with no real organizing principle behind them.

Success means not the absence of attacks, or even the absence of successful attacks. Success means the absence of coordination.

What made September 11th so devastating was not that an attack happened, it was that an attack that was the culmination of years of planning, years of gathering the proper credentials, and years of training all came together, and became an event so spectacular that we could not help but be scarred by it. There had been hijackings before 9/11. There were planes that blew up, or were forced to crash, or were taken hostage. None of these had the same impact as four planes, simultaneously, hitting three buildings, completely destroying two of them and killing thousands of people.

But what have we seen since then? Every attack has been less sophisticated than the one before. From hijacked planes, they regressed to train bombings. From train bombings, they regressed to sending guys with guns to run around a tourist city shooting as many people as they could before they were killed. From there, they have regressed to the point where they rely on a lone extremist with so little training that he forgot to open the valves on the propane tanks.

Is there more to do? Of course. And it is clear that some lessons learned from the Times Square attack have already been put into practice. Airlines now have to check the no fly list within two hours of a change being made, rather than within 24 hours, like it was before. Are there more lessons to learn? Of course. Each attack, whether it is broken up, flops, or is successful, teaches us new lessons, allows us to refine our methods.

This is what Success in the war on terror looks like.