Boko Haram’s bloody weekend attacks in Nigeria’s most important Islamic city, Kano, following unrelated countrywide protests over the end of a decades-old fuel subsidy underscore the fact that business as usual is no longer good enough. Only genuine reform of Nigeria’s political economy can pull it back from the brink.

By partly reinstating the fuel subsidy, coupled with alleged payoffs to labor leaders and a certain amount of oppression, the government of President Goodluck Jonathan was able to subdue protests that brought the country to a halt for a week. But with Boko Haram, the radical Islamic movement that has been gripping the northeastern part of the country, a similar response is unlikely to work.

During previous insurrections, the government responded with handouts and military intervention. In the Niger Delta, the country’s oil-producing region, former President Umaru Yar’Adua was only able to end the revolt by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta with payoffs to warlords (and, it is whispered, certain politicians) under the auspices of an “amnesty” for militants. But the government did not address the fundamental grievances — a perceived unfair allocation of oil revenue to the Delta region — that fueled the uprising.

There are some similarities between MEND and Boko Haram.

Both have a geographic base far from the capital, Abuja: the former in the oil patch, the latter in the northeast. Both are highly diffuse, without a recognized charismatic leadership or formal politburo or even an accepted manifesto. Both reflect their region’s alienation from the federal government and relative underdevelopment compared with other parts of the country. Both appear to have links with local political leaders.

Both resort to violence and terror for political purposes. The operatives of both seem to be small in number, but are able to draw on the support or acquiescence of a larger proportion of the local population. Both also have criminal elements, with MEND profiting from kidnapping and extortion and Boko Haram from bank robberies.

But key differences will likely mean that the Jonathan government cannot subdue Boko Haram as the Yar’Adua government did MEND.

MEND has always been about money. It wants a larger percentage of the oil-and-gas profits to stay in the Delta region. The criminal dimension of its activities is also important. Accordingly, the government was able to buy the group’s various warlords when the price was right.

But the “amnesty” did not address the popular grievances of a very underdeveloped region, and the co-opted warlords are slowly being replaced by successors not shy about threatening to resume violent activities.

Boko Haram is more focused on political power. This reflects concerns by the Northern elite that Jonathan’s decision to end an informal agreement to alternate presidential power between the Muslim North and Christian South before the 2011 presidential elections will exclude the North from any possibility of future control of the state.

Further, there is a radical Islamic dimension to Boko Haram’s fight, focused on “justice” for the common people vis-à-vis the resource-rich, corrupt state. Some of the group’s operatives have adopted a violent stance against the “evil” federal government. Its attacks against police stations are far bloodier than those MEND ever committed in the Delta.

Initially, Boko Haram was an indigenous movement, with no significant links to other international terrorist groups. And so far it has not targeted Western facilities, scarce in any case in its area of operations. But that focus may change in the future, particularly if Western governments come to be seen as supporters of the Jonathan administration. Boko Haram may even try to reach out to other terrorist groups for tactical assistance.

If the Jonathan government persists in dealing with Boko Haram as a security issue without acknowledging and addressing the political dimension to the insurrection, it is likely that the conflict will intensify. The impotence of the police, military and security services so far indicates that the Abuja government does not have the ability or resources to destroy Boko Haram.

Although the Jonathan government is looking for help from the international community, there is little evidence that additional security resources can turn the tide.

Money will not solve the Boko Haram problem, and a political settlement would require a restructuring of Nigerian politics that would be difficult for any presidential administration to achieve.

Some political and civil society leaders are calling for a “sovereign national conference” that would review the fundamental political and economic issues at stake and draw up a new constitution. While this type of radical course has been unacceptable to those who run the central government, in the end they may have no choice.

This week, still reeling from Friday’s bloody bombings on the northern city of Kano, Nigeria braces itself for more violence ahead. The bulk of the casualties in the attacks on churches belonged to the Igbo people, and this has already led to retaliatory attacks in parts of south-eastern Nigeria. An Igbo group, Ogbunigwe Ndigbo, gave all northern Muslims in the region two weeks to leave or face their wrath. In Lokpanta, where my mother is from, the Muslim Hausa community – which settled there many years ago – were seen leaving in truckloads.

With the deepening crises it has become normal, not just in the media but among ordinary Nigerians, to argue that the violence is a sectarian or religious matter, an issue of north v south, Muslims v Christians. I have spoken to friends who are convinced that it is not just southern Christians who are the primary targets of Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group who have claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Igbos in particular. Well-meaning Igbo leaders are calling on their brethren to “return home”, referring to the attacks as “systematic ethnic cleansing”. A friend shouted to me over the phone that “Igbos should just secede. Igbo blood is being spilled and the government is doing nothing at all about it.”

However, as tempting as it is, polarising the crisis is misleading. First, the position of Boko Haram, whose name translates as “western education is prohibited”, is not representative of Nigerian Muslims. Before its rise to prominence, Nigerians co-existed tolerably well, respectful of each other’s faith. I spent six years as a child in a boarding school in the north. We said both Muslim prayers and Christian grace before meals.

While there is an undeniable religious element to the assaults, the targets of Saturday’s attacks in the Islamic heartland of the country clearly illustrate the problem with such singular interpretations of complex situations. There have, for instance, been suggestions that some politicians in the Muslim north feel betrayed by President Goodluck Jonathan for not honouring the power-rotating pact within the ruling PDP party, which would have not seen a southerner run for presidency until 2015, and that they are using Boko Haram to try and unseat him. Last May there were bomb blasts in two separate northern cities mere hours after Goodluck Jonathan was sworn in, one in the home city of the vice president, Namadi Sambo, himself a Muslim.

Obviously these are troubled times for Nigeria. Many who, like my father, lived through the Biafran war of 1967, are fearful that events might escalate. Indeed, in an address to the nation the president referred to the deepening crisis as “worse than the war”. It doesn’t help that he seems overwhelmed by the scale of events. It took him almost an entire day after the Kano attacks to address the nation. When he did, it was an uninspired speech delivered through an aide. The escape from custody of the prime suspect in the Christmas Day bombings has shown, as a friend said, “that Boko Haram is stronger than the president”.

Yet, despite everything, if the Occupy Nigeria movement protests of the past weeks have taught us anything, it is that there is still hope for the country’s future. Amidst the anger, the frustration, the violence, Nigerians joined hands across cultural and religious barriers to rise up against a government they no longer trust.

The images that I hang on to are the photographs posted on Facebook during the protests: Christians keeping watch over their Muslim brothers as they prayed, and young Muslim men in Kano visiting churches across the city. The Igbo have a saying that the hunger that has hope of being stilled does not kill. These photographs convince me that one day we will save Nigeria.

But to do so, we will need the help of not just the government, but of religious and cultural leaders. They need to talk across barriers, not just to each other, but also to their followers, to stem the tide of attacks and counter-attacks. Innocent citizens are not the enemy. The enemy is Boko Haram, and the government needs to step up and do whatever it takes to crush this group, before it becomes any more powerful than it already is.

Of all the hangovers from the George W. Bush years, the thorniest may be what to do about the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There are still 171 detainees at Guantanamo and little consensus on what to do with them. Last spring, President Obama announced the resumption of military trials for some of those charged with participating in the 9/11 attacks. These trials, known as military commissions, have been stalled for years by legal challenges. Recently, the official in charge of the Guantanamo prison, Rear Adm. David Woods, issued a draft order that compounds these challenges. The order requires all correspondence between the accused and their appointed military lawyers to be reviewed by federal officials.

The proposed order is a mistake, one that threatens to jeopardize the progress made in reversing Guantanamo’s tainted legacy as a legal black hole. It likely violates the 6th Amendment’s guarantee of the right to counsel, which has long been understood to permit lawyers to communicate confidentially with their clients.

The order is not just bad law. It is also bad policy that could tarnish the most high-profile military trials held by our nation since World War II.

What legal rights the Guantanamo detainees possess is hotly contested. The Bush administration long argued that Guantanamo was Cuban, not American, territory and therefore the detainees had no constitutional rights. That view was repudiated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 in Boumediene vs. Bush. In deciding that at least some constitutional rights extended to those held at Guantanamo, the court recognized the highly unusual nature of the base.

Guantanamo has been under American control since U.S. troops prevailed in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Cuba has no effective control over the base, which is governed by a lease that cannot be changed without U.S. consent and that accords the U.S. “complete jurisdiction and control.” This history led the Supreme Court to declare that whatever the legal formalities, it is an “obvious and uncontested fact” that the United States is the de facto sovereign there.

In short, Guantanamo Bay is technically Cuba. But as a practical matter, it is just as much a part of the United States as Tampa Bay.

Boumediene did not involve the 6th Amendment. And the Supreme Court has never expressly declared that the 6th Amendment applies to foreigners tried abroad. In the closest case on point — involving Nazi saboteurs captured during World War II on the beaches of Long Island and Florida and tried in the U.S. — the court held that they lacked a 6th Amendment right to trial by jury because the laws of war did not require one for unlawful combatants. But the 1942 decision pointedly said nothing about the other aspects of the amendment, including the right to counsel.

In light of these precedents, it is not at all implausible that the right to counsel extends to those at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court made it clear in Boumediene that it was deeply troubled by the idea that the federal government could evade constitutional restraints simply by moving prisons offshore. That reasoning applies no less readily to offshore trials.

Woods’ order does not simply raise legal concerns, however. By violating the sanctity of attorney-client privilege, it jeopardizes the perception of American military commissions as fair and just, a perception that is crucial if these trials are to succeed.

To see why, consider the fundamental purpose of such trials. Why not simply imprison the suspected terrorists in perpetuity without trial? The chief reason, dating to the landmark Nuremberg tribunal, is the belief that a just and fair trial of even our worst enemies is the best vindication of our nation’s values, and the best way to ensure that cycles of revenge are tamped down, individuals are held accountable and the truth emerges.

War-crimes trials have long been tarred by cries of “victor’s justice.” It is only through scrupulous adherence to fair, neutral and time-honored procedures that we can forcefully refute such criticism.

To some critics, of course, no amount of due process can save the military commissions. They see the results as foreordained and the legal process as so much window-dressing. But the commissions, though rarely employed in our history, grow out of a long and honorable tradition of military justice. They can and ought to be fair proceedings. If they are perceived as unfair, they will jeopardize the entire point of war-crimes trials — which is, in the famous words of Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at Nuremberg, to “stay the hand of vengeance” and submit “captive enemies to the judgment of the law.”

That is why the defense lawyers appointed to represent the detainees — American service members who proudly wear our uniform — have vigorously protested the effort to intrude on attorney-client privilege. They recognize an important truth. The U.S., and our long struggle against terrorist violence, will be the loser if the deck is stacked against the Guantanamo defendants.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the hand-wringing is in high gear. There have been op-eds by former detainees, a statement by retired military personnel, denunciations of President Obama for his failure to close the site and tear-stained statements by human rights groups.

In a decade of policy experimentation at Guantanamo, some efforts have succeeded, some have failed tragically and some are still in process. But far more interesting than the past 10 years is what the next 10 will look like. And that subject seems oddly absent from the current conversation.

Make no mistake: There will be another 10 years of Guantanamo. (Even if Guantanamo itself miraculously closes, we’ll have to build it again somewhere else.) Our forces already hold more detainees than they can safely release or put on trial before any tribunal to which this country would attach its name. And in any future conflict against non-state actors, our forces are likely to capture more of such people, and they will have to put them somewhere. If the United States is lucky, we may be able to reduce the number of detainees further than the combined efforts of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations have so far managed. But we will not eliminate it, and even if we could, we cannot guarantee that we will not replenish it all of a sudden in some future, spasmodic set of military operations abroad.

America needs principles for Guantanamo’s next decade — principles that might form the basis for a national policy that commands support from a wide swath of our political system. Here are three suggestions toward that end.

First, the president must face the fact that the effort to close Guantanamo has failed. It is clear that no conceivably electable presidential administration — including the Obama administration — is going to abandon the military detention of terror suspects. It is also clear that Congress has an irrationally strong preference for handling this detention at Guantanamo, that legislators will frustrate any efforts by the administration to create or use alternative sites, and that the executive branch will not exert the political effort necessary to stare Congress down on this point.

This is actually a rational calculation on Obama’s part. The marginal political gain he would net from closing Guantanamo and building some other site for the same purpose — a site that would quickly acquire similar infamy — just isn’t great enough to justify the intense political energy it would require to achieve Guantanamo’s closure. What’s more, much of the president’s political base — not being stupid — has figured out that closure doesn’t mean all that much if detainees are moved rather than freed. So why not stop pretending that Guantanamo’s closure is still meaningfully part of the plan?

Second, detention at Guantanamo has become rich with due process, and we should embrace this model for a wider array of long-term counterterrorism detentions. Detainees at Guantanamo have access to habeas corpus. They have access to lawyers. And those who lose their cases have a robust review process that will reexamine their cases regularly. Ironically, while Guantanamo remains controversial, U.S. detainees elsewhere in the world have much less process available to them. Instead of clamoring for a useless closure that isn’t going to happen anyway, we should think about which detainees, including those held in theater in Afghanistan and those we have sometimes held on ships, we might prefer to bring to Guantanamo and hold under its rules. These guidelines have actually served the executive branch well by creating legitimacy and judicial sign-off for detentions that had once been executive-only affairs.

Third, non-criminal detention is a fluid business that requires flexibility. Public myths aside, detention at Guantanamo has not usually meant detention forever. Opportunities to press charges against detainees will sometimes arise. Opportunities to transfer them abroad come up more often. We learn about errors, and new information has often triggered releases. Yet just as the administration has avoided acknowledging Guantanamo’s ongoing role, many in Congress from both parties have been in denial about the importance of transfers from the facility. Congress has made transfers terribly difficult and thereby all but guaranteed that the administration will not use the base for future cases. This is wrongheaded. Guantanamo is a detention facility, not a lobster trap, and a detention facility where detentions can’t end helps nobody. The ability to free detainees must be unencumbered for any detention policy to work well.

Put these three principles together and you get something — process-rich, flexible detention at Guantanamo Bay — that looks like a detention policy for the coming decade. Working toward such a policy, not endlessly picking at the scab of the past 10 years, should be the focus of today’s discussion.

Ten years after its opening, mention Guantanamo, and a thousand images emerge. Men in orange jumpsuits wearing goggles, hoods and handcuffs, hunched over in the relentless Caribbean sun; zoo-like cages, exposed to the elements, with nothing but buckets as toilets; secret areas of the prison compound where “enhanced interrogation techniques” were tested; a detainee deprived of sleep, and injected forcibly with fluids to cause swelling, until he broke; men found hanging from ropes in their cells.

What would a world without Guantanamo be like? That’s two questions, really. First, one must imagine a world in which the detention facility had never opened its doors. And, less fanciful, a world in which it closed down now. To begin, it’s a good idea to remind ourselves of what Guantanamo has been and what it means today.

From the start, the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was painted for the public as containing unimaginably bad inmates. White House and military officials insisted that the prisoners there were “the worst of the worst”; former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard Myers described the detainees as almost superhuman — able to “gnaw hydraulic lines” on the airplane bringing them to the facility.

President George W. Bush insisted that there was no rendition-to-torture program, until the day he moved 14 prisoners from the program to the camp, announcing the national security value of interrogating them. Judges, national security officials, prosecutors and other officers of the law insisted that the U.S. court system was too weak to handle such terrible men.

President Obama’s administration has concurred, pushing the closure of Guantanamo further away and buttressing its prognosis for a long life with the banal assertion that there are roughly 48 detainees who will be kept there in “indefinite detention.”

Symbolically, Guantanamo has always had a power far beyond its harboring of captives in the war on terror. For civil libertarians, it represents the rights that the U.S. government violated in the name of that war, most glaringly the tolerance of open-ended detention. For its defenders, Guantanamo marks the United States’ willingness to take the gloves off. Internationally, it is a symbol of the humbling of America. Guantanamo is an invitation for others to say: “See? The United States is just like the rest of us, unable to resist going to the dark side when attacked.”

Guantanamo represents what lies below the surface of America the civilized; it is a window into the lure of the brutal in times of confusion, and a reminder of the forgotten discipline that constitutional democracy requires.

But mostly, Guantanamo is this: It is the place where the United States has decided to collect the universe of post-9/11 moral issues that confound its politicians, laws and people. When in doubt or ignorance, or when just plain challenged by the complexities of national security dilemmas, send the problems to Guantanamo. Don’t know what to do with prisoners captured on the terrorism battlefield? Send them to Guantanamo. Doubtful of the ability of the U.S. courts to try terrorists? Put them in Guantanamo. Anxious about the haunting realities of torture coming to light? Keep those who were tortured at Guantanamo.

So what if we erased all that?

Without Guantanamo, there would be no focal point that so readily called to mind the U.S. role in the war on terror. There would be no one place that encapsulated the errant journey that the nation began in the wake of 9/11, the startling deviation from law and process, from the self-identity of America as law-abiding, confident and fair. The absence of Guantanamo — this one term that evokes so much — would have meant that the United States had not chosen the easy out.

Had there been no Guantanamo, the nation would have had to confront the issues that continue to haunt us: the ability of the Constitution to deal with 21st-century enemies; the strengths and weaknesses of our intelligence services; the uncertainty of who is an enemy and who is not. Without Guantanamo, the country’s leaders would have had to create aboveboard policies that would not have led us into a state of perpetual limbo, now codified by Congress and supported by the president in the form of indefinite detention and military detention for foreign terrorism suspects.

With no Guantanamo, there would still be much to trouble us: the war in Iraq and the lies that got us there, the losses in Afghanistan, the overstepping of the security state into conversations, virtual and otherwise. But there wouldn’t be a glaring badge of shame on the United States. Nor would there be a ready symbol of the country’s willingness to allow national security to trump the rule of law. Without Guantanamo, our moral compass wouldn’t have been so visibly hijacked.

Obama has continued to use Guantanamo as a collection box for the most challenging national security dilemmas. If anything, he has intensified the prison’s role as a catch-all for the confusion of post-9/11 security — as if for each cell emptied of a human being, another is filled with a problem: the use of waterboarding and hearsay, the desire to arrest individuals for association with a terrorist group, the need to have a secondary system of justice, the political attraction of promising Congress that the enemies of the United States will not be allowed onto U.S. soil.

But if we now close Guantanamo, the Pandora’s box of so much that went wrong after 9/11, it would bring to an end the entire era — and with it the anger, frustration, and loss of faith in government and the courts that has lasted a decade. The ignorance that persists, day after day, about who is there and what actual danger they pose to the United States would disappear. Gone would be some of the disappointment with lawmakers who use Guantanamo as a reminder that the nation is beset by threats and thus keep fear alive. Gone would be the emasculation of the U.S. courts as a viable venue for trying terrorism cases.

Could shutting down Guantanamo resolve the legal and moral confusion unleashed by the global war on terror, or would its closure merely be another failed remedy? The answer lies in how it is done. Guantanamo can’t be closed quietly. Rather than just withering away, blanketed in excuses of political constraint and legal complexities, it needs to be shuttered with a clear declaration of rights and wrongs.

Indefinite detention is wrong. Bypassing the courts is wrong. Succumbing to fear until it dominates the law is wrong.

Ultimately, because Guantanamo is a repository not just of prisoners but of America’s confusion, its closure should mark a moment of clarity, and of renewed confidence in our country and the rule of law. Close Guantanamo, and you close the box of sin that the war on terror unleashed, making us, rather than an exceptional nation, one like all the others. Close the box, bury the ills of the past decade, close the doors on a state of limbo and confusion, and America’s true exceptionalism can once again thrive.

“I have here in my hand a list of … names.”

When Sen. Joseph McCarthy told the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, W.Va., on Feb. 9, 1950, that he held a list of 205 communists employed by the State Department, he ignited a firestorm and launched a career.

We now know there was no list. Even then, it was obvious McCarthy was not particularly punctilious about the numbers. In Wheeling it was 205; in Salt Lake City it was 57; on the Senate floor it was 81. Nor was he especially careful about the allegation. Maybe they weren’t all “card-carrying” communists. Maybe some were just “loyalty risks” or “people with communist connections.”

None of that mattered. The number, so peculiar and precise, seemed like the product of careful calculation by government insiders. And it fit with what many people wanted to believe, which also encouraged a suspension of disbelief.

I thought of all this recently because the “list” is back.

Jan. 11 marks 10 years since the first prisoners arrived at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. About 170 remain, even though most have been cleared for transfer by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, meaning they have been cleared for release from U.S. custody and transfer to the custody of another country. (In the past, the receiving country has typically released the prisoner in a matter of hours or days because they haven’t done anything wrong.) Yet none of these cleared prisoners is likely to leave any time soon, thanks to Congress’ annual pot-clanging fest, also known as the National Defense Authorization Act.

Every year, Congress conditions money for the Defense Department on all manner of draconian amendments. This year, like last year, Congress added restrictions that make it all but impossible for the president to transfer prisoners from the base. Congress passed the amendments in the name of national security and dared the president to veto the bill as we head into a presidential election.

Obama blinked. And you wonder why Americans hate politics.

The restrictions on transfer are motivated by the myth of the superhuman terrorist, a demon so dangerous that every precaution seems essential. And the favorite argument to keep them forever is the so-called list of recidivists. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), for instance, warned during the Senate debate over the defense spending bill that “27% of detainees who were released got back in the fight.”

Claims like this surface periodically. Leave aside the obvious incongruity of describing someone as having “returned” to behavior without having shown they did anything wrong in the first place. All we know is that once they were at Guantanamo, now they aren’t, and someone thinks they may be dangerous.

The last time this issue came up, a colleague and I tried to get to the bottom of it. We filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Turns out this “list” is like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: There’s no there there.

Former Guantanamo prisoners are tracked by the Defense Intelligence Agency. But in response to our request, we learned that the DIA has no fixed criteria to determine whether a person has “returned” to anything: “DIA does not endeavor to create any sort of firm guidelines for identifying a detainee as having returned to the fight. The data collected to support this determination simply varies too greatly to allow for categorical simplification.”

For that reason, the DIA letter said, “the number of persons suspected of having returned to the fight is subject to constant change…. That number will rise and fall as DIA analysts gather new data and information and as those analysts revise their assessments of previously gathered evidence and intelligence.” A person today might be suspected of having returned to the fight because he has no known source of income. But if he gets a job the next day, he could be taken off the list.

Recently, the director of national intelligence told Congress that “81 [former detainees] are confirmed and 69 are suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after transfer.” He said a person can be “confirmed” based on a preponderance of the evidence but “suspected” based on nothing more than “plausible but unverified” information.

But this does not add much because we still do not know what it takes to make the list, or what these people have supposedly done. The government says it demands more than anti-American propaganda, and it describes what it could be, like recruiting someone to participate in a terrorist operation, but it is careful to note it could also be other stuff that’s not on the list. And because officials do not name names, no one can check what they say.

It is certainly true that some people have left Guantanamo and engaged in violent behavior. Independent studies by researchers at Seton Hall University indicate the number is substantially lower than the government’s estimate. As important, even according to the government’s numbers, the overwhelming majority of suspected “recidivists” are alleged to have engaged in unspecified and undefined “terrorist activities” in Turkey and Russia. Only a small percentage who have been released to Afghanistan or Pakistan, where U.S. forces are engaged, are suspected of wrongdoing.

But in a time of superhuman demons and cowed leaders, anyone who claims to hold in their hands a list of names will get what they want, and even cleared prisoners will stay locked up.

In the 10 years since the Guantánamo detention camp opened, the anguished debate over whether to shutter the facility — or make it permanent — has obscured a deeper failure that dates back more than a century and implicates all Americans: namely, our continued occupation of Guantánamo itself. It is past time to return this imperialist enclave to Cuba.

From the moment the United States government forced Cuba to lease the Guantánamo Bay naval base to us, in June 1901, the American presence there has been more than a thorn in Cuba’s side. It has served to remind the world of America’s long history of interventionist militarism. Few gestures would have as salutary an effect on the stultifying impasse in American-Cuban relations as handing over this coveted piece of land.

The circumstances by which the United States came to occupy Guantánamo are as troubling as its past decade of activity there. In April 1898, American forces intervened in Cuba’s three-year-old struggle for independence when it was all but won, thus transforming the Cuban War of Independence into what Americans are still wont to call the Spanish-American War. American officials then excluded the Cuban Army from the armistice and denied Cuba a seat at the Paris peace conference. “There is so much natural anger and grief throughout the island,” the Cuban general Máximo Gómez remarked in January 1899, after the peace treaty was signed, “that the people haven’t really been able to celebrate the triumph of the end of their former rulers’ power.”

Curiously, the United States’ declaration of war on Spain included the assurance that America did not seek “sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control” over Cuba and intended “to leave the government and control of the island to its people.”

But after the war, strategic imperatives took precedence over Cuban independence. The United States wanted dominion over Cuba, along with naval bases from which to exercise it.

Enter Gen. Leonard Wood, whom President William McKinley had named military governor of Cuba, bearing provisions that became known as the Platt Amendment. Two were particularly odious: one guaranteed the United States the right to intervene at will in Cuban affairs; the other provided for the sale or lease of naval stations. Juan Gualberto Gómez, a leading delegate to the Cuban Constitutional Convention, said the amendment would render Cubans “a vassal people.” Foreshadowing the Cuban Missile Crisis, he presciently warned that foreign bases on Cuban soil would only draw Cuba “into conflict not of our own making and in which we have no stake.”

But it was an offer Cuba could not refuse, as Wood informed the delegates. The alternative to the amendment was continued occupation. The Cubans got the message. “There is, of course, little or no real independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment,” Wood remarked to McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, in October 1901, soon after the Platt Amendment was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution. “The more sensible Cubans realize this and feel that the only consistent thing now is to seek annexation.”

But with Platt in place, who needed annexation? Over the next two decades, the United States repeatedly dispatched Marines based at Guantánamo to protect its interests in Cuba and block land redistribution. Between 1900 and 1920, some 44,000 Americans flocked to Cuba, boosting capital investment on the island to just over $1 billion from roughly $80 million and prompting one journalist to remark that “little by little, the whole island is passing into the hands of American citizens.”

How did this look from Cuba’s perspective? Well, imagine that at the end of the American Revolution the French had decided to remain here. Imagine that the French had refused to allow Washington and his army to attend the armistice at Yorktown. Imagine that they had denied the Continental Congress a seat at the Treaty of Paris, prohibited expropriation of Tory property, occupied New York Harbor, dispatched troops to quash Shays’ and other rebellions and then immigrated to the colonies in droves, snatching up the most valuable land.

Such is the context in which the United States came to occupy Guantánamo. It is a history excluded from American textbooks and neglected in the debates over terrorism, international law and the reach of executive power. But it is a history known in Cuba (where it motivated the 1959 revolution) and throughout Latin America. It explains why Guantánamo remains a glaring symbol of hypocrisy around the world. We need not even speak of the last decade.

If President Obama were to acknowledge this history and initiate the process of returning Guantánamo to Cuba, he could begin to put the mistakes of the last 10 years behind us, not to mention fulfill a campaign pledge. (Given Congressional intransigence, there might be no better way to close the detention camp than to turn over the rest of the naval base along with it.) It would rectify an age-old grievance and lay the groundwork for new relations with Cuba and other countries in the Western Hemisphere and around the globe. Finally, it would send an unmistakable message that integrity, self-scrutiny and candor are not evidence of weakness, but indispensable attributes of leadership in an ever changing world. Surely there would be no fitter way to observe today’s grim anniversary than to stand up for the principles Guantánamo has undermined for over a century.

On Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

I left Algeria in 1990 to work abroad. In 1997 my family and I moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the request of my employer, the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. I served in the Sarajevo office as director of humanitarian aid for children who had lost relatives to violence during the Balkan conflicts. In 1998, I became a Bosnian citizen. We had a good life, but all of that changed after 9/11.

When I arrived at work on the morning of Oct. 19, 2001, an intelligence officer was waiting for me. He asked me to accompany him to answer questions. I did so, voluntarily — but afterward I was told that I could not go home. The United States had demanded that local authorities arrest me and five other men. News reports at the time said the United States believed that I was plotting to blow up its embassy in Sarajevo. I had never — for a second — considered this.

The fact that the United States had made a mistake was clear from the beginning. Bosnia’s highest court investigated the American claim, found that there was no evidence against me and ordered my release. But instead, the moment I was released American agents seized me and the five others. We were tied up like animals and flown to Guantánamo, the American naval base in Cuba. I arrived on Jan. 20, 2002.

I still had faith in American justice. I believed my captors would quickly realize their mistake and let me go. But when I would not give the interrogators the answers they wanted — how could I, when I had done nothing wrong? — they became more and more brutal. I was kept awake for many days straight. I was forced to remain in painful positions for hours at a time. These are things I do not want to write about; I want only to forget.

I went on a hunger strike for two years because no one would tell me why I was being imprisoned. Twice each day my captors would shove a tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach so they could pour food into me. It was excruciating, but I was innocent and so I kept up my protest.

In 2008, my demand for a fair legal process went all the way to America’s highest court. In a decision that bears my name, the Supreme Court declared that “the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” It ruled that prisoners like me, no matter how serious the accusations, have a right to a day in court. The Supreme Court recognized a basic truth: the government makes mistakes. And the court said that because “the consequence of error may be detention of persons for the duration of hostilities that may last a generation or more, this is a risk too significant to ignore.”

Five months later, Judge Richard J. Leon, of the Federal District Court in Washington, reviewed all of the reasons offered to justify my imprisonment, including secret information I never saw or heard. The government abandoned its claim of an embassy bomb plot just before the judge could hear it. After the hearing, he ordered the government to free me and four other men who had been arrested in Bosnia.

I will never forget sitting with the four other men in a squalid room at Guantánamo, listening over a fuzzy speaker as Judge Leon read his decision in a Washington courtroom. He implored the government not to appeal his ruling, because “seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to a question so important is, in my judgment, more than plenty.” I was freed, at last, on May 15, 2009.

Today, I live in Provence with my wife and children. France has given us a home, and a new start. I have experienced the pleasure of reacquainting myself with my daughters and, in August 2010, the joy of welcoming a new son, Yousef. I am learning to drive, attending vocational training and rebuilding my life. I hope to work again serving others, but so far the fact that I spent seven and a half years as a Guantánamo prisoner has meant that only a few human rights organizations have seriously considered hiring me. I do not like to think of Guantánamo. The memories are filled with pain. But I share my story because 171 men remain there. Among them is Belkacem Bensayah, who was seized in Bosnia and sent to Guantánamo with me.

About 90 prisoners have been cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo. Some of them are from countries like Syria or China — where they would face torture if sent home — or Yemen, which the United States considers unstable. And so they sit as captives, with no end in sight — not because they are dangerous, not because they attacked America, but because the stigma of Guantánamo means they have no place to go, and America will not give a home to even one of them.

I’m told that my Supreme Court case is now read in law schools. Perhaps one day that will give me satisfaction, but so long as Guantánamo stays open and innocent men remain there, my thoughts will be with those left behind in that place of suffering and injustice.

I left Guantánamo Bay much as I had arrived almost five years earlier — shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, and ankles to a bolt on the airplane floor. My ears and eyes were goggled, my head hooded, and even though I was the only detainee on the flight this time, I was drugged and guarded by at least 10 soldiers. This time though, my jumpsuit was American denim rather than Guantánamo orange. I later learned that my C-17 military flight from Guantánamo to Ramstein Air Base in my home country, Germany, cost more than $1 million.

When we landed, the American officers unshackled me before they handed me over to a delegation of German officials. The American officer offered to re-shackle my wrists with a fresh, plastic pair. But the commanding German officer strongly refused: “He has committed no crime; here, he is a free man.”

I was not a strong secondary school student in Bremen, but I remember learning that after World War II, the Americans insisted on a trial for war criminals at Nuremberg, and that event helped turn Germany into a democratic country. Strange, I thought, as I stood on the tarmac watching the Germans teach the Americans a basic lesson about the rule of law.

How did I arrive at this point? This Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of the opening of the detention camp at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. I am not a terrorist. I have never been a member of Al Qaeda or supported them. I don’t even understand their ideas. I am the son of Turkish immigrants who came to Germany in search of work. My father has worked for years in a Mercedes factory. In 2001, when I was 18, I married a devout Turkish woman and wanted to learn more about Islam and to lead a better life. I did not have much money. Some of the elders in my town suggested I travel to Pakistan to learn to study the Koran with a religious group there.

I made my plans just before 9/11. I was 19 then and was naïve and did not think war in Afghanistan would have anything to do with Pakistan or my trip there. So I went ahead with my trip.

I was in Pakistan, on a public bus on my way to the airport to return to Germany when the police stopped the bus I was riding in. I was the only non-Pakistani on the bus — some people joke that my reddish hair makes me look Irish — so the police asked me to step off to look at my papers and ask some questions. German journalists told me the same thing happened to them. I was not a journalist, but a tourist, I explained. The police detained me but promised they would soon let me go to the airport. After a few days, the Pakistanis turned me over to American officials. At this point, I was relieved to be in American hands; Americans, I thought, would treat me fairly.

I later learned the United States paid a $3,000 bounty for me. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently the United States distributed thousands of fliers all over Afghanistan, promising that people who turned over Taliban or Qaeda suspects would, in the words of one flier, get “enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.” A great number of men wound up in Guantánamo as a result.

I was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where American interrogators asked me the same questions for several weeks: Where is Osama bin Laden? Was I with Al Qaeda? No, I told them, I was not with Al Qaeda. No, I had no idea where bin Laden was. I begged the interrogators to please call Germany and find out who I was. During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.

At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable.

After about two months in Kandahar, I was transferred to Guantánamo. There were more beatings, endless solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and extreme heat, days of forced sleeplessness. The interrogations continued always with the same questions. I told my story over and over — my name, my family, why I was in Pakistan. Nothing I said satisfied them. I realized my interrogators were not interested in the truth.

Despite all this, I looked for ways to feel human. I have always loved animals. I started hiding a piece of bread from my meals and feeding the iguanas that came to the fence. When officials discovered this, I was punished with 30 days in isolation and darkness.

I remained confused on basic questions: why was I here? With all its money and intelligence, the United States could not honestly believe I was Al Qaeda, could they?

After two and a half years at Guantánamo, in 2004, I was brought before what officials called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, at which a military officer said I was an “enemy combatant” because a German friend had engaged in a suicide bombing in 2003 — after I was already at Guantánamo. I couldn’t believe my friend had done anything so crazy but, if he had, I didn’t know anything about it.

A couple of weeks later, I was told I had a visit from a lawyer. They took me to a special cell and in walked an American law professor, Baher Azmy. I didn’t believe he was a real lawyer at first; interrogators often lied to us and tried to trick us. But Mr. Azmy had a note written in Turkish which he had gotten from my mother, and that made me trust him. (My mother found a lawyer in my hometown in Germany who heard that lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights represented Guantánamo detainees; the center assigned Mr. Azmy my case.) He did not believe the evidence against me and quickly discovered that my “suicide bomber” friend was, in fact, alive and well in Germany.

Mr. Azmy, my mother and my German lawyer helped pressure the German government to secure my release. Recently, Mr. Azmy made public a number of American and German intelligence documents from 2002 to 2004 that showed both countries suspected I was innocent. One of the documents said American military guards thought I was dangerous because I had prayed during the American national anthem.

Now, five years after my release, I am trying to put my terrible memories behind me. I have remarried and have a beautiful baby daughter. Still, it is hard not to think about my time at Guantánamo and to wonder how it is possible that a democratic government can detain people in intolerable conditions and without a fair trial.

Terrorists from Nigeria have again turned the joyful celebrations of Christmas into a D-Day for premeditated mass murder. This year, extremists slaughtered worshippers in a church during Christmas services near the Nigerian capital and elsewhere in the country.

America is at risk for this type of violence. Two Christmases ago, a militant from my country – the infamous Underwear Bomber – tried to blow up an American jetliner over Detroit.

Nigeria welcomes the White House’s rapid Christmas Day declaration of support against the perpetrators of that day’s attacks, but we must stress that the threat emerging in our country is far larger and may be headed America’s way.

It’s time for a strategic security relationship between Nigeria and the United States.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation. We are blessed with more people than Russia or Japan and are America’s fourth-largest foreign supplier of oil.

In the past two years, a group called Boko Haram has wounded and murdered hundreds of innocent Nigerians. Many observers in the United States and Nigeria dismissed Boko Haram as a tiny, weak, even incompetent terrorist group that, at best, was aimed only at destabilizing our democratically elected president.

They were mistaken. In August, Boko Haram escalated its attacks by sending a suicide bomber to blow up the United Nations building in Abuja. The terrorist group issued a statement to taunt not the president of Nigeria, but the president of the United States.

We can destroy Boko Haram in its early stages, before it goes truly international. We don’t want or need American troops. But we would benefit greatly from American know-how and other forms of support as we develop our new counterterrorism strategy. We have much to offer through our own expertise, human resources and experience.

Well before the Christmas bombings, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing on Boko Haram and issued a landmark report that contained some excellent proposals.

“Historically, Boko Haram has been focused on Nigerian government targets. Until recently, Western intelligence services did not widely view Boko Haram as a potential threat,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan, Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the subcommittee on counterintelligence and terrorism, and Rep. Jackie Speier, California Democrat, in an unusual joint statement at the Nov. 30 hearing.

The lawmakers made a bipartisan call for the State Department and intelligence community to take greater note of Nigeria, and to work with us against terrorism and ideological extremism.

The subcommittee report is a fine first step. It observes that small extremist groups can quickly endanger the American homeland before Washington even recognizes the threat.

Like other Islamist extremists, Boko Haram sees itself as fulfilling part of a global mission. Churches are not the group’s only religious targets. Boko Haram claims to be Islamic, but targets the Muslim faithful. Boko Haram is an enemy of all decent people. It is striving to spark a religious war the way racist extremists in the past have tried to provoke race wars. Those who fail to understand the enemy threat doctrine will fail to see the danger until it is too late.

The subcommittee leaders appear to agree: “In the recent past, the U.S. intelligence community has underestimated the intent and capability of other terrorist groups to launch attacks against the U.S. homeland,” and did not foresee those groups attempting to strike the U.S. at home. “These assessments and general assumptions,” Mr. Meehan and Ms. Speier said, “nearly proved fatal” in America.

The report’s conclusions mean that each country requires the assistance from the other. So far, however, the bipartisan congressional recommendations have yet to become U.S. policy, even as the U.S. Africa Command has made clear its similar concerns. The State Department, however, has yet to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organization.

Nigeria’s president intends to create a climate where no supporter of terrorism will be safe. In November, Nigerian authorities made the unusual move of arresting a federal senator from the president’s own party, based on intelligence that he was facilitating Boko Haram.

Such an arrest and prosecution of a sitting lawmaker is rare in any democracy. The severe action indicates both the profound nature of the threat as well as Nigeria’s sense of purpose in wiping it out.

The congressional homeland security panel called for the administration to “increase its support for programs that enhance the ability of Nigerian security forces to more effectively target Boko Haram and counter its evolution.”

Such support will certainly assist Nigeria and West Africa as a whole, but it will also be a low-cost, high-impact way of eradicating Boko Haram – and others like it – as a threat to the United States as well.

With recent developments reverberating across Africa, Nigeria is working out strategic partnerships with key players to track and neutralize extremists wherever they may be – before they become violent. We should not be seen merely as a tactical ally of convenience. The United States has been helpful on a small-scale basis, but is far behind other countries in forging a meaningful, strategic counterterrorism relationship with Nigeria.

Nigeria can defend its interests without U.S. support. But the United States cannot well defend its homeland from Boko Haram and other threats without Nigeria. We welcome a mutually beneficial partnership with the U.S. against terrorists like Boko Haram while there is still time.

Una de las tantas paradojas actuales es que mientras en la periferia muchas sociedades y Gobiernos intentan ampliar los derechos ciudadanos, en varios países centrales se pretende desvertebrar el Estado de derecho. En América Latina y, en tiempos recientes, en Oriente Próximo y el norte de África con la llamada primavera árabe, se observan impulsos y logros importantes en el reclamo y la extensión de derechos y garantías de diverso tipo. Inversamente, en países clave de Occidente, y desde el 11 de septiembre de 2001, en Estados Unidos se denota un esfuerzo desde el Ejecutivo y el Legislativo (y con pocas limitaciones por parte del Poder Judicial) de recortar y suprimir derechos alcanzados con enorme esfuerzo colectivo. Con el presunto objetivo de proteger la seguridad nacional en Estados Unidos se ha gestado una compleja estructura jurídica, burocrática e institucional cívico-militar que ha configurado de hecho una condición de inseguridad permanente; meta que al parecer ha logrado alcanzar el terrorismo transnacional a una década de los atentados en Nueva York, Washington y Filadelfia.

En ese contexto, la poslegalidad tiende a imponerse: se trata de una situación en la que el derecho interno e internacional se manipula, se desconoce o se quiebra a expensas de un bifronte Estado gendarme que opera con escasa rendición de cuentas hacia adentro y con excesivo despliegue militar hacia afuera. Lo poslegal no es patrimonio exclusivo de Estados Unidos -recientemente la secretaria del Interior de Reino Unido, Theresa May, sugirió la necesidad de deshacerse de la Ley de Derechos Humanos de 1998-, pero tiene su manifestación más elocuente e inquietante en aquel país.

La poslegalidad se exacerba en Estados Unidos en medio de una fenomenal crisis económica y ante una ciudadanía que, ante la incertidumbre y de modo confuso, se expresa contradictoriamente frente al delicado balance entre seguridad y libertad. Por ejemplo, en junio de 2010 una encuesta a cargo de Rasmussen Reports indicaba que el 28% de los estadounidenses consideraba que era una mala idea el control civil de los militares y apenas el 44% consideraba bueno dicho control. Pero, a su vez, en una encuesta de Gallup efectuada en septiembre de 2011 un 49% de los entrevistados consideraba que el Gobierno federal era “una amenaza inmediata a los derechos y libertades individuales”.

La poslegalidad, por vía de presuntos términos legales, rápidamente asimilados por los medios de comunicación y los principales líderes políticos nacionales, naturaliza un nuevo lenguaje que facilita el desprecio por los derechos. Así, en vez de referirse a la tortura se habla de “técnicas acrecentadas de interrogación”; el secuestro extraterritorial de personas, realizado de manera clandestina por funcionarios, se denomina “entrega extraordinaria”; las ejecuciones extrajudiciales se justifican en el marco de las “hostilidades” contra “militantes”; y a las guerras punitivas contra países que no han atacado a Estados Unidos se las llama “acción militar cinética”.

La poslegalidad tiene símbolos: Guantánamo y Abu Ghraib. Tiene puntos clave de construcción conceptual: las oficinas del Legal Advisor del Departamento de Estado, del General Counsel del Departamento de Defensa y del Special Counsel de la Casa Blanca. Tiene un mapa de referencia para su racionalización y justificación: la “guerra contra el terrorismo”. Y tiene continuidad política bipartidista: desde George W. Bush a Barack Obama.

Ahora bien, tres asuntos han puesto en evidencia el desbordamiento de la poslegalidad de Estados Unidos. Primero, el incesante uso de vehículos aéreos no tripulados (unmanned aerial vehicles), los denominados drones, en Asia (Irak, Afganistán y Pakistán) y África (Libia, Somalia y Yemen). El recurrente uso de aquel medio de combate -al que hay que sumar un fracasado intento reciente en Irán- ha llevado a debatir en torno a la “guerra de los drones”; un modo de enfrentamiento a distancia, sin grandes contingentes en condición de combate frontal, presuntamente de alta precisión y más económico que el despliegue de tropas. El recurso a los drones ha implicado, entre otras, cierta facilidad para lanzar ataques en los que las bajas propias son casi inexistentes, bastante indiferencia de una opinión pública que apenas si conoce el tema y que, en general, no padece costo alguno inmediato después de su utilización, y un ascendente papel militar de los órganos de inteligencia dado que es la CIA la encargada del sistema de lanzamiento. Si bien en 2009 el Informe del Relator Especial de la ONU para Ejecuciones Extrajudiciales, Philip Alston, sugería que los drones podrían violar el derecho internacional humanitario, nada parece haber conducido a replantear su uso por parte de Washington.

Segundo, en septiembre pasado el Gobierno de Barack Obama fue un paso más adelante en esta materia. En un “panel secreto”, y con aval presidencial, autorizó dar de baja a dos estadounidenses, Anwar al Awlaqi y Samir Khan, mediante misiles lanzados desde un vehículo aéreo no tripulado. En los dos casos no hubo una acusación formal, no se pretendió su arresto ni se buscó poner en marcha el debido proceso. Ni la Constitución ni las enmiendas 5, 6 y 14 fueron tenidas en cuenta para llevar a cabo este targeted killing.

Y tercero, más recientemente, en la Ley de Autorización de Defensa Nacional de 2012 y con una votación de 93 a 7, el Senado aprobó que cualquier estadounidense sospechoso de terrorismo puede ser detenido indefinidamente por autoridades militares (al tiempo que aumenta las restricciones para no trasladar los prisioneros de Guantánamo a territorio continental estadounidense). Para algunos observadores esta legislación es un serio revés al Estado de derecho. Organizaciones de derechos civiles y voces liberales demandan y se consuelan con un eventual veto del presidente Obama.

Los tres ejemplos mencionados apuntan a subrayar que en Estados Unidos la legalidad está en entredicho y que lo poslegal se está tornando en lo habitual. Más temprano que tarde esto tendrá un efecto devastador sobre la democracia en aquel país. Lo que tendrá, y de hecho ya tiene, reverberaciones por fuera de Estados Unidos. En ese caso se habrá dado un paso abismal: del acoso democrático al ocaso democrático.

On July 23, 2001, a former senior Iranian intelligence officer,Abolghasem Mr. Mesbahi,learned that Iran’s plan to strike the United States had been activated. Mr. Mesbahi knew it was important and real because he had worked on this plan previously, when he had helped set up Iran’s intelligence service, the MOIS, as far back as the mid-1980s. Mr. Mesbahi – known outside Iran as one of a core of “Assassins”- told German intelligence, which had given him protected status as a key witness in German prosecutions of brutal Iranian assassinations of dozens of dissidents.

On Aug. 13, 2001, Mr. Mesbahi received greater specificity as to the plot. The coded messages from former colleagues inside Iran revealed that the longtime plan to crash civilian airliners into American cities had been activated. Again, the officer told his German handlers, who responded that they would convey the information – we do not know if they did or to whom or exactly what information they might have passed on – and the Germans would let Mr. Mesbahi know if there were any developments. On Aug. 27, 2001, Mr. Mesbahi once more received confirmation that the plan was in motion, and the messages indicated a German connection. The 9/11 Commission would later confirm that key 9/11 liaison Ramzi Binalshibh and pilots Mohammad Atta and Ziad Jarrah were all German residents leading up to Sept. 11.

After Sept. 11, Mr. Mesbahi approached an American he knew was well-versed in Iranian affairs and told him of his foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 plan and how the plot to crash the then existing Boeing 747 aircraft into New York, Washington and Chicago had evolved in Iran years prior. The Pentagon, White House and World Trade Center had been on the hit list. Back in the 1980s, Iran had decided, he said, that to defeat the United States, it needed to engage in asymmetric warfare.

Mr. Mesbahi is one of three Iranian defectors in a case that took eight years to develop. His affidavit remains under seal in a case in which a judgment was signed late last month in New York federal court, Havlish v. Iran,which establishes that the joint enterprise of Iran, Hezbollah and al Qaeda were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. His testimony has been deemed credible by former CIA Middle East undercover officers and supervisors Clare Lopez and Bruce Tefft, also experts in the case representing Sept. 11 victim’s families. Mr. Mesbahi had direct contact with Iran’s leaders during the 1980s and early 1990s, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Mr. Mesbahi held many positions in Iran’s intelligence service, including running espionage out of the Iranian Embassy in France (France expelled him) and later for all of Western Europe. It was Mr. Mesbahi’s good friend, Saeed Emami, also a top official in the MOIS, who warned Mr. Mesbahi that he was slated for assassination in the mid-1990s upon his falling out with hard-liners.

On May 14, 2001, the overseer of Iran’s intelligence apparatus, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, wrote to the head of Iran’s intelligence operations on behalf of Iran’s supreme leader about the pending plot that became Sept. 11. The document shows the following: (1) direct connectivity between Iran’s supreme leader’s intelligence apparatus and al Qaeda; (2) knowledge and support for a large upcoming operation connecting Iran, Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the planned attack; and (3) the Iranian government’s goal to “damage America’s and Israel’s economic systems, discredit [their] institutions … as part of political confrontation, undermining [their] stability and security.” Specifically, the document states “support for al-Qaeda’s future plans,” cautioning “to be alert to the negative future consequences of this cooperation [between Iran and al Qaeda]” and the “expanding the collaboration with the fighters of al Qaeda and Hezbollah … no traces must be left that might have negative and irreversible consequences.”

The document is an attachment in the Havlishcase in the expert affidavit of Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman, who has written extensively on Mr. Mesbahi, Iran and Hezbollah and has deep connections to Israeli intelligence. Before Mr. Bergman, Iran expert Ken Timmerman also made this document public.

How did Iran get involved with al Qaeda? According to the Lopez-Tefft affidavit and other expert affidavits in the case, as well as convicted former Osama bin Laden bodyguard Ali Mohamed, the alliance began in 1993 in Khartoum, Sudan, in a meeting between Iranian and Hezbollah leadership with al Qaeda leadership to bridge the Shiite-Sunni gap and address common goals of defeating Israel and the United States. A direct working relationship was created between Iran’s MOIS; Hezbollah’s operational chief and key liaison with Iran, Imad Mughniyah; Osama bin Laden; and other senior al Qaeda leadership. Mughniyah himself was responsible for more than 100 terrorist incidents until his assassination in Syria in 2008.

Much of the al Qaeda training was carried out in camps in Iran run by MOIS and Mughniyah. In addition to training, al Qaeda received blueprints and drawings of bombs, manuals for wireless equipment, intelligence training, travel facilitation, operational guidance and much more. Hezbollah was a role model for al Qaeda, with more direct attacks and diversity of attacks against American property and Americans than any other terrorist organization, from the 1983 Marine barracks and American Embassy bombings in Lebanon to the torture deaths of senior CIA officials. Inside Iran, al Qaeda was directed carefully, providing all varieties of material support in the successful attacks in the late 1990s on the USS Cole, Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and U.S. embassies in Africa. (Iran and Hezbollah’s involvement in these other incidents has been referenced previously in federal prosecutions in U.S. courts. Khobar Towers, for example, was conducted by Saudi Hezbollah with direct support from Iran and knowledge of al Qaeda. The USS Cole and African bombings were carried out by al Qaeda with support and direction from Iran and Hezbollah.) The more al Qaeda proved its ability, the more attention Iran gave.

Iran already had conceived the Sept. 11 plot. al Qaeda became the perfect proxy. Not only was terrorist travel facilitation provided to al Qaeda by Iran generally, as described by the 9/11 Commission in its final report, but Mughniyah himself accompanied at least some Sept. 11 hijackers into Iran after the hijackers obtained the U.S. visas that would assure their entry into America, as I describe at length in my affidavit in the Havlish case. Yet Iran needed credible deniability. The May 2001 memo acquired by Mr. Bergman shows that Iran’s operational strategy clearly delineated that its leadership demanded a “hands off” approach about any involvement in terrorist acts committed against the United States. Iran knew a direct assault against America could mean a devastating U.S. response.

In the mid-1980s, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, labeled the plot “Shaitan dar Atash”meaning “Satan in Fire” or “Satan in Hell.” “Satan” was the code word for the United States. Plots included the use of chemical bombs, “dirty” bombs; attacks on power plants, gas stations, and oil tankers; as well as the plot that became Sept. 11. According to Mr. Mesbahi, at least one hijacker, Majid Moqed, who supported the terrorist operation on American Airlines Flight 11 (north tower of the World Trade Center) was housed at the Hotel Sepid, a MOIS safe house in Tehran. Mr. Mesbahi also relates that Iran was able to obtain an Airbus simulator and Boeing software from China for exactly the type of plane that eventually was used in the plot.

For the past 10 years, our foreign policy has been skewed toward heading off al Qaeda terrorist activities and dealing with the regimes of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet we now know, after all these years, that al Qaeda might never have carried out the Sept. 11 attacks but for Iran and Hezbollah. The 9/11 Commission gave America the details on how Iran’s proxy, al Qaeda, managed to carry out the Sept. 11 plot and detailed what it could of Iranian involvement – having come across relevant intercepts indicating Iranian involvement at the National Security Agency two weeks before the statutory close of the commission. The commission recommended a further look into Iran and Sept. 11 on Page 241 of the final report, stating: “After 9/11, Iran and Hezbollah wished to conceal any past evidence of cooperation with Sunni terrorists associated with al Qaeda. A senior Hezbollah official disclaimed any Hezbollah involvement in 9/11. We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government.” But it was never done.

Rep. Peter T. King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, would like to reconvene a 9/11 Commission. He has a point. Answers are essential, however embarrassing they may be. As Iran gets cozy with South America, is said to be months away from nuclear warhead capability and is known to continue to plot against the United States, nothing less grave than our national security is at stake.

Ten years ago last month, the now-infamous “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, boarded an American Airlines flight bound for Miami from Paris, intending to kill himself and all of the other passengers by detonating an explosive device he had concealed in his shoes. What was unknown at the time is that Reid was not supposed to act alone. Saajid Badat – like Reid a British citizen – was supposed to ignite his own pair of explosive shoes on a different trans-Atlantic flight, but he dropped out in the plot’s final stages.

Two years ago, on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines flight in Amsterdam bound for Detroit, intending to kill himself and all 289 passengers onboard by igniting an explosive device – this time hidden in his underwear – as the plane approached Detroit. As with Reid, other passengers subdued him before he could do so.

The similarities and differences between these two plots can inform our current understanding of the nature of the al Qaeda threat to the West.

Some of the similarities are obvious: high-profile targets, attempts made during the holiday season to maximize media attention, and diabolical creativity in terms of the hidden personal improvised explosive devices (in shoes and underwear) intended to cause maximum death and destruction on flights coming to the United States.

A less obvious but vital similarity is the bombers’ backgrounds. It was not by accident that both plots involved men who essentially radicalized to violence in the West (in London). In fact, a careful dissection of 16 of the most important “al Qaeda” plots launched against the West since 1993 reveals a consistent trend embedded in the al Qaeda threat to the West. Namely, al Qaeda has repeatedly and opportunistically used men who radicalized to violence in Western cities such as Hamburg, Germany, Montreal, London and New York, who showed up on al Qaeda’s doorstep on their own initiative and then were trained, turned around and launched back at the West by al Qaeda.

Although the tendency has been to see al Qaeda as “the other,” the truth of the matter is that whether it was the Madrid transit-system attacks of 2004, the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, or the New York City subway plot of September 2009, the bombers lived in the great cities of the West, were radicalized in the West and turned to violence in the West. Based on terrorism-related arrests in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past year, this trend of bottom-up radicalization in the West is not likely to end anytime soon.

Just as important is the lesson that can be drawn from the key difference between the shoe-bomber and underwear-bomber plots – the first directed by al Qaeda Core and the latter by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP): Since 2001, the broad threat from al Qaeda has metastasized away from its core leadership, mutated and spread, potentially making it even more dangerous than before.

There has been growth on the periphery of other important nodes in al Qaeda’s worldwide association of diffuse but ideologically aligned groups. The core has networked laterally with them, forming a loose coalition that includes AQAP, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan,Lashkar-e-Taiba, al Shabab and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, among others.

Each group serves as a power center or hub that has an informal and loose relationship to AQ Core. If the core fades in the wake of bin Laden’s death or from attrition because of drone strikes, other nodes in the network will seek to raise their profile and may even surpass the core’s ability to project a threat outward against the West. This process may have startedalready. Indeed, these affiliates and allies already have begun to attract would-be warriors radicalized in the West who previously might have attempted to join al Qaeda Core but instead chose peripheral nodes. These groups then deployed the attackers back home to conduct plots against the West – such as the underwear-bomber plotand the Times Square plot.

What the past 10 years have shown us is that the organization that struck the United States in New York, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania in 2001 is adaptive. Its members and adherents are not just sitting there waiting to be killed. They have found a way to survive and spread into new safe havens, such as Yemen, Somalia and North Africa. The ongoing, overseas al Qaeda-linked threat has morphed but not dissipated. Combating and deterring it will require continued vigilance, commitment of resources and staying power.

President Obama backed down from his threat to veto the 2012 defense authorization bill that Congress passed this month. But the legislation takes a position on detainees that is misguided. It should prompt the president to fully exercise the discretion the legislation gives him.

For the first few years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it was not at all clear we were beating al-Qaeda: Terror attacks took place in London, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and the Philippines.

Today, al-Qaeda’s leadership is decimated and its regional affiliates are struggling mightily. The lone-wolf threat remains significant, but lone wolves do not represent strategic threats any more than gang killings represent the crippling of U.S. society. We have far to go to defeat our jihadist adversary and its slowly eroding ideology, but we are more than halfway through writing the book of the downfall and death of al-Qaeda.

Amid the global decline of deaths from terror attacks, our nation recently debated whether to give this group what it wants: continued treatment as a viable military adversary on par with U.S. soldiers. Doing so suggests that al-Qaeda fighters deserve to be treated differently than the common criminals and murderers they are. Their ideology is dying because they can’t defend themselves against charges of wanton murder across the Muslim world; that is their Achilles’ heel. Yet now we have agreed to mandate military custody for some detainees.

Rather than engage in a dispassionate assessment of what plagues our adversary, many in Washington focused on internal political disputes. Meanwhile, it’s the degradation of its platform that al-Qaeda hates, the perception that its fighters are weak killers with no vision and no future. Certain provisions in the defense legislation offer a boon to al-Qaeda, allowing its fighters to argue that they remain a strategic threat, that they are a powerful movement meriting a military response and that the growing perception that they’ve become common criminals is wrongheaded. We don’t seem to be fighting them when we decide they have to head to military custody; it’s what they want. We’re fighting among ourselves, even as we’re grinding them down operationally.

One rationale for why we are headed down this path might be that it is a better option for the U.S. agencies that have to interrogate the fighters. Yet not once in nearly 10 years in senior positions at the CIA and the FBI did I hear a professional raise this issue. Indeed, some of our most respected national security leaders have said they don’t need or want this law. Like the debate about whether we should direct law enforcement professionals to Mirandize suspects, this is a national security dispute in which questions about how to fight the enemy outside the Beltway have become subordinate to fighting inside the Beltway.

The legislation Congress sent the president grants him authority to waive the military-detention provisions. He should use it, as we recognize that the criminal justice system has tools the military doesn’t. A new, healthy debate could center on whether there should be adjustments to terror cases without mandating military custody. One useful legal action would be accelerating the deportation of non-citizens in national security investigations. We spend too many taxpayer dollars on people we should have simply expelled, but the process to send them home is cumbersome. As it considers best tactics going forward, Washington also should tackle the politically sensitive question of how to advance the legal process by which the United States collects digital intelligence. We’re mired in a decades-old analog process that was designed to accommodate Cold War needs. And it would be useful to address why, years after intelligence reform, we still lack a single clearinghouse for security clearances.

Our goal should be simple: Take what our adversaries hate and turn it against them. In countless statements, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have told us they cannot defend the killing of innocents. Military engagements are easy for them to explain; murder is not. In numerous polls across the Islamic world, citizens consistently say that they do not understand al-Qaeda killings of Muslims, though they have no problem with al-Qaeda and Taliban military engagements with the United States. And al-Qaeda’s footprint — its recruiting, its ability to take advantage of the Arab Spring and its presence on al-Jazeera — is disappearing because of its inability to answer these criticisms.

The United States does not want to suggest that al-Qaeda is a battlefield adversary; it is not. Yet we have said its members are worthy of treatment as military adversaries, requiring military custody. They are below this and slipping further every day from self-inflicted missteps. We should take advantage of their mistakes and use those errors against this fading threat. Don’t give them what they want. Give them what they hate.

Tema: En 2011 el número de civiles afganos muertos a consecuencia atentados perpetrados por los talibán y sus aliados será unas cuatro veces superior al de militares de la coalición internacional abatidos por la violencia de esos mismos insurgentes.

Resumen: En Afganistán se perpetran actualmente, cada mes, aproximadamente el 10% de los atentados terroristas ocurridos en todo el mundo. Entre julio y octubre de 2011, la media fue de 175 mensuales. Este terrorismo, llevado a cabo por organizaciones yihadistas de origen no solo autóctono sino también foráneo, se ha incrementado y continúa evidenciando no tanto una forma de oposición a la presencia de tropas extranjeras en el territorio del país, que también, como una estrategia insurgente de control social en la que los talibán ven complementadas sus actuaciones con las de otras entidades yihadistas afines, sobre todo aunque no exclusivamente de procedencia paquistaní. Ese incremento de los actos de terrorismo en Afganistán, dirigidos principalmente contra la propia población afgana, como pone de manifiesto el atentado del 6 de diciembre en Kabul, a consecuencia del cual perdieron la vida cerca de 80 civiles, obliga a reflexionar con realismo acerca de los eventuales resultados, previstos e imprevistos, de la ayuda externa que, en circunstancias como las presentes, se pueda continuar ofreciendo o se prometa ofrecer a sus incipientes instituciones y a sus gentes, una vez comenzada la reducción del despliegue militar Occidental y tras la definitiva retirada de las tropas internacionales prevista para 2014.

Análisis: El atentado suicida ocurrido en Kabul el pasado 6 de diciembre, como consecuencia del cual han perdido la vida al menos 80 personas, de acuerdo con el balance de víctimas que hizo público cuatro días después el presidente de Afganistán, Hamid Karzai, es ante todo un atentado contra la propia población afgana. Como al menos dos más, menos cruentos, ocurridos ese mismo día en otros lugares del país, caso de Mazar i Sharif. Como la mayoría de los atentados terroristas que allí se producen. Esta es una realidad a menudo soslayada en nuestros medios de comunicación y que todavía parece no encajar en la imagen que muchos occidentales tienen de lo que ocurre con la denominada insurgencia en esa sociedad del sur de Asia. Suele pensarse que los blancos principales de dicha violencia son las tropas de la International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), desplegadas con mandato de Naciones Unidas y mando de la Alianza Atlántica; o, en su defecto, las fuerzas afganas de seguridad, entrenadas y capacitadas por aquellas. Pero la realidad es bien distinta. Aun cuando la inmensa mayoría de los atentados que afectan a la población afgana ni siquiera sean noticia. Sólo parecen serlo cuando resultan altamente letales, como en el aludido episodio, o cuando acontecen en la capital del país, donde se concentran los corresponsales de prensa extranjera.

Sectarismo y nexos yihadistas

Por otra parte, el hecho de que se tratara de un atentado cometido contra afganos chiíes, congregados multitudinariamente en torno a un emblemático lugar de culto para los seguidores locales de confesión chií –la mezquita de Hazrat Abul Fazal al-Abas– y en una festividad emblemática para esa minoría musulmana dentro y fuera del país surasiático –es decir, la celebración de los ritos correspondientes a la Ashura– pone de manifiesto la orientación excluyente del ideario religioso que lo inspira y el probable concurso de terroristas foráneos en su práctica. En Mazar i Sharif, el atentado se dirigió asimismo contra chiíes que accedían a su principal santuario en dicha localidad al noreste del país. Todo ello evoca tanto la ya conocida impronta de al-Qaeda sobre las modalidades y procedimientos del terrorismo insurgente en Afganistán como asimismo la dinámica de la violencia yihadista en Irak y en Pakistán, experiencias que sin lugar a dudas emula el atentado del 6 de diciembre en Kabul. Un portavoz de los talibanes afganos negó la implicación de estos en el atentado de Kabul y los de otras dos localidades, pero una organización yihadista paquistaní, Lashkar e Jhangvi (LeJ), se los atribuyó el mismo día de su ejecución. Tanto si dicha reclamación de autoría es, como bien podría ser, auténtica, como si, de modo alternativo o compatible, ocultase la implicación de los talibán afganos, una hipótesis que no debe descartarse –no hay que olvidar que, recientemente, el mulá Omar ha diseminado algunos mensajes en los que expresaba preocupación por el número de civiles afganos muertos en “ataques de martirio y otras operaciones”–, nada nuevo añade a la estrategia de estos últimos y de sus allegados en la insurgencia yihadista en Afganistán.

Es más, LeJ y los talibán afganos se encuentran estrechamente relacionados desde el establecimiento de aquella organización terrorista hacia 1996 o 1997 en la provincia paquistaní del Punyab. Se considera que su denominación alude precisamente a uno de los fundadores del movimiento islamista radical Sipah e Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), Haq Nawaz Jahngvi, asesinado en 1990, supuestamente por extremistas chiíes. No en vano, LeJ procede de una escisión ocurrida en el seno de esa misma formación extremista suní. Sus actos de terrorismo, inicialmente dirigidos sobre todo contra individuos y colectividades chiíes en Pakistán, han terminado por afectar, a lo largo de la última década, también a blancos de adscripción cristiana o simplemente extranjeros en ese país e incluso a autoridades del mismo. Esto y la progresiva introducción, a partir de 2003, del terrorismo suicida como parte de su repertorio de violencia, indican la influencia que sobre dicha organización yihadista paquistaní ejerció y probablemente ejerce al-Qaeda. Más aún, tras haberse visto afectada por la persecución policial en Pakistán, LeJ consiguió reorganizarse entre 2004 y 2006, para lo que se benefició del apoyo económico recibido tanto por al-Qaeda como por los talibán afganos, que además acogieron a los líderes de la organización terrorista paquistaní buscados por las autoridades de su país de origen.

LeJ no sólo se encuentra vinculada a al-Qaeda y a los talibán afganos, sino que también se halla relacionada, en el marco de los nexos yihadistas en Afganistán, como Harkat ul Muyahidín (HuM) y Jaish e Mohamed (JeM) –ambas asimismo conectadas con al-Qaeda– en Pakistán y con integrantes del Movimiento Islámico de Uzbekistán establecidos en Afganistán. LeJ formó parte de la conocida como Brigada 313, aglutinada para responder a la invasión militar estadounidense de Afganistán a finales de 2001. En dicha coalición se integraron asimismo Lashkar e Toiba, Harakat ul Yihad ul Islami, HuM y JeM. En determinadas zonas de Afganistán, al igual que en algunas demarcaciones montañosas de Pakistán, es donde los terroristas de LeJ, en la actualidad probablemente alrededor de un centenar en activo, han venido recibiendo adiestramiento, con frecuencia en campos adscritos a alguna de las referidas organizaciones yihadistas. Dichos militantes, por lo común reclutados en madrasas paquistaníes, se suelen distribuir en células de entre cinco y ocho integrantes, independientes entre sí pero en conjunto subordinadas al mando de las subunidades territoriales y en última instancia al Majlis i Shoora o directorio de LeJ, en el que todavía predominan individuos que durante los años 80 combatieron en la llamada yihad afgana junto a los talibanes. Además de las contribuciones económicas ya refereidas, LeJ se ha venido financiando habitualmente mediante donaciones privadas procedentes de dentro y fuera de Pakistán, rescates obtenidos de secuestros y otras actividades criminales.

Auge y expansión del terrorismo

Por añadidura, los actos de violencia sectaria acontecidos en Afganistán el 6 de diciembre son asimismo reveladores del auge y expansión que registra actualmente el terrorismo en el país. De acuerdo con los datos proporcionados por la misión de Naciones Unidas en Afganistán (UNAMA, de acuerdo con sus siglas en inglés), entre enero y junio de 2011 fueron casi 1.500 los civiles que perdieron la vida en el contexto de conflicto armado que se vive en el país, por lo que la cifra podría acercarse a los 3.000 civiles para final de año. Pero nada menos que el 80% de esas víctimas mortales se produjeron como consecuencia de atentados terroristas perpetrados por actores antigubernamentales, sobre todo por seguidores del Emirato Islámico de Afganistán, como los talibán aluden a su propio movimiento armado. Una fracción de tales incidentes es obra de grupos y organizaciones yihadistas que se asientan al otro lado de la frontera, en las zonas tribales de Pakistán, como la conocida Red Haqqani, que se mantiene asociada con al-Qaeda y relacionada con la inteligencia paquistaní, o Therik e Taliban Pakistan, cuyos integrantes comparten además con los talibán afganos su común etnia pastún. Como LeJ en relación al atentado del 6 de diciembre en Kabul, también el Movimiento Islámico de Uzbekistán ha reclamado ya la autoría de algún acto de terrorismo. Empero, no es inusual que miembros de estas u otras entidades yihadistas colaboren con los talibanes afganos en la preparación y ejecución de atentados terroristas.

Hablo de atentados terroristas porque la realidad es que, a lo largo de 2011, ocho de cada 10 víctimas mortales ocasionadas por actos de violencia insurgente en Afganistán han fallecido, según los datos proporcionados por la propia UNAMA, como consecuencia de episodios de terrorismo suicida, de incidentes perpetrados mediante el uso de artefactos explosivos y de asesinatos individuales premeditados, bien sea con armas blancas –los degollamientos de afganos por insurgentes talibán son frecuentes– o con armas de fuego. Es decir, como consecuencia de modalidades y procedimientos tácticos propiamente terroristas. Ello quiere decir que la estrategia de la insurgencia afgana en general y la de los talibán en particular está en la actualidad dedicada, pese a lo que su propaganda proclama, no tanto a oponerse violentamente a la presencia militar extranjera en Afganistán –que, por supuesto, también– como a imponer, mediante el recurso a la intimidación y el miedo, un control social efectivo sobre la población y recuperar con ello el dominio, o cuando menos la influencia, sobre amplios sectores de la misma. En 2011, el número de civiles afganos muertos a consecuencia atentados perpetrados por los talibán y sus aliados será, según cabe anticipar, unas cuatro veces superior al de militares de la coalición internacional abatidos por la violencia de los insurgentes yihadistas. Una violencia que obedece menos a la resistencia contra las tropas extranjeras que a una estrategia de control social sobre la propia población afgana.

El número de atentados está cerca de duplicarse en 2011 respecto a 2010 y casi a triplicarse respecto a 2009. Estamos, pues, ante un auge del terrorismo insurgente en general y talibán en particular, que las fuerzas afganas de seguridad son incapaces de contener, la heterogénea misión de la Fuerza Internacional de Asistencia a la Seguridad no contribuye a mitigar y los enredos estadounidenses en torno a una más que cuestionable negociación con los talibán o sus afines enmascaran. Hay una lectura relativamente positiva de esta realidad, y consiste en observar que el incremento en la actividad propiamente terrorista desarrollada por los talibán y sus afines puede obedecer a las crecientes dificultades que encuentran para enfrentarse de otro modo, más convencional, a las tropas de la ISAF o a las fuerzas afganas de seguridad. Así, una mayor actividad terrorista podría ser entendida como la respuesta adaptativa de los insurgentes a una situación en la que prefieren evitar una confrontación directa con sus adversarios militares. De hecho, parece que en 2011 ha disminuido marcadamente, respecto a 2010, el número de ataques complejos y coordinados iniciados por los talibán y otros insurgentes afganos, según el Report on Progress Towards Security and Stability in Afghanistan difundido el pasado mes de octubre por el Departamento de Defensa estadounidense, aunque continúa siendo alto cuando se contemplan los datos relativos a la serie completa desde 2009. En este contexto cabría interpretar el fallido atentado suicida del 13 de diciembre contra la base de las tropas españolas en Qala i Now, capital de Baghdis. En cualquier caso, la evolución reciente del terrorismo en Afganistán advierte de las extraordinarias dificultades que tendrá, ante una situación como la actual, implementar con éxito una ayuda internacional y de las consecuencias que, para la propia población afgana se podrían derivar de una retirada no compensada de los militares estadounidenses y de otras naciones occidentales que actualmente desarrollan su misión en Afganistán. La dinámica terrorista emprendida por los talibán afganos y sus asociados yihadistas foráneos será muy difícil de contener a corto plazo.

Conclusión: Que el último atentado suicida de Kabul fuese especialmente letal y, además del cariz sectario de la violencia que implica, coincidiera con la visita del presidente de Afganistán, Hamid Karzai, a Alemania, para tomar parte en la cumbre internacional sobre el futuro de su país que tuvo lugar en Bonn –cumbre denostada públicamente por los talibán y que Pakistán, potencia nuclear cuya solución para Afganistán pasa porque el futuro gobierno de Kabul sea favorable a los intereses de Islamabad, boicoteó–, seguramente no es casualidad. En conjunto, lo ocurrido obliga a insistir en una reflexión sobre los obstáculos que la creciente inestabilidad en el mismo, a 10 años de la intervención militar estadounidense que derrocó al régimen talibán y destruyó la infraestructura de al-Qaeda en territorio afgano, derivada entre otros factores de un incremento sin solución de continuidad de los actos de terrorista –en Afganistán se perpetran actualmente, cada mes, aproximadamente el 10% de los atentados ocurridos en todo el mundo, una media de 175 mensuales entre julio y octubre de 2011–, perpetrados por organizaciones yihadistas de origen no sólo autóctono sino también foráneo, plantea a la hora de anticipar con realismo los eventuales resultados, previstos e imprevistos, de la ayuda externa que, en circunstancias como las presentes, se pueda continuar ofreciendo o se prometa ofrecer a sus incipientes instituciones y a sus gentes, una vez comenzada la reducción del despliegue militar Occidental y tras la definitiva retirada de las tropas internacionales prevista para 2014.

In his inaugural address, President Obama called on us to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” We agree. Now, to protect both, he must veto the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress is expected to pass this week.

This budget bill — which can be vetoed without cutting financing for our troops — is both misguided and unnecessary: the president already has the power and flexibility to effectively fight terrorism.

One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past. Some claim that this provision would merely codify existing practice. Current law empowers the military to detain people caught on the battlefield, but this provision would expand the battlefield to include the United States — and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.

A second provision would mandate military custody for most terrorism suspects. It would force on the military responsibilities it hasn’t sought. This would violate not only the spirit of the post-Reconstruction act limiting the use of the armed forces for domestic law enforcement but also our trust with service members, who enlist believing that they will never be asked to turn their weapons on fellow Americans. It would sideline the work of the F.B.I. and local law enforcement agencies in domestic counterterrorism. These agencies have collected invaluable intelligence because the criminal justice system — unlike indefinite military detention — gives suspects incentives to cooperate.

Mandatory military custody would reduce, if not eliminate, the role of federal courts in terrorism cases. Since 9/11, the shaky, untested military commissions have convicted only six people on terror-related charges, compared with more than 400 in the civilian courts.

A third provision would further extend a ban on transfers from Guantánamo, ensuring that this morally and financially expensive symbol of detainee abuse will remain open well into the future. Not only would this bolster Al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts, it also would make it nearly impossible to transfer 88 men (of the 171 held there) who have been cleared for release. We should be moving to shut Guantánamo, not extend it.

Having served various administrations, we know that politicians of both parties love this country and want to keep it safe. But right now some in Congress are all too willing to undermine our ideals in the name of fighting terrorism. They should remember that American ideals are assets, not liabilities.

James Madison, father of the Constitution, warned, “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become instruments of tyranny at home.” Abraham Lincoln had similar thoughts, saying, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

During war, there has always been a struggle to preserve constitutional liberties. During the Civil War, the right of habeas corpus was suspended. Newspapers were closed. Fortunately, those actions were reversed after the war.

The discussion now to suspend certain rights to due process is especially worrisome, given that we are engaged in a war that appears to have no end. Rights given up now cannot be expected to be returned. So we do well to contemplate the diminishment of due process, knowing that the rights we lose now may never be restored.

My well-intentioned colleagues ignore these admonitions in defending provisions of the 2012 defense authorization bill pertaining to detaining suspected terrorists.

Their legislation would arm the military with the authority to detain indefinitely – without due process or trial – suspected al Qaeda sympathizers, including American citizens apprehended on American soil.

I want to repeat that. We are talking about people who are merely suspected of a crime. We are talking about American citizens.

If these provisions pass, we could see American citizens being sent to Guantanamo Bay. This should be alarming to everyone because it puts every single American citizen at risk.

There is one thing and one thing only protecting innocent Americans from being detained at will by the hands of a too-powerful state: our Constitution and the checks it puts on government power. Should we err and remove some of the most important checks on state power in the name of fighting terrorism, well, then the terrorists will have won.

Detaining citizens without a court trial is un-American. In fact, this alarming arbitrary power is reminiscent of Egypt’s “permanent” emergency law authorizing indefinite preventive detention, a law that provoked ordinary Egyptians to tear their country apart last spring and risk their lives to fight.

Recently, Justice Antonin Scalia affirmed this idea in his dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, saying, “Where the government accuses a citizen of waging war against it, our constitutional tradition has been to prosecute him in federal court for treason or some other crime.”

He concluded, “The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the executive.”

Justice Scalia was, as he often does, following the wisdom of our Founding Fathers.

As Ben Franklin wisely warned, we should not attempt to trade liberty for security. If we do, we may end up with neither. And really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us?

Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and later secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, testified shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He underscored that “the history of this government in prosecuting terrorists in domestic courts has been one of unmitigated success and one in which the judges have done a superb job of managing the courtroom and not compromising our concerns about security and our concerns about classified information.”

Some say that to prevent another Sept. 11 attack we must fight terrorism with a war mentality and not treat potential attackers as criminals. For combatants captured on the battlefield, I tend to agree.

But Sept. 11 didn’t succeed because we granted the terrorists due process. The attacks did not succeed because al Qaeda was so formidable, but because of human error. The Department of Defense withheld intelligence from the FBI. No warrants were denied – the warrants weren’t requested. The FBI failed to act on repeated pleas from its field agents, agents who were in possession of a laptop with information that might have prevented Sept. 11.

These are not failures of laws. They are not failures of procedures. They are failures of imperfect men in bloated bureaucracies. No amount of liberty sacrificed on the altar of the state will ever change that.

We should not have to sacrifice our liberty to be safe. We cannot allow the rules to change to fit the whims of those in power. The rules, the binding chains of our Constitution, were written so that it didn’t matter who was in power. In fact, they were written to protect us and our rights from those who hold power without good intentions. We are not governed by saints or angels. Our Constitution allows for that. This bill does not.

The next president of the United States needs to answer this question: When, and under what conditions, will the U.S. government stop using drones to bomb suspected terrorists around the world?

The drone program — assuming the media and think-tank coverage of it is basically true, and this piece should not be construed as confirming the existence of the program — is a tactical and technological innovation that has been invaluable in the war against al-Qaeda. Cost-effective, increasingly precise and surgical, it is almost the archetype of sterile, risk-free, push-button warfare, which the U.S. military has dreamed of for a generation.

But bombing by drone is also an act of war that kills people. And wars are supposed to end. They have to have an end. Endless war is unacceptable and dangerous. The U.S. government simply cannot arrogate the right to wage an endless, global war against anyone it deems a threat to national security. The prospect of such a war should trouble anyone who has the least acquaintance with history or political philosophy.

The writer Randolph Bourne warned that “War is the health of the state,”and endless, global war is dangerous for proponents of limited government.

After U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a September drone attack, the ACLU’s deputy legal director rightly said, “It is a mistake to invest the President — any President — with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country.”

The point is simple: That power will corrupt those who would wield it.

I do not believe President George W. Bush misused this power or that President Obama has misused it so far. It is clear that drones need to be in the skies for some years yet. But that does not mean we should automatically extend the same trust to every future president.

The best argument for allowing the U.S. government to kill its citizens without charge or trial is that, as was the case during the Civil War, the president is authorized to defend this country against rebellion, which means he may wage war against rebels. Abraham Lincoln killed more Americans than did Bush or Obama — or al-Qaeda — and he was right to do so. He did not deploy the Union Army to arrest the Confederacy but to destroy it. It was his duty to do so.

Similarly, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress authorized the president to use “all necessary and proper force” against the perpetrators of what were rightly deemed acts of war.

But the comparison of the war against terrorism and the Civil War only underscores the difference between them: Eventually, the Civil War ended and the U.S. government stopped trying to kill its own citizens. Upon termination of hostilities, the president’s authority to kill rebels lapsed, and the normal responsibility to respect due process resumed.

Brought forward to today’s situation, that means the president must explain the precise conditions we are working toward that will constitute the end of the war against al-Qaeda and, upon meeting them, will halt the government’s efforts to kill people, including U.S. citizens. The president’s authority to kill should be exceptional, not routine.

Simply put, when is this war over?

The answer cannot be “once we’ve killed them all,” because we will never know whether or when that has been achieved. Using the killing of every active or potential member of al-Qaeda as the metric for victory is simply a recipe for extending the war for as long as the government deems convenient. Nor is the metric “after al-Qaeda surrenders” useful, because there will be no surrender ceremony.

The answer is likely to be murky: when U.S. intelligence no longer judges al-Qaeda to be a clear and present danger to national security. The government should clarify what that looks like and, to the extent possible, define that goal with as many concrete and measurable benchmarks as possible so that there is objectivity and accountability in its assessment. Without such metrics, we are simply trusting that the government will make the right decision and relinquish its war powers of its own accord, by its own judgment, when it deems the time right.

I don’t know the exact answer. But I also don’t get the sense that the Obama administration is even asking the question, and that is most worrisome of all.

The Colombian army’s killing of Alfonso Cano, head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), will not eliminate that country’s largest guerrilla group anytime soon. But it does partly illustrate why international terrorism has not established a major presence in Latin America. Local security forces, bolstered by generous American assistance, have made the region a difficult place for foreign terrorists to set up operational cells – and other conditions also help to make Latin America less vulnerable.

One reason why the FARC has survived repeated blows to its leadership is the support that it receives from various groups, perhaps including government officials, in neighboring Ecuador and Venezuela. Fortunately, this backing appears to have declined in the last year or so, following improvement in Colombia’s relations with these countries.

Another factor contributing to the FARC’s survival has been its transformation over the years from a revolutionary organization into a narco-terrorist group that uses violence to support its criminal operations. Many former terrorist and insurgent groups in the region have undergone similar transformations over the last two decades.

These groups, some with transnational reach, mostly engage in narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, and kidnapping. At worst, they sometimes employ terrorist tactics (commonly defined as violence that deliberately targets civilians). In Colombia, the FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) finance their operations through drug trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion. These groups might kill civilians, but their main targets are the police and security personnel who threaten their activities.

Latin America is distinctive in the recurring and broad overlap of mass movements professing revolutionary goals with transnational criminal operations. The Internet and modern social media are allowing these mass criminal movements to expand their activities beyond kidnapping, extortion, and trafficking in drugs, arms, and people, to include fraud, piracy, information theft, hacking, and sabotage.

Violent mass movements remain in some Latin American countries, but, like the FARC, they are typically heavily engaged in organized crime. Drug cartels and gang warfare may ruin the lives of thousands of innocent people, but they should not be seen as equivalent to the ideological revolutionaries who used to wreak havoc in the region, or to contemporary mass terrorists.

Extra-regional terrorist movements such as al-Qaeda have minimal presence in South America, with little independent operational activity and few ties to local violent movements. At most, the two types of groups might share operational insights and revenue from transnational criminal operations. Hezbollah has not conducted an attack in Latin America in almost two decades. Indigenous organized criminal movements are responsible for the most serious sources of local violence.

Latin American countries generally are not a conducive environment for major terrorist groups. They lack large Muslim communities that could provide a bridgehead for Islamist extremist movements based in Africa and the Middle East. The demise of military dictatorships and the spread of democratic regimes throughout Latin America (except for Cuba) means that even severe economic, class, ethnic, and other tensions now more often manifest themselves politically, in struggles for votes and influence.

No Latin American government appears to remain an active state sponsor of foreign terrorist movements. At worst, certain public officials may tolerate some foreign terrorists’ activities and neglect to act vigorously against them. More often, governments misapply anti-terrorist laws against their non-violent opponents. For example, despite significant improvement in its human-rights policies, the Chilean government has at times applied harsh anti-terrorism laws against indigenous Mapuche protesters.

Indeed, Latin American terrorism is sometimes exaggerated, because governments have incentives to cite local terrorist threats to secure foreign support, such as US capacity-building funding. Just as during the Cold War, when Latin American leaders were lavished with aid for fighting communist subversion, governments seek to fight “terrorist” threats at America’s expense.

Ironically, the strength of transnational criminal organizations in Latin America may act as a barrier to external terrorist groups. Extra-regional terrorists certainly have incentives to penetrate the region. Entering the US, a high-value target for some violent extremist groups, from Latin America is not difficult for skilled operatives. Extra-regional terrorist groups could also raise funds and collaborate operationally with local militants.

But Latin America’s powerful transnational criminal movements, such as the gangs in Mexico that control much of the drug trafficking into the US, do not want to jeopardize their profits by associating themselves with al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Supporting terrorism would merely divert time and other resources from profit-making activities, while focusing unsought US and other international attention on their criminal operations.

Nevertheless, Latin America is not immune to the violent terrorism that has plagued other continents. The region’s countries clearly have vulnerabilities that weaken their individual and collective efforts to combat potential foreign terrorist activities. The US government has cited such recurring handicaps as excessive duplication of efforts, overlapping institutional mandates, and inadequate information-sharing and coordination of counterterrorism efforts.

In some sub-regions, such as the Caribbean, criminal organizations sometimes have stronger and more efficient transnational operations than local governments can counter, particularly given inadequate collaboration. National sovereignty concerns, especially in the US, can also limit international cooperation.

Finally, at the national level, some Latin American countries suffer from such terrorism enablers as corruption, weak government institutions, insufficient interagency cooperation, inadequate financial safeguards, misapplied terrorist laws against non-terrorists, and insufficient counterterrorism resources.

Cano’s death is a welcome blow to the FARC. But Latin America should redouble its efforts in order to avoid losing its enviable status as the region least threatened by international terrorism.

I am going to make a statement of the obvious, being one of the people heavily involved in the events of 9/11: We didn’t actually know what was going to happen next.

We made a very good stab at trying to understand what might happen, but much that is said now is said with the benefit of hindsight. My own views have changed over the last 10 years, especially now that I have the time to reflect and read, which I didn’t necessarily have in my previous job.

Unquestionably 9/11 was a defining moment, and by that I mean that it had a historical before and after. It caused a fundamental rethink of national security threats and a reordering of national security priorities in the United States, in Britain and elsewhere. It had a huge impact on security, defense and intelligence budgets. It caused a significant change of direction in U.S. foreign policy, and we live with the consequences today in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, to an extent in Iraq and perhaps across the entire Middle East.

It will take a long time for the surface of American society to become even again. Though President Obama has cleverly remolded the rhetoric around what the previous administration called “the war on terror,” he has actually in some respects raised the aggression level against Al Qaeda.

The current administration has approved more “targeted killings,” particularly in northern Pakistan, than the Bush administration, and of course there has been no closure of Guantánamo.

Yet what is surprising 10 years on is the relative failure of violent Islamism to make a more lasting political impact. Few of us would have predicted this failure at the time.

Al Qaeda began with the idea of purging Saudi Arabia of “infidels”; it then came up with a complex political model of a caliphate. What we are seeing instead — and I stress that my comments are personal — is a resurgence of moderate Islam and moderate Islamist parties. These groups are now apparently arguing for the very democratic values and individual rights that Al Qaeda was so opposed to. This can be seen in what is happening today in Tunisia, in Egypt, in the sort of things that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is saying and doing.

Suddenly we have a different narrative — a narrative to which the Qaeda leadership is violently opposed — making the political and social weather across the Middle East. Al Qaeda to an extent is on its back foot. And intelligence has proven effective in blunting its efforts over the past decade.

Let me focus briefly on that: The first point is that effective counterintelligence work is highly dependent on working with other agencies both domestically and internationally; it requires unprecedented international and domestic cooperation.

To be sure, that has raised issues of dealing with governments and legal systems different from our own, and particularly with partners whose views of human rights are different from ours. Intelligence agencies operate under a system of political clearance, and it is the responsibility of government ministers to decide what the scope of that cooperation should be in the face of clashes of interest or clashes of legality.

For example, any future exchange of information with the Russians, after the Alexander Litvinenko affair, is clearly a political decision for the government. We were cooperating quite extensively with the Russians until we had this serious bilateral problem. A potentially valuable relationship has become quite difficult to handle for political reasons.

I want to add that I rather resent the suggestions I’ve heard that our relationship with Muammar el-Qaddafi was “cozy.” No, it was uncomfortable, difficult and pragmatic. It was a political decision, after having significantly disarmed Libya, for the government to cooperate with the Libyans on Islamist terrorism. The whole relationship was one of serious calculation about where the overall balance of our national interests stood.

Another challenge in fighting terrorism has been the need to work with intelligence that I would call highly mosaic. It requires locking many small pieces together to form a coherent picture. It requires extracting value from massive data flows, filtering out large quantities of irrelevant and useless material.

Yet another challenge is dealing with what I call “non-organizations.” Collecting intelligence on organizations that have organograms, telephone directories or papers in safes is relatively straightforward.

Dealing with transient conspiracies that are based around charismatic individuals, whose members come together like flocks of birds and disperse, creates huge difficulties. Sources can be very temporary and short-lived.

There is also the question of when to intervene. We can’t just sit there and amass intelligence and increase our understanding, as we did in the Cold War on the Soviet military. Now we actually have to do something with it. We have to plan for the catastrophe, for the possibilities of something truly dreadful happening.

Now, back to Al Qaeda, and its crisis of credibility. I believe Al Qaeda made a tactical and strategic error in trying to fight the U.S. military in Iraq, which it did with a substantial number of foreign fighters. Al Qaeda had a vision of taking on the American military in Iraq, but once the United States got its act together, the Sunni tribal chiefs decided to support the Americans, and the war only accelerated Al Qaeda’s decline. From its point of view, Al Qaeda would have been far better off concentrating on terror attacks.

We also must be careful when we talk about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is not the Taliban. Its relationship with the Pashtun Taliban has always been an alliance of convenience, and their agendas do not really match. I don’t want to give Al Qaeda more advice, but if they have one objective in Afghanistan it should be to keep the Taliban away from the negotiating table.

Negotiations are a two-way process. The I.R.A. in Ireland is a classic example of moving from terrorism to a political solution. Similarly, it is possible to negotiate, say, with Basques — or the Taliban. But Al Qaeda has no realistic political agenda, it is entirely rejectionist. Theirs is a confrontation of beliefs and values. So it is the right thing to do, despite the risks, to go out on the front foot and meet their threat militantly.

Al Qaeda may well have more very nasty surprises in store. But it is instructive to look at how Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, responded to the phenomenon of the Arab Spring and the Arab Awakening. It took Al Qaeda a long time to make any statement, and when a statement came it condemned the aspirations to democracy and rejected the secular character of the uprisings. That does not look like the sort of message that will have any potency on the Arab street in the light of what is happening. We have a different narrative, and events in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and Syria should give us hope that it has the greater power.

Of course there is always the danger in a time of revolutionary change that well-organized nonrepresentative groups — by that I mean groups that don’t have democratic credentials — can hijack political developments. I am concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and what its ultimate objectives may be. There is also evidence in Libya of a relatively well organized Islamist group. If Yemen continues to fall apart, it could be highly fertile ground for a movement like Al Qaeda to move into.

But then so could Saudi Arabia. Let me recount an anecdote that illustrates the complexity of what I am talking about. I traveled extensively after 9/11, in part with the prime minister, and also representing the interest of my service. On a visit to Saudi Arabia not long after the event, I was harangued by one of the senior members of the Saudi royal family, who said, “9/11 is a pinprick for the West. You will get over it. It does not threaten your fundamental identity, but it does threaten us. Ultimately we are the targets of these people.”

We have now various strands conflicting with one another, and it is difficult to make sense of the future. Liberal modernity, religious fundamentalism, tribalism, powerful sectarian divisions and failing authoritarian regimes are some of these strands, and against this background counterterrorism is but one tool among several — and not the dominant one any longer.

The success of the electoral process in Tunisia should give us some cause for optimism. But the political vacuums that follow behind long-serving dictators when they are forced from office are susceptible to being filled initially by politicians whose appeal is sectional and who have had no incentive and no opportunity to develop a broad political base. The acid test for those countries of the Arab Spring now facing elections will be the ability of their politicians to put themselves at the head of formations or parties that are not defined by their ethnicity, tribe or religion.

That process could take several years. Meanwhile, holding at bay the extremists while building successful civil societies with better justice, more representation and economic opportunities for all will be difficult, with unavoidable setbacks, but nonetheless achievable if there is a broad and assertive consensus about the general direction in which these countries now wish to travel.

I see the return of politics to the Middle East after a long period of stasis. Obviously this will affect how intelligence services view the area and view the problems. Violent political Islam has not become the catalyst for change and crisis in the way I expected it to become after 9/11.

Despite all the dangers and risks — and the fact there will be further terror incidents, some of them no doubt serious — Al Qaeda is no longer the focus, and I doubt it will ever again be at the center of our attentions. I think we are moving on.

There is no denying that 2011 has been a banner year for taxpayer-funded assassinations — Osama bin Laden, Anwar Awlaki, five senior Pakistani Taliban commanders in October and many more. Given the crucial U.S. backup role in Libya, and the ringing exhortation for the Libyan leader’s death issued by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton just before the event itself, we can probably take a lot of credit for Moammar Kadafi’s messy end too.

Once upon a time, U.S. officials used to claim that we were merely targeting “command and control centers,” rather than specific individuals, as in the hunt for Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Persian Gulf War or the raid on Kadafi in 1986. Nowadays no one bothers to pretend. Successful assassination missions, whether by elite special forces or remote-controlled drones, are openly celebrated.

Clearly, the sentiment prevalent among our leaders is that eliminating particular enemy leaders is bound to have a beneficial effect. Thus in our recent wars, the U.S. has made the pursuit of “high-value targets,” the principal objective of so-called human network attacks, a priority. “The platoon’s mission is to kill or capture HVTs,” recalled Matt Cook, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne based in northern Iraq in 2005. “That is all we do.”

By 2008, according to a U.S. Strategic Command study, our military was simultaneously engaged in no fewer than 285 human network attack programs.

So, now that assassination is an official tool of U.S. foreign policy, along with trade embargoes and overseas aid, it is surely time for an open debate on whether it is indeed effective. Surprisingly for some, evidence based on hard numbers demonstrates unequivocally that the answer is no.

The numbers are derived from a study conducted in Iraq during the “surge” campaign of 2007-08 that enabled the U.S. to declare victory and wind down the war. Key to the surge was an intensive and ruthless hunt for key individuals in the “IED networks” that were organizing homemade bomb attacks against U.S. troops. Cause and effect — more dead network leaders leading to fewer bombs — seemed so self-evidently obvious that nobody bothered to check.

Early in 2008, however, Rex Rivolo, an analyst at the Counter-IED Operations/Intelligence Center attached to U.S. headquarters in Baghdad, briefed his superiors on some hard realities of the campaign. With access to any and all information relating to U.S. military operations in Iraq, he had identified about 200 successful missions in which key IED network individuals had been eliminated. Then he looked at the reports of subsequent bomb attacks in the late insurgent leader’s area of operation. The results were clear: IED attacks went up, immediately and sharply. One week after the hit, on average, incidents within about three miles of the dead leader’s home base had risen 20%.

Why, with the commander dead, did the enemy fight with such reinforced vigor? Eliminated enemy commanders, intelligence revealed, were almost always replaced at once, usually within 24 hours. “The new guy is going to work harder,” Rivolo told me. “He has to prove himself, assert his authority. Maybe the old guy had been getting lazy, not working so hard to plant those IEDs. Fresh blood makes a difference.”

Once posited, this consequence may appear obvious, but Rivolo’s study, so far as I am aware, was the only time that anyone with access to relevant data had looked at the consequences of our principal national security strategy in a systematic way. However, even as he submitted his conclusions, the same strategy was being exported to Afghanistan on a major scale. Ever-increasing special forces “night raids” have indeed subsequently succeeded in killing large numbers of insurgent commanders (along with many civilians), but the consequences have been depressingly predictable.

“I used to be able to go talk to local Taliban commanders,” a journalist long resident in Afghanistan told me, “but they are all dead. The ones who replaced them are much more dangerous. They don’t want to talk to anyone at all.”

Nongovernmental groups similarly report that the new breed of Taliban leadership is unwilling to allow the free passage of aid workers permitted by their assassinated predecessors. Neither in Afghanistan nor Pakistan, where high-value targets are the responsibility of the CIA’s burgeoning killer-drone bureaucracy, is there any indication that the enemy’s military capability has been diminished.

As Matthew Hoh, the foreign service officer who quit in protest at the futility of the Afghan war, told me recently, “War is a breeding ground for unintended consequences.”

President Obama should think about that.

Quirky though it was, U.S. officials are convinced that the recently exposed plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to Washington was the work of the vaunted Quds Force, the special operations branch of the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC). As policymakers consider how best to respond to Iran’s increasingly dangerous behavior they should look first to our own back yard south of the border.

To be sure, this plot demands a response. Pointing to the 1983 and 1984 Beirut bombings, the CIA reported in 1987 that “many Iranian leaders use this precedent as proof that terrorism can break U.S. resolve” and view “sabotage and terrorism as an important option in its confrontation with the United States in the Persian Gulf.” It is critical that the United States and the international community take concrete steps in response to the planned assassination of a foreign ambassador in the U.S. capitol to signal the international community’s resolve to confront Iranian state sponsorship of terrorism.

One step the United States and its allies could pursue would send a strong message to Tehran and at the same time have a tangible impact on U.S. security: Press allies to restrict the size of Iranian missions to the minimum needed to conduct official business. Over the past few years, Iran has vastly expanded its presence in South and Central America, opening new missions and populating them with far more people than required for normal diplomatic duties.

Consider the finding of Argentine officials investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires by Hezbollah operatives working in tandem with Iranian intelligence agents. Argentine intelligence discovered that prior to his posting in Buenos Aires, Iranian Ambassador Hadi Soleimanpour served as chargé d’affaires and then Ambassador in Spain from 1985 to 1989. “During this period,” investigators determined, “Soleimanpour was instructed by the Iranian government to take charge of the collaboration of a group of five residents of Spain with a view to providing Pasdaran (IRGC) with support in the event a reprisal action was carried out against the U.S. and Israel.” He engaged in similar activities in Argentina, according to prosecutors.

A few weeks after the 1994 AMIA bombing, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism expressed concern that Iranian embassies in the region were stacked with larger than necessary numbers of diplomats, some of whom were believed to be intelligence agents and terrorist operatives: “We are sharing information in our possession with other States about Iranian diplomats, Iranian terrorist leaders who are posing as diplomats, so that nations will refuse to give them accreditation, or if they are already accredited, to expel them. We have had some success in that respect, but we have not always succeeded.”

Amazingly, Iran’s intelligence penetration of South America has expanded significantly since the AMIA bombing.

Five years later, the commander of U.S. Southern Command indicated the Iranian presence in the region had grown still larger by expanding the number of embassies in the region from just a handful to 12 missions by 2010. Taken together with other developments, such as the now regular flights between Tehran and Caracas, Venezuela, which law enforcement officials have taken to calling “Aero Terror,” Iran’s increased presence in the southern half of the Western Hemisphere presents a clear and present danger to U.S. security.

According to press reports, the Quds Force plot to murder the Saudi ambassador may have also included plans to target Saudi or Israeli diplomats in Argentina. To execute the attack in Washington, the Quds Force apparently approved a plan to subcontract the attack to someone tied to a Mexican drug cartel.

Now is the time for the United States to galvanize allies and collectively press our friends south of the border to severely restrict the size of Iran’s diplomatic missions to the minimum needed to conduct official business. Such action is not only an appropriate response to Iran’s clear disregard for the Vienna Convention and its protections for international diplomats, it would also have an immediate impact on U.S. and regional security.

Tema: Al-Qaeda estableció una célula en Kenia a inicios de los 90. Al-Shabab se formó posteriormente en Somalia. Pero la relación entre ambas es muy estrecha, constituyendo una amenaza terrorista para la región del Este de África y más allá.

Resumen: El Este de África es desde el inicio de la década de los 90 un escenario particularmente significativo del terrorismo yihadista, aunque sea en estos momentos cuando adquiera una especial relevancia. Al-Qaeda estableció una célula en Kenia al poco de dar comienzo aquella década y desde entonces no ha dejado de constituir una amenaza para la estabilidad del país y su economía nacional. Al-Shabab, por su parte, surgida con posterioridad, es una amenaza existencial para el ya de por sí fallido Estado de Somalia, desde donde aquella célula de miembros de la estructura terrorista fundada por Osama bin Laden ha venido también operando. Pero los nexos entre ésta y al-Shabab llegan al solapamiento entre ambas entidades, que incluso comparten en cierta medida sus directorios. A partir de aquí se entiende mejor la naturaleza y el alcance de la amenaza terrorista que conjuntamente representan para Somalia, Kenia y otros países de la región, e incluso para algunos occidentales.

Análisis: A 10 años de los atentados del 11 de septiembre, cuando los principales escenarios del terrorismo yihadista siguen localizándose en el sur de Asia y Oriente Medio, el curso de los acontecimientos en Somalia, donde actúa al-Shabab y desde donde opera también en buena medida la célula de al-Qaeda en Kenia, hace que adquiera un renovado interés el ámbito del Este de África, donde se desenvuelven esos actores colectivos relacionados entre sí y con la urdimbre del terrorismo global en su conjunto. Pero, ¿cuándo y cómo se estableció una célula de al-Qaeda en Kenia? ¿Cuál es la dinámica reciente de la violencia de al-Shabab en Somalia? ¿En qué medida puede hablarse de nexos entre aquella célula y esta última organización? Responder a estas preguntas, siquiera de manera sucinta, permite una aproximación a la amenaza que la violencia yihadista supone actualmente para Somalia, Kenia y otros países de la región, como pusieron de manifiesto los atentados suicidas del 11 de julio de 2010 en Kampala, la capital de Uganda. Sin olvidar aquellos indicios cuya evidencia permite conjeturar que el Este de África es asimismo un foco de amenaza terrorista para algunos países de Europa Occidental y Estados Unidos.

Una célula de al-Qaeda en Kenia

Poco después de haber sido fundada, cuando al-Qaeda había conseguido asentarse en Sudán, concretamente entre 1991 y 1996, antes de reubicarse en Afganistán, extendió también su influencia hacia otros países del Este de África. Individuos relacionados con al-Qaeda con origen libio, egipcio, libanés y jordano, por ejemplo, se desenvolvían en Nairobi o Mombasa desde inicios de los 90. Su propósito inicial era el de establecer una infraestructura que facilitara el tránsito por la región a miembros de aquella organización terrorista, pero también desarrollar actividades de financiación mediante la constitución de pequeñas empresas. Todo ello se enmascaraba a menudo mediante supuestas entidades caritativas. Asimismo, llevaban a cabo actividades de entrenamiento en el uso de armas y explosivos. En Kenia, de hecho, se adiestraron individuos que, ya en 1993, combatieron contra tropas estadounidenses en Somalia.

Pronto, los miembros de al-Qaeda que actuaban en Kenia se vieron en la necesidad de contar con miembros locales, pertenecientes a la población musulmana del país, para mejor desarrollar sus tareas. Así es como fueron reclutados, tras un proceso de radicalización que a menudo incluía viajes a Afganistán, Pakistán o Yemen, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Faid Mohammed Ally Msalam, Issa Oman Isa y Ahmed Salim Swedan, ciudadanos kenianos que pasaron a conformar el núcleo de lo que será la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África. En 1996 disponía ya de bases en Lamu y Ras Kiambuli, a lo largo de la frontera entre Kenia y Somalia. Para granjearse la hospitalidad de los con frecuencia pauperizados habitantes de esas áreas, donaban dinero y en ocasiones contraían matrimonio con mujeres pertenecientes a las comunidades en cuyo seno se introducían.

Como en tantos otros casos, esa célula pasó de labores logísticas y económicas a otras de índole operativa. Así, el primero de los actos de terrorismo cometidos por integrantes de la misma tuvo lugar antes del 11-S, el 7 de agosto de 1998. Se trató de una serie concatenada de atentados suicidas, ejecutados junto a las embajadas de EEUU en Nairobi y Dar es Salaam, la capital de Tanzania. En conjunto, algo más de 200 personas perdieron la vida como consecuencia de las explosiones y se registraron alrededor de 5.000 heridos. Estos fueron los primeros atentados ideados, planificados, preparados y ejecutados por al-Qaeda desde que su líder, actualmente fallecido, Osama bin Laden, anunciara poco más de cinco meses antes y desde Pakistán, la constitución del Frente Islámico Mundial para Yihad contra Judíos y Cruzados, por el que algunos grupos armados islamistas norteafricanos y asiáticos quedaban asociados a al-Qaeda en una común agenda global.

Será después del 11-S, concretamente en noviembre de 2002, cuando Kenia vuelva a ser escenario de otra secuencia de actos de terrorismo ejecutados por miembros de la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África. Ese día, un terrorista suicida atentó contra un hotel turístico de Kikambala, ocasionando la muerte a 15 personas y lesiones a más de 40. Los terroristas fracasaron sin embargo en derribar, mediante un misil, una aeronave israelí de pasajeros cuando despegaba en el aeropuerto de Mombasa. Esa misma célula, todavía liderada por Fazul Abdullah Mohammed y conectada con el directorio de al-Qaeda, intervendrá, aunque no en exclusiva, en los atentados suicidas perpetrados en Kampala el 11 de julio de 2010. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed murió el 8 de junio de 2011, no en Kenia sino en Mogadiscio, la capital de Somalia, el territorio de al-Shabab.

Evolución reciente de al-Shabab

Al-Shabab, o para ser más precisos al-Shabab al-Mujahidin, se forma después de la derrota, en 1997, por parte de las fuerzas armadas procedentes de Etiopía y del territorio somalí de Putlandia, de al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya. Algunos miembros de esta última organización se trasladaron a Afganistán con el fin de recibir entrenamiento en el uso de armas y explosivos. Allí fue donde entablaron relación con al-Qaeda y constituyeron al-Shabab. Tras los atentados del 11-S regresaron a Somalia, estableciendo un campo de entrenamiento en Mogadiscio. Al-Shabab era una de las organizaciones integrantes de la heterogénea coalición de entidades islamistas somalíes, Ittihad al-mahakim al-islamiya, conocida como Unión de Tribunales Islámicos, que en 2006 se hizo con el poder en Mogadiscio, imponiéndose a la denominada Alianza para la Restauración de la Paz y Contra el Terrorismo.

Ese mismo año, la invasión etíope de Somalia, respaldada por EEUU, con el propósito de detener el avance de la Unión de los Tribunales Islámicos, proporcionó a al-Shabab una nueva oportunidad para desarrollar sus actividades yihadistas. El 18 de septiembre de 2006 se produjo, de hecho, el primer atentado suicida registrado en Somalia, en las cercanías del edificio del Parlamento en Somalia, cuyo blanco principal era el presidente del Gobierno Federal de Transición. Al mismo tiempo, la presencia de tropas de Etiopía en Somalia suscitó una revulsión entre la diáspora somalí en todo el mundo. Al-Shabab comenzó entonces a utilizar Internet como medio para diseminar propaganda, algo que permitió a la organización yihadista inducir procesos de radicalización en el seno de aquella diáspora y reclutar militantes, lo que continuó haciendo incluso después de la retirada etíope de Somalia en enero de 2009. El posterior despliegue de soldados de Uganda y Burundi en Somalia, como resultado de una resolución de la Unión Africana, fue utilizado por al-Qaeda y por al-Shabab.

Así, un buen número de expatriados somalíes residentes en EEUU y algún país de Europa Occidental, como por ejemplo Dinamarca, empezaron a trasladarse a Somalia con el propósito de combatir contra la presencia de soldados infieles en el territorio de su país. No pocos de ellos han intervenido directamente, desde al menos 2008, en la ejecución de importantes atentados suicidas, en ocasiones muy letales –como el que fue perpetrado en un conocido hotel de Mogadiscio mientras se celebraba la ceremonia de graduación de estudiantes de una institución universitaria de la ciudad–, cuya autoría fue asumida por al-Shabab. Importa recordar que esta organización yihadista atenta principalmente contra segmentos no afines de la población somalí –el pasado 4 de octubre, un atentado contra estudiantes en Mogadiscio causó cerca de 100 muertos– y contra las fuerzas gubernamentales. Este mismo mes de octubre, un mando de al-Shabab de origen estadounidense, Omar Hammami, aparecía en un conocido foro yihadista en lengua inglesa, Shumukh al-Islam, dirigiéndose a jóvenes musulmanes que viven en países occidentales para que viajen a Somalia y se unan a su misma organización.

El día 5 del pasado mes de agosto, al-Shabab, que entonces controlaba amplias zonas de Mogadiscio, decidió una retirada táctica de las mismas, tras una ofensiva iniciada en febrero por fuerzas de la misión de la Unión Africana y del propio Gobierno Federal de Transición. Ante una situación adversa, los dirigentes de al-Shabab renunciaron a su dominio sobre dichas áreas para plantearse una confrontación armada de características diferentes al enfrentamiento entre partidas más o menos numerosas de activistas propios y soldados de aquellos contingentes. Pero esa retirada supuso asimismo una importante caída de los recursos económicos que al-Shabab conseguía de la población bajo su control, en especial de los derivados de la extorsión que ejercía sobre comerciantes de los mercados existentes en la capital somalí. Para una organización que necesita mantener sus estructuras y sostener su campaña de terrorismo, pagar a militantes que en gran número lo son a cambio de incentivos selectivos, e incluso a los clanes locales sin cuyo concurso es mucho más difícil operar, la reducción de ingresos es un muy grave contratiempo. De aquí que se haya inclinado, desde el pasado septiembre, por emular a al-Qaeda en el Magreb Islámico, llevando a cabo secuestros con propósitos de financiación.

Nexos entre al-Qaeda y al-Shabab

Desde finales de los 90 había importantes miembros de la célula de al-Qaeda en Kenia que se habían instalado en Somalia, entre los que se encontraba Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, dirigente de la misma. Al-Qaeda y la Unión de los Tribunales Islámicos mantenían vínculos antes de 2006, año en el que destacados integrantes de al-Shabab empiezan a relacionar sus actividades en Mogadiscio con el llamamiento a los musulmanes de todo el mundo para que se unieran a la yihad global y contra lo que definían como enemigos del islam. En esos pronunciamientos alineaban el llamamiento a una yihad en Somalia con los que, con finalidad similar, se llevaban a cabo en Irak, Afganistán, Palestina, Chechenia y el Magreb. Así las cosas, en noviembre de 2008 Ayman al Zawahiri, entonces número dos en la jerarquía de al-Qaeda, hizo un reconocimiento explícito de al-Shabab, a cuyos militantes denominaba “leones del Islam en Somalia” e instaba a instaurar un dominio salafista en su país.

Pocos meses después, en junio de 2009, desde el interior de al-Qaeda se transmitió que esta estructura terrorista, que contaba con presencia en Somalia, disponía de miembros que actuaban junto a al-Shabab. Al año siguiente, 2010, parecía ya evidente que la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África, al mando de Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, ejercía una notable influencia sobre al-Shabab, acentuando su alineamiento con al-Qaeda. Entre los cuadros y dirigentes de esa organización yihadista somalí se detectaban individuos originarios de otros países de la región, como Sudán, o incluso procedentes de Arabia Saudí y Pakistán. Por otra parte, en ese mismo sentido, la proximidad geográfica entre Somalia y Yemen propiciaba un acercamiento entre al-Shabab y al-Qaeda en la Península Arábiga, lo que a su vez fortalecía las conexiones con el núcleo central de al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, avanzado el año 2009, había estimulado a los yihadista somalíes, que a su vez se autoproclamaron soldados de aquel.

En septiembre de 2009 fue abatido el entonces líder de la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África. El propio emir de al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, designó como nuevo dirigente de su estructura terrorista en la región del Cuerno de África a Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, quien anunció que, desde Somalia, proyectarían sus actividades yihadistas hacia otros países de la zona como Kenia, Etiopía y Yibuti. Esta designación fue recibida con alborozo por el directorio de al-Shabab. En febrero de 2010, al-Shabab y un grupo yihadista de Kamboni emitieron un comunicado en el que declaraban expresamente haberse unido a la yihad internacional de al-Qaeda. La muerte de Nabhan fue lo que estimuló la preparación, como revancha, de la serie de atentados ocurridos en Kampala el 11 de julio de 2010, exactamente mientras las selecciones nacionales de España y los Países Bajos jugaban la final de la Copa del Mundo de fútbol. Más aún, la célula que los perpetró se denominaba precisamente Nabhan.

Tales atentados, perpetrados por dos terroristas suicidas –uno keniano y el otro somalí– en un restaurante de cocina etíope y un club local de rugby, en los que perdieron la vida 74 personas, en su mayoría ugandeses, pusieron de manifiesto la estrecha relación operativa, en el Este de África, entre al-Qaeda y al-Shabab. Además, fueron los primeros en que esta última se implicaba fuera de Somalia. Uganda fue seleccionada como blanco debido a que sus soldados constituyen buena parte de las fuerzas armadas de AMISOM (African Union Mission in Somalia) en Mogadiscio, que tanto al-Qaeda como al-Shabab consideran su principal obstáculo para imponer un dominio yihadista en Somalia. Por otra parte, al-Shabab había amenazado con atentar en Kampala y Burundi desde 2009. En el directorio de esta organización yihadista, que reclamó la autoría de tales atentados, estaba entonces Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. Además de al-Shabab estuvieron por tanto implicados miembros de al-Qaeda asentados en Somalia y Kenia. Por si cupieran dudas sobre el nexo entre estas entidades yihadistas, el pasado 14 de octubre, el portavoz de al-Shabab y un responsable de la célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África aparecieron juntos, ante las cámaras de al-Yazira, en el campo de refugiados Aal Yasser, controlado por aquella primera organización, subrayando la conexión entre ambas mientras inauguraban una iniciativa asistencial denominada “Campaña de caridad el mártir Osama bin Laden para ayudar a los afectados por la sequía”.

Conclusiones: Poco antes de finalizar este análisis sobre los nexos del terrorismo yihadista en África del Este, la Embajada de EEUU en Kenia advertía sobre la posibilidad de un inminente atentado terrorista en este último país. Esta alerta se producía una semana después de que, el pasado 13 de octubre, tropas kenianas entraran en Somalia, con la aquiescencia de las autoridades de Mogadiscio y la complacencia de AMISOM, para perseguir a militantes de al-Shabab y atacar sus bases en el sur de ese país. La decisión fue adoptada tras el secuestro de dos cooperantes españolas en un campo de refugiados somalíes dentro del territorio de Kenia, que se sumaba al de otros dos turistas europeos llevados a cabo en septiembre. Estos hechos suponen un grave nuevo contratiempo para el sector turístico de Kenia, fundamental en su economía nacional, aunque la intervención militar en Somalia sucede a la ofensiva que los soldados de la Unión Africana y del Gobierno Federal de Transición vienen desarrollando desde el mes de febrero, produciéndose además cuando al-Shabab había sido forzada a abandonar casi en su totalidad Mogadiscio. Está por ver que las tropas kenianas consigan sus propósitos declarados, si bien al-Shabab se está viendo obligada a hacer frente, en suelo somalí, a soldados de otros tres países de la región.

Al-Shabab, que pese a haber conseguido asimilar recientemente a algún grupo rival, no atraviesa por su mejor momento y cuyos componentes también se han visto afectados tanto por las graves circunstancias que afectan a la población somalí en su conjunto como por el malestar de amplios sectores de esta con las severas prácticas impuestas por la organización yihadista en las demarcaciones que domina, reaccionó a la decisión del Gobierno de Kenia amenazando con perpetrar atentados en ciudades de este último país, donde la célula de al-Qaeda establecida hace casi dos décadas no ha dejado de existir. Y son los nexos entre al-Shabab y esta célula de al-Qaeda en el Este de África los que sitúan en su adecuada dimensión la verdadera amenaza del terrorismo yihadista en Kenia y otros países de la región. Sin olvidar que son ya un buen número los individuos de origen somalí que, procedentes de distintos países europeos y norteamericanos, se han unido en los últimos años a al-Shabab, lo que hace del Este de África un foco significativo de amenaza terrorista para algunas de esas naciones occidentales. Donde continúan existiendo ámbitos de la población musulmana en los que los acontecimientos que están teniendo lugar en Kenia van a adquirir especial atención como parte de la narrativa utilizada en los procesos de radicalización yihadista y reclutamiento terrorista.

Afirmar que, cuando hay conciudadanos secuestrados por alguna organización terrorista, es siempre inmoral que las autoridades de países democráticos se impliquen en la negociación de un rescate por su liberación, supone cuando menos no haber leído a Max Weber. Hablar de moralidad es hacerlo de cuestiones éticas y de lo que se debería o no se debería hacer. También en situaciones tan extraordinariamente complicadas como la que en estos momentos tienen ante sí nuestros gobernantes, al verse obligados a afrontar el probable hecho de que cuatro españoles hayan sido tomados como rehenes por terroristas de orientación yihadista que operan en el Norte y Este de África. Situaciones ante las que, sin embargo, no parece que haya una única manera de tomar decisiones basadas en principios morales, ni tampoco es razonable atribuir una superioridad moral absoluta a un curso de acción sobre el contrario.

Max Weber, el clásico sociólogo alemán de la política, distinguía entre la ética de la convicción y la ética de la responsabilidad. Mientras que con la primera aludía a una relación de carácter deontológico entre valores y acción política, con la segunda subrayaba una correspondencia de índole finalista entre la acción política y sus efectos. Aplicando una ética de la convicción, no cabe utilizar la misma racionalidad mediante la cual se eligen determinados medios para seleccionar un fin concreto. Recurriendo a una ética de la responsabilidad, la acción política adquiere su sentido en atención al entendimiento objetivo de sus posibles consecuencias reales. Es inviable pretender que, en todo momento y lugar, una de esas éticas esté por encima de la otra. Menos aún cuando se trata de decidir qué hacer ante secuestros terroristas, pues ni los valores ni los efectos de la acción política que eventualmente se emprenda son únicos e incuestionables.

¿Cuál sería, en este sentido, el valor subyacente a una actuación gubernamental que aborde el secuestro de compatriotas por parte de grupos y organizaciones terroristas en base a una ética de la convicción? Muchos dirán que la respuesta está clara. Dirán que los terroristas se conducen ilegalmente y que, por consiguiente, las legítimas autoridades de un Estado democrático de derecho nunca deben negociar directa o indirectamente con ellos. Incluso si no existen medios alternativos eficaces para liberar a los rehenes. Pese a que ello difícilmente evitará que estos sean asesinados, dirán además que ceder a sus pretensiones supondría fomentar que repitan similares atentados y contra blancos de la misma nacionalidad. Elegir no negociar es, desde luego, una opción de principios coherente. Pero su robustez no puede predicarse con igual contundencia de los resultados anticipados. Negarse a negociar no garantiza evitar que los secuestradores reincidan. Tampoco es inevitable ni inexorable que lo acaso obtenido por los secuestradores a cambio de liberar a sus rehenes llegue a ser utilizado en el futuro para el mismo tipo de crímenes.

Si el uso específico que los terroristas hagan de la contrapartida que reciban por liberar a sus rehenes es lo suficientemente indeterminado, ¿no habría entonces que actuar políticamente de acuerdo con una ética de la responsabilidad? A este respecto, muchos otros dirán que preservar la integridad física y el derecho a la vida de los secuestrados debe ser el fin de la acción gubernamental, justificando que se introduzcan los medios adecuados para la consecución de dicho objetivo, incluyendo la provisión de fondos que permitan el rescate. En este supuesto, el fin no podría justificar decisiones cuya implementación menoscabe el orden social, erosione la estabilidad institucional o fuerce a modificar la política nacional o exterior de un Gobierno democrático. Aquellos medios pueden coincidir con los de las agencias estatales de seguridad, si los secuestros ocurren en el territorio nacional. Pero en ausencia de tales medios para intentar la liberación de los rehenes y limitadas o impracticables otras iniciativas unilaterales o multilaterales en el caso de que se encuentren fuera de nuestras fronteras, la opción de negociar un rescate sería moralmente aceptable.

Aunque entre la ética de la convicción y la ética de la responsabilidad existe una tensión inevitable, no son opuestos irreconciliables. Max Weber insistía en combinar ambas y apelaba para hacerlo a los políticos de vocación que tienen ideales y al mismo tiempo son realistas. En este sentido, hay que congratularse de las reacciones del Gobierno y de la oposición ante los recientes secuestros de cooperantes españoles en Kenia y el Sáhara occidental, previsiblemente por individuos relacionados con organizaciones terroristas de orientación yihadista. La ministra de Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación, Trinidad Jiménez, ha definido los términos de la prioridad gubernamental: “Lo que nos importa es que cuanto antes los cooperantes puedan ser liberados”. Por su parte, el líder del Partido Popular, Mariano Rajoy, ha afirmado: “Apoyamos todas las gestiones que pueda hacer el Gobierno de España para su liberación”. Llegados a este punto, es menester confiar en ellos sin necesidad de haber leído a Max Weber.

We in the Muslim American community have been battling the corrupt and bankrupt ideas of cults such as Al Qaeda. Now it seems we also have to battle pseudo-experts in the FBI and the Department of Justice.

A disturbing string of training material used by the FBI and a U.S. attorney’s office came to light beginning in late July that reveals a deep anti-Muslim sentiment within the U.S. government.

If this matter is not immediately addressed, it will undermine the relationship between law enforcement and the Muslim American community — another example of the ineptitude and/or apathy undermining bridges built with care over decades. It is not enough to just call it a “very valid concern,” as FBI Director Robert Mueller told a congressional committee this month.

The training material in question provided to FBI agents at the academy in Quantico, Va. — as first reported by Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog — contained bigoted and inflammatory views on Muslims, including claims that “devout” Muslims are more prone toward violence, that Islam aims to “transform a country’s culture into 7th century Arabian ways,” that Islamic charitable giving is a “funding mechanism for combat” and that the prophet Muhammad was a “violent cult leader.”

Wired also found a 2010 presentation by an analyst working for the U.S. attorney’s office in Pennsylvania that warns of a ” ‘Civilizational Jihad’ stretching back from the dawn of Islam and waged today in the U.S. by ‘civilians, juries, lawyers, media, academia and charities’ who threaten ‘our values.’ The goal of that war: ‘Replacement of American Judeo-Christian and Western liberal social, political and religious foundations by Islam.’”

Such baseless and inflammatory claims shall best be left to those few who share Al Qaeda’s agenda of keeping America in a perpetual state of war with Islam. In other words, the rhetoric of Al Qaeda and these law enforcement trainers are opposite sides of the same coin of hate.

If our law enforcement and intelligence agencies continue to use incorrect and divisive training literature, the crucial partnership between the Muslim American community and law enforcement will slowly disintegrate. According to the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Post-9/11 Terrorism Incident Database, these partnerships have proved effective in keeping our nation safe. Nearly 40% of Al Qaeda-related plots threatening the American homeland since 9/11 have been foiled thanks to tips from Muslims.

One example of this is the so-called Virginia 5 case in 2009, in which information from the Muslim community in Virginia led to the arrest in Pakistan of five Muslims from Virginia who were trying to join an Al Qaeda group. Last year, in another case, members of a Maryland community warned law enforcement about Antonio Martinez, who had recently converted to Islam. He was subsequently arrested after he allegedly tried to blow up a military recruitment center.

More important, Muslim leaders, not FBI agents, can more effectively battle Al Qaeda’s destructive ideas.

I have worked for more than 20 years with law enforcement and Muslim American communities, and one of the biggest consequences of these training sessions and use of this material is the setback of a vital relationship that required years to build. I know justifiable criticism can be levied against some Muslim leaders in America for not aggressively promoting civic engagement, for not being self-critical enough and for not distancing themselves from rabble-rousers. But how can we persuade Muslim American communities to stay at the table when the food on the table is filled with poison?

These training manuals are making it more difficult for Muslim Americans to foster any trust with law enforcement agencies. Biased and faulty training leads to biased and faulty policing.

The real challenge now is getting the partnership back on track, and for the FBI and the Justice Department to take the following steps: issue a clear and unequivocal apology to the Muslim American community; establish a thorough and transparent vetting process in selecting its trainers and materials; invite experts who have no animosity toward any religion to conduct training about any religious community to law enforcement. Finally, the White House needs to form an interagency task force that can conduct an independent review of FBI and Justice Department training material.

The following words are etched into the walls of the FBI headquarters building in Washington: “The most effective weapon against crime is cooperation … of all law enforcement agencies with the support and understanding of the American people.”

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and FBI Director Mueller, take some leadership on this matter, or the partnership we’ve built to counter violent extremism will forever be handicapped. The question you have to answer is simple: Are we on the same team or not?

Theme: ‘Home-grown’ Islamist terrorism has developed in Australia in a comparable pattern to other Western countries. The Australian counter-terrorism strategy is similar to that in the UK, including the recent introduction of community-based preventive initiatives.

Summary: This ARI summarises the findings from an-depth empirical study of all publicly-confirmed cases of Islamist terrorism involving Australians. The domestic situation of Australian Muslims is briefly described, followed by an overview of Islamist terrorism cases to date, including the number and location of cases and the level of threat they have presented, both domestically and internationally. The background characteristics of offenders and details of radicalisation are discussed, followed by an examination of the national counter-terrorism (CT) strategy, with a focus upon counter-radicalisation initiatives. Current CT tactics appear to be appropriate to the nature of the threat; however, it will be important to closely monitor preventive measures in order to avoid a potential backlash similar to that in the UK, and to make sure that they are appropriately targeted.

Analysis: Although Australia has not yet suffered from an Islamist terrorist attack at home, jihadi militants have been active in the country since the 1980s and ‘home-grown’ Islamist terrorism (HGIT) has recently been recognised as a serious and likely persistent threat to national and international security.[1] In order to assess the nature of the threat it is important to have an appreciation of the Australian context, the number and location of Islamist terrorism cases, the level of threat these individuals have presented so far (including links to foreign terrorist organisations), background characteristics of offenders and their pathways of radicalisation, and current CT tactics.

The Australian Context

While Islamist terrorists represent only a tiny minority of the wider Muslim population in any country, the domestic situation of Muslims has the potential to fuel grievances and therefore contribute to an element of pre-disposing risk for some individuals. The Australian Muslim population is diverse, is located mainly in Sydney and Melbourne, and accounts for approximately 2% of the overall population.[2] Research has shown that they are affected by poor social and economic conditions,[3] suggesting that there is potential reason for frustration directed against the home-country. More significantly, Australia participated in the invasion of Iraq and maintains combat troops in Afghanistan. It has also been repeatedly named as a legitimate target for attack by bin Laden and others, and more than 100 Australians have died in Islamist terrorist attacks overseas, primarily in Indonesia. It is also relevant that the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) is active in Australia, although it has not had the same impact as similar groups in the UK.

Number and Location of Cases

From September 2000 until mid-2011 there have been 16 publicly-confirmed cases (36 individuals) actively participating in, planning or promoting violent jihad at home or abroad. Twenty-seven of these individuals have been convicted in Australia, primarily under terrorism statutes; one person has been convicted of terrorism offences in Kazakhstan; another has been convicted in Kuwait; one person has been charged in Lebanon and one person was killed fighting in Somalia; Willie Brigitte was convicted in France for planning attacks whilst in Australia; another four individuals have not been charged, or had charges dropped, although their involvement in violent jihad has been publicly documented. In addition to these figures there have been a number of unconfirmed cases, as well as 40 Australians who have had their passports revoked or denied for ‘reasons relating to terrorism’.[4]

In the 11-year period from 2000 up until 2010 there has been at least one publicly confirmed Islamist terrorism case involving Australian citizens each year, with the exceptions of 2008 and 2010 (and none so far in 2011). This translates into a rate of 1.45 cases, or 3.27 individuals per year (see Table 1 below). In comparison to countries such as the US and the UK, Australia has clearly experienced a lower number of Islamist terrorism cases. However, it is worth noting that Australia has a comparatively small Muslim population and for this reason, the rate of Australian cases relative to Muslim population size is higher than for the US and for the UK even, for the period 2001-08.[5] Although this says more about the potentially misleading nature of statistics (since Australia remains geographically peripheral and is a secondary target for violent Islamists), it is important to comprehend the scale of the problem.

Table 1. Australian Islamist terrorism cases, 2000-10 (numbers in brackets refer to individuals; figures per population are multiplied by 1,000 for presentation purposes)

In terms of geographic distribution within Australia, 10 Islamist terrorism cases so far have involved individuals based in Sydney (two of whom relocated to Perth); four have involved individuals based in Melbourne; and two cases involved individuals from Adelaide. Six cases (16 individuals) have involved a focus on carrying out domestic attacks, although only three of these have presented a credible threat (see below). Thus, more cases have involved attempts to go overseas for violent jihad, but more individuals have been involved in domestic terrorist activity since these have involved larger groups.

Threat Level so Far

To date, there have been no successful Islamist terrorist attacks within Australia, nor have domestically-focused groups managed to come close to success. The most credible domestic threats occurred in 2003 (Willie Brigitte and Faheem Lodhi), 2005 (the Sydney ‘Operation Pendennis’ group) and 2009 (the ‘Operation Neath’ plotters). None of these groups had constructed working explosive devices and they were not ready to launch an assault at the time of their arrests. With the possible exception of the Neath group, who were planning a Mumbai-style attack on Holsworthy army barracks in Sydney, no definite targets had been decided.

There are fewer precise details about the overseas activities of Australian jihadists, although they have involved collaboration with foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs) in terms of training, planning attacks and participating in armed combat. For example, Omar Hadba from Sydney stands accused of having killed civilian and military personnel in Lebanon in 2006 as part of the Islamist militant group Fatah al-Islam.[6]

Links to FTOs among Australian Islamist terrorism cases have been present in 14 of 16 cases (88%). The comparative percentages for cases in the US and the UK are 50% and 43%, respectively, between 2001 and 2008[7] and although it is surprising that the Australian rate is higher, it is a matter of the low numbers involved. Australians have been linked to the following FTOs: Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Lashkar e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish e-Mohammed (JeM), the Peninsula Lions in Kuwait, Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, and al-Shabab in Somalia.

Despite the prevalence of such links, fewer individuals have established contact with FTOs over time, and –similar to other Western countries– the nature of that contact has diminished among domestically-based groups. Earlier cases involved more significant levels of organisational support, including logistic advice and financial backing for conducting attacks. More recent ties to FTOs for domestic groups have either been limited to previous training with no additional support (individuals in the Sydney and Melbourne Pendennis groups), or primarily involved telephone contact and small-scale fundraising for al-Shabab (Operation Neath). There is no evidence that FTOs have actively supported or had knowledge of terrorist plots in Australia since Jack Roche (in 2000) and Willie Brigitte and Faheem Lodhi (in 2003). This lack of organisational support for attacks within Australia helps to explain the limited capacity of domestic groups to date.

Offender Characteristics and Radicalisation

The available data indicates that Australian jihadis are broadly similar to Islamist terrorists from Europe and North America in that they are male, mostly below the age of 30 and are citizens or long-term residents of the country in question.[8] Although more than half of the sample was born in Australia, most are dual nationals and close to 60% are of Lebanese heritage. Educational attainment is generally quite low, with at least seven individuals having left high school before the age of 18, and only three confirmed as having completed university.[9]

In accordance with their level of education (and comparable to a study of European jihadis by Bakker)[10] most were in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations such as driving taxis or manual labour. Around 70% of the sample was married, most with children, at the time of involvement in terrorist activity; only a handful appear to have had previous unrelated criminal records (for generally minor offences); and although several individuals exhibited psychiatric disorder as a result of incarceration, available information indicates that only one or two people in the sample were suffering from serious mental health issues at the time of offending and none were legally exculpated on these grounds.[11]

Overall, there is nothing remarkable about the backgrounds of Australian jihadis that distinguishes them from the rest of the population that would be useful for investigative profiling. Nor is there much that marks them out as vastly different from studies of their contemporaries in other Western countries (the Australians have a slightly lower socioeconomic standing, a slightly higher average age –but are still most in their 20s– and a slightly higher marriage rate, but these characteristics are hardly discerning).

The unique feature of Australian jihadis (aside from their geographic base in the Antipodes) is the aforementioned prevalence of Lebanese among them, which is not easily explained. People of Lebanese origin represent about 9% of the Australian Muslim population[12] and are therefore over-represented in Islamist terrorism cases. Moreover, Lebanon has not featured heavily in the ‘global’ jihad and few Lebanese people have been convicted for terrorism offences in other Western countries. At face value it seems as if there is something unique in the experience of the Australian-Lebanese that might help to explain the radicalisation of individuals in the sample. Lingering racial tensions (which flared up in the Cronulla riots south of Sydney in 2005) are potentially relevant in this regard. However, it is important to bear in mind the small sample size, meaning that relative percentages are easily skewed. Moreover the bottom-line, or necessary, conditions for involvement in Islamist terrorism within the West appear to be a mixture of social and ideological exposure.[13] In other words, it is more productive to examine localised, pro-jihadi subcultures (direct motivators) rather than broad socioeconomic conditions (pre-disposing risk) in trying to explain how and why individuals become involved in terrorism.

Geographically, the distribution of Islamist terrorism cases in Australia over time reflects the initial distribution of influential Islamist militants and ideologues dating back to the 1980s. These factors are likely to have contributed to lasting pro-jihadi subcultures, maintained via a process of social transmission of ideas. Within supportive environments, jihadi entrepreneurs such as Abdul Nacer Benbrika (‘spiritual leader’ in the Melbourne Pendennis group) have gradually become more extreme in their beliefs and have managed to attract limited numbers of like-minded others.

Retrospectively tracing processes of radicalisation is fraught with hindsight bias –the tendency to interpret information as meaningful and in support of the current hypothesis–. It is also an exercise which is frequently plagued by the lack of information on which to base judgements, especially for less well-known cases. With these limitations in mind, available information suggests that Australian jihadis have radicalised in a similar fashion to ‘home-grown’ Islamist terrorists in other Western countries.[14] Many do not appear to have been particularly religious prior to becoming involved in radical Islamism (at least five were converts) and they seem to have adopted increasingly militant identities by way of intensifying group-socialisation.[15] Very few in the Australian sample have acted independently of an immediate group or at least a wider, supportive network, and although leaders are not always readily identifiable, there does appear to have been top-down influence in various forms, ranging from informal social influence to organisational direction.[16] Radicalisation thus appears to have taken place by way of more or less informal social interaction and mutual influence within groups.[17] Beyond these social (process) motivations, individuals expressed a predictable mixture of religious and political justifications for violent jihad (ideological motivations), including outrage at Australian support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.[18] There is also evidence that individuals accessed online jihadi propaganda, which seems to have contributed to their radicalisation, and that the Internet was also used to distribute jihadi materials and to research potential targets for attack.[19]

Australian Counter-Terrorism

Having examined the threat, it is equally important to examine the response. The revised Australian CT strategy was unveiled in a 2010 White Paper which officially acknowledged the threat from home-grown Islamist terrorists for the first time.[20] The 2010 White Paper outlines the overarching national strategy for countering terrorism, which is modelled after the UK CONTEST strategy (see Table 2 below). This involves a comprehensive approach to mitigating the terrorist threat by incorporating both international and domestic CT measures.

Table 2. British and Australian CT strategies

It is beyond the scope of this ARI to give an in-depth account of every aspect of Australian CT, although it is worth noting that Australian authorities are working to overcome similar barriers to more effective investigation as experienced in other Western countries (relating to interagency information sharing and cooperation).[21] The focus here will be upon the ‘Resilience’ strand of CT and related counter-radicalisation initiatives, which are aimed at preventing further radicalisation of Australian residents.

In accordance with general trends, the Australian approach to CT in the post-9/11 era has emphasised prevention and there has been an increasing interest in counter-radicalisation programmes, both for the rehabilitation of convicted terrorism offenders and in a preventive capacity within communities (under the heading of ‘Resilience’). To date, little has been publicised about either sort of programme, due to the fact that both are in their infancy and have yet to be systematically evaluated. In particular, there is a dearth of information about rehabilitative ‘de-radicalisation’ efforts with Australia’s convicted Islamist terrorists. The few details released so far indicate that ‘specialist staff and psychologists’ are engaging with prisoners on a one-to-one basis to discuss and challenge radical beliefs in an effort to supplant them with more moderate tendencies.[22] Although it is unclear how structured these interventions are, they clearly build upon existing programmes around the world and are likely to face many of the same challenges.[23]

Preventive counter-radicalisation in Australia is an even more recent endeavour and involves at least three overlapping layers. At the highest, and most indirect level, broad government policies aim to ‘build social cohesion, harmony and security’,[24] including efforts to provide socioeconomic opportunities, to reduce inter-communal conflict and to explain Australian CT law and foreign policy to ‘at-risk’ communities.[25] The Australian Federal Police (AFP) engages with newly arrived immigrants to explain Australian law and policing and is reported to be increasing community outreach, including taking part in sporting activities for ‘at-risk’ youth.[26] Below the Federal level, State Police are more closely engaged with communities and have expanded these activities as part of their CT remit. This includes arranging community meetings to explain CT laws and who they are aimed at as part of broader efforts aimed at building trust; however, as a senior New South Wales Police officer remarked, ‘We have no ability to counter-radicalise anybody, [so] we have to rely on people who have that capacity’.[27] The Federal and State levels are thus aimed at reducing elements of pre-disposing risk, enhancing community engagement for the purposes of improved cooperation and identifying ‘at-risk’ individuals who may be targeted for intervention.

The third and most direct level of preventive counter-radicalisation in Australia is orchestrated by the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Taskforce within the Attorney General’s Department but (as in the UK) is to be primarily implemented by community partners. It is the AGD’s view that ‘Communities are best placed to develop solutions to local problems and for that reason, consultation will be occurring with a wide variety of community groups and stakeholders’.[28] In May 2010, AUS$9.7 million of funding was announced for the CVE to be spent over four years.[29] In February 2011 it was announced that AUS$1.1 million of that funding was being used for the ‘Building Community Resilience: Youth Mentoring Grants Program’.[30] Over 100 community groups applied for between AUS$5,000 and AUS$200,000 for the programme, although only seven groups have been confirmed as being successful.[31] Details of these seven groups and how they will contribute to counter-radicalisation are so far fairly sparse but on the whole they appear to focus more on developing mentoring skills (including modelling appropriate behaviours and communication skills) and promoting participation in Australian democratic society among youths, rather than focusing explicitly on violent Islamist ideology.[32]

The present situation does not permit a detailed evaluation of CVE programmes, given their recent development and lacking information. However, there are important parallels between the Australian ‘Resilience’ and the UK ‘Prevent’ approaches which may be informative. The ‘Prevent’ strategy was implemented on a much larger scale than in Australia, but involved a similar mixture of broad and indirect measures aimed at improving social cohesion, and a policy of financing a wide variety of community groups to conduct the actual leg-work of counter-radicalisation.[33] This strategy came under a significant amount of criticism for being ineffective but also apparently for providing funds to anti-democratic and extremist groups who were in fact promoting many of the same beliefs that were supposed to countered.[34] The fundamental reasons for this occurring were that there was an emphasis on preventing violent behaviour without too much concern for related beliefs, and there was a lack of clear criteria from central government that might assist local governments and police in choosing who to engage with.[35] At the same time, ‘Prevent’ initiatives are believed to have further singled out Muslims in British society, to have securitised their relationship with the state, and to have increased rather than decreased alienation, leading to recent reforms.[36]

Looking at the Australian ‘Resilience’ and CVE measures, it is far too early to condemn them, but there are lessons to be learnt. The emphasis on countering violent extremism runs the risk of leaving the door open to engaging with inappropriate community partners who may exacerbate the problem. It would thus be sensible for the Australian authorities to reappraise the limits of their aims (although this delves deeper into the Pandora’s Box of how exactly a Western secular government should address religious beliefs, which are also combined with distinctly non-Western political perspectives). In any case, it is vital to devise clear criteria for engagement with community partners using democratic values and commitment to Australia and civil rights as a yardstick.[37] Equally, there must be criteria for assessing community partnerships over time and for severing relationships in the event that they are deemed inappropriate or counter-productive. On a positive note, the modest scale of CVE in Australia is indicative of a cautious approach. It is also important to note that the aim in Australia is to target all forms of violent extremism (not just radical Islamism), therefore theoretically limiting further potential alienation of Muslims in society.

Conclusion; Home-grown Islamist terrorism has become a fact in Australian society much as it has throughout the West and it is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The Australian government has developed a comprehensive CT strategy, which is appropriate to the nature of the threat. However, initiatives developed under the ‘Resilience’ strand of the overall strategy in particular are still very new and face some daunting challenges. Whether or not these efforts are successful is going to be very difficult to assess, even with a great deal more information.

Based on the analysis of the threat (see above), a key factor that will at least partially determine the efficacy of preventative community interventions will be whether they are appropriately targeted. This means that service provision should be geographically and socially targeted to intervene within genuinely ‘at-risk’ communities, ie, where social and ideological exposure to violent Islamist ideology is occurring. It also means that the right individuals must be targeted. Granted, the whole point of prevention is to intervene before a problem develops; however, given that Australian jihadis have generally been in their mid-to-late 20s and married, and did not radicalise until this point in their lives, it is unclear whether targeting youths can inoculate them from future radicalisation. At the very least it seems that some form of intervention for young men in their 20s (presumably overlooked by youth-mentoring schemes) should also be considered.

The future is, of course, uncertain and there is no magic bullet for countering Islamist terrorism in the West. The real challenge for Australia will be to maintain a measured response and to contain the backlash in society should a successful domestic attack take place.

********************

[1] Australian Government (2010), Counter-Terrorism White Paper: Securing Australia, Protecting Our Community, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, accessed 29/V/2010.

[2] Muslims in Australia: A Snap Shot (undated), Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Canberra, accessed 29/V/2010.

[3] Amanda Wise & Jan Ali (2008), Muslim Australians and Local Government: Grassroots Strategies to Improve Relations between Muslim and Non-Muslim-Australians, Centrefor Research on Social Cohesion, Sydney, accessed 20/IV/2011.

[4] Australian Government (2010), Counter-Terrorism White Paper.

[5] This author has currently analysed 47 publicly-confirmed Islamist terrorism cases (92 individuals) in the US from 2001 to 2008, and 56 cases (112 individuals) in the UK for the same period. See Sam Mullins (2010), ‘A Systematic Analysis of Islamist Terrorism in the USA and UK: 2001-2008’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wollongong. This data set is currently being updated to include 2009 onwards.

[6] See Mullins (2011), ‘Islamist Terrorism and Australia’, p. 275

[7] Mullins (2010), ‘A Systematic Analysis of Islamist Terrorism in the USA and UK: 2001-2008’,  p. 338.

[8] Mullins (2011), ‘Islamist Terrorism and Australia’, p. 259-262.

[9] Ibid; Louise Porter & Mark Kebbell (2010), ‘Radicalization in Australia: Examining Australia’s Convicted Terrorists’, Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 11/VI/2010.

[10] Edwin Bakker (2006), Jihadi Terrorists in Europe: Their Characteristics and the Circumstances in Which They Joined the Jihad: An Exploratory Study, Clingendael Institute, The Hague.

[11] Mullins (2011), ‘Islamist Terrorism and Australia’, p. 261-262; Porter & Kebbell (2010), ‘Radicalization in Australia’, p. 8.

[12] About Australia: Muslims in Australia (2009), Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, 30/V/2010.

[13] Sam Mullins (2010), ‘Iraq Versus Lack of Integration: Understanding the Motivations of Contemporary Islamist Terrorists in the West’, Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 19/X/2010.

[14] Marc Sageman (2008), Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia; Marc Sageman (2004), Understanding Terror Networks, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia; Mitchell Silber & Arvin Bhatt (2007), Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, New York City Police Department, New York.

[15] Porter & Kebbell (2010), ‘Radicalization in Australia’, p. 9-10.

[16] Mullins (2011), ‘Islamist Terrorism and Australia’, p. 262-263.

[17] See Clark McCauley & Sophia Moskalenko (2008), ‘Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways Toward Terrorism’, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 20, nr. 3, p. 415–433.

[18] Porter & Kebbell (2010), ‘Radicalization in Australia’, p. 11-12.

[19] Mullins (2011), ‘Islamist Terrorism and Australia’, p. 269; Porter & Kebbell (2010), ‘Radicalization in Australia’, p. 13-14.

[20] Australian Government (2010), Counter-Terrorism White Paper.

[21] See, for example, Kelly O’Hara & Anthony Bergin (2009), ‘Information Sharing in Australia’s National Security Community’, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, November, accessed 26/II/2011.

[22] ‘Terrorists to be “De-Radicalised” in NSW Supermax’, ABC News, 25/II/2010, accessed 27/II/2010.

[23] See Sam Mullins (2010), ‘Rehabilitation of Islamist terrorists: Lessons from criminology’, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, vol. 3, nr. 3, p. 162-193.

[24] Australian Government (2010), Counter-Terrorism White Paper, p.67.

[25] Ibid, p. 63-68; Attorney-General’s Department (2010), ‘Countering Violent Extremism in Our Community’, Attorney-General’s Department, 11/V/2010, accessed 17/II/2011.

[26] Sally Neighbour (2010), ‘Battle of Ideas to Curb Terror’, The Australian, 2/XI/2010, accessed 26/II/2011.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Attorney General’s Department (2010), ‘Countering Violent Extremism’, Attorney-General’s Department, 17/II/2010, accessed 26/II/26, 2011.

[29] Attorney-General’s Department (2010), ‘Countering Violent Extremism in Our Community’.

[30] Attorney General’s Department (2011), ‘Youth Mentoring Grants to Help Tackle Violent Extremism’, Attorney General’s Department, 22/II/2011, accessed 26/II/2011.

[31] Ibid; Attorney-General’s Department (2010), ‘Countering Violent Extremism in Our Community’.

[32] See Attorney General’s Department (2011), ‘Youth Mentoring Grants to Help Tackle Violent Extremism’.

[33] See Shiraz Maher & Martyn Frampton (2009), Choosing Our Friends Wisely: Criteria for Engagement with Muslim Groups, Policy Exchange, London, accessed 12/I/2011; Patrick Roberts (2010), ‘Preventative Medicine – The UK’s Changing Approach to Radicalism’, Jane’s Intelligence Review, 29/X/2010.

[34] Duncan Gardham (2011), ‘Counter-Terrorism Projects Worth £1.2m Face Axe as Part of End to Multiculturalism’, The Telegraph, 11/II/2011, accessed 12/II/2011.

[35] Maher & Frampton (2009), Choosing Our Friends Wisely.

[36] Ibid; Roberts, (2010), ‘Preventative Medicine – The UK’s Changing Approach to Radicalism’.

[37] See Maher & Frampton (2009), Choosing Our Friends Wisely.

America needs a new policy for dealing with Pakistan. First, we must recognize that the two countries’ strategic interests are in conflict, not harmony, and will remain that way as long as Pakistan’s army controls Pakistan’s strategic policies. We must contain the Pakistani Army’s ambitions until real civilian rule returns and Pakistanis set a new direction for their foreign policy.

As Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee last month, Pakistan provides critical sanctuary and support to the Afghan insurgency that we are trying to suppress. Taliban leaders meet under Pakistani protection even as we try to capture or kill them.

In 2009, I led a policy review for President Obama on Pakistan and Afghanistan. At the time, Al Qaeda was operating with virtual impunity in Pakistan, and its ally Lashkar-e-Taiba had just attacked the Indian city of Mumbai and killed at least 163 people, including 6 Americans, with help from Pakistani intelligence. Under no illusions, Mr. Obama tried to improve relations with Pakistan by increasing aid and dialogue; he also expanded drone operations to fight terrorist groups that Pakistan would not fight on its own.

It was right to try engagement, but now the approach needs reshaping. We will have to persevere in Afghanistan in the face of opposition by Pakistan.

The generals who run Pakistan have not abandoned their obsession with challenging India. They tolerate terrorists at home, seek a Taliban victory in Afghanistan and are building the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. They have sidelined and intimidated civilian leaders elected in 2008. They seem to think Pakistan is invulnerable, because they control NATO’s supply line from Karachi to Kabul and have nuclear weapons.

The generals also think time is on their side — that NATO is doomed to give up in Afghanistan, leaving them free to act as they wish there. So they have concluded that the sooner America leaves, the better it will be for Pakistan. They want Americans and Europeans to believe the war is hopeless, so they encourage the Taliban and other militant groups to speed the withdrawal with spectacular attacks, like the Sept. 13 raid on the United States Embassy in Kabul, which killed 16 Afghan police officers and civilians.

It is time to move to a policy of containment, which would mean a more hostile relationship. But it should be a focused hostility, aimed not at hurting Pakistan’s people but at holding its army and intelligence branches accountable. When we learn that an officer from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, is aiding terrorism, whether in Afghanistan or India, we should put him on wanted lists, sanction him at the United Nations and, if he is dangerous enough, track him down. Putting sanctions on organizations in Pakistan has not worked in the past, but sanctioning individuals has — as the nuclear proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan could attest.

Offering Pakistan more trade while reducing aid makes sense. When we extend traditional aid, media outlets with ties to the ISI cite the aid to weave conspiracy theories that alienate Pakistanis from us. Mr. Obama should instead announce that he is cutting tariffs on Pakistani textiles to or below the level that India and China enjoy; that would strengthen entrepreneurs and women, two groups who are outside the army’s control and who are interested in peace.

Military assistance to Pakistan should be cut deeply. Regular contacts between our officers and theirs can continue, but under no delusion that we are allies.

Osama bin Laden’s death confirmed that we can’t rely on Pakistan to take out prominent terrorists on its soil. We will still need bases in Afghanistan from which to act when we see a threat in Pakistan. But drones should be used judiciously, for very important targets.

In Afghanistan, we should not have false hopes for a political solution. We can hope that top figures among the Quetta Shura — Afghan Taliban leaders who are sheltered in Quetta, Pakistan — will be delivered to the bargaining table, but that is unlikely, since the Quetta leadership assassinated Burhanuddin Rabbani, the leader of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council and a former Afghan president, last month. The ISI will veto any Taliban peace efforts it opposes, which means any it doesn’t control. Rather than hoping for ISI help, we need to continue to build an Afghan Army that can control the insurgency with long-term NATO assistance and minimal combat troops.

Strategic dialogue with India about Pakistan is essential because it would focus the Pakistani Army’s mind. India and Pakistan are trying to improve trade and transportation links severed after they became independent in 1947, and we should encourage that. We should also increase intelligence cooperation against terrorist targets in Pakistan. And we should encourage India to be more conciliatory on Kashmir, by easing border controls and releasing prisoners.

America and Pakistan have had a tempestuous relationship for decades. For far too long we have banked on the Pakistani Army to protect our interests. Now we need to contain that army’s aggressive instincts, while helping those who want a progressive Pakistan and keeping up the fight against terrorism.

Despite global sanctions, Iran continues to export terrorism worldwide while importing nuclear weapons technology in a quest to impose Islam on the world. The United States and its Western allies must step up the pressure against Tehran.

Part of the export of terrorism turned up Tuesday when U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced federal authorities had foiled an Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States and bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington.

U.S. authorities concerned about Iran’s terrorist activities have taken new action to limit the illicit activities of the Islamic regime in Tehran, but it’s not enough.

In conjunction with U.S. sanctions, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) suspended the sale of Iran Air tickets through its Billing and Settlement Plan system, which serves as the central point through which data and funds flow between travel agents and airlines worldwide.

According to one official at IATA, the suspension went into effect last week and was a direct response to U.S. sanctions against illegal activities conducted by the Iranian government through Iran Air. Within the framework of these sanctions, travel agencies must refuse the sale of Iran Air passenger tickets.

While sanctions are exerting some pressure on the Islamic regime in Iran, they have failed to stop it from illicit activities of money laundering, transferring of arms and explosives in support of its terror network worldwide and, most important, its pursuit of a nuclear bomb program.

The United States, in collaboration with our allies in the European Union, must exert much more pressure against Iran. These actions could include the closure of all offices of Iran Air, Iranian shipping lines and bank offices in Europe.

In addition, an oil embargo would drastically affect the Iranian economy, forcing its leaders to change their behavior or face the wrath of their own people, who for decades have paid dearly to gain freedom from their radical rulers. We have to realize once and for all that a regime change in Tehran would go a long way in securing peace and stability not only in the region, but in the world.

Iran repeatedly has violated international laws, one of which strictly prohibits the use of passenger flights for security or military purposes. According to the opposition group Green Experts of Iran, the Iranian government on at least three recent occasions has smuggled large sums of money out of the country using Iran Air passenger flights.

One such money-laundering case involved transferring millions of euros to the Iranian Embassy in Germany, intended for expanding intelligence operations as well as funding Iranian-supported Islamic centers across Europe, such as the Islamic centers in Hamburg, Germany, and Vienna, Austria, and one Sudanese Islamic center based in Europe.

The second case involved transferring large sums of U.S. dollars to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, through Iran Air flights. Portions of these funds were moved later to the Philippines, and the final destination is unclear at this time.

The third case of the Iranian government’s money-laundering scheme via Iran Air is connected to Iranian-Pakistani joint nuclear activity. For this purpose, hundreds of millions of dollars in cash has been paid to the Pakistani government to purchase necessary components as well as the expertise of Pakistani nuclear scientists.

As I have reported on several occasions, known because of my experience as a CIA agent inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran, Iranian intelligence agents occupy every office and entity in connection with the Islamic government in Iran. These include consulates and embassies, Iran Air and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines offices, Iranian banks abroad, Islamic and cultural centers, mosques and every extension of the Iranian government in businesses throughout the world.

Not only money is smuggled to support Iranian intelligence activities. As I have reported to the CIA, arms and explosives are smuggled using Iran Air flights. In one such case, the explosives smuggled by Iran Air were transferred from the airport via an Iranian consulate convoy, which has diplomatic immunity. These actions have resulted in many assassinations and acts of terrorism worldwide.

Iran Air flights are also used to transport terrorists. These flights, though commercial, often show as being fully booked many months in advance so that no regular passengers can fly. These mystery flights are used routinely to transfer funds and arms to Syria and carry known terrorists back to Iran.

Iranian Quds Forces and Hezbollah use the same Iran Air mystery flights to transfer members to Venezuela to strengthen their terror network in Latin America. These terror cells, in collaboration with drug cartels, get into Mexico, from which they enter the United States.

Mohammad Hussein Babai, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, recently revealed that the Iranian terror cells, in coordination with Hezbollah, have infiltrated into the heart of Europe and America. Their mission, Mr. Babai said, is to help create an Islam-dominated world.

As two current high-profile cases demonstrate, the U.S. government’s practice of listing “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs) has become an increasingly dangerous and hollow political exercise rather than a sober assessment of the real threats to America.

Last month, Afghanistan’s ruthless Haqqani Network reportedly staged a brazen attack against the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. The Haqqanis, who conduct grisly terrorist attacks on hotels, embassies and other targets to advance their agenda to become power brokers in a future political settlement, reportedly are responsible for hundreds of American deaths since 2001. Some American military officers apparently are furious that the Obama administration decided not to designate the Haqqani Network as a terrorist organization because it was feared that listing the group would make it harder for the Afghan government to negotiate with the Haqqanis.

At the same time, the United States continues to list the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), Iran’s main opposition group and a declared democratic ally, as an FTO even though it meets none of the criteria and long ago renounced violence. Importantly, the group was the first to reveal Iran’s 20-year clandestine nuclear program and provided invaluable intelligence to the U.S. military in Iraq, which not only helped identify and neutralize Iran’s proxy terrorist groups operating in that country but undoubtedly saved American lives in the process.

What gives? Listing organizations like the MEK and not listing groups like the Haqqanis sends the wrong message to friends and foes alike.

In the case of the MEK, the group was put on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations in 1997 to appease the Tehran regime. The mullahs, who hate and fear the MEK, demanded that the group be listed as a precondition for potential negotiations with the United States. Those negotiations never materialized, and today, Iran remains the most dangerous player in the region. Ironically, the misguided FTO designation has given Iran and its proxies in Iraq a license to kill thousands of MEK members, including a massacre on April 8 that killed or wounded hundreds of unarmed men and women in their Iraqi base known as Camp Ashraf. The current drawdown of protective U.S troops in Iraq means that almost certain annihilation awaits a group that has dedicated itself to a democratic, non-nuclear Iran.

There is a growing movement to delist the MEK. It includes a bipartisan group of 96 members of Congress, including chairmen of the House Select Intelligence and Armed Services committees and an impressive roster of former high-level intelligence, law enforcement and security officials from the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

As for the Haqqanis, sources indicate that during high-level discussions last year, Obama administration officials debated listing the group as an FTO, which would have allowed for assets to be frozen and could help dry up the pool of financial donors supporting the group. Though some political leaders and military commanders pushed for the designation in response to the group’s escalating attacks on Americans, the administration decided that such a move might alienate the Haqqanis and drive them away from the negotiating table. It also would have been perceived as another “provocation” in the already tenuous U.S.-Pakistani relationship. In late September, Adm. Michael Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a compelling case for Pakistani complicity in the attack against the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

What began as a coordinated effort to identify, list, delegitimize and defang terrorist groups has instead become a symbol of appeasement: America put the MEK on the list to appease the Iranians and has kept the Haqqanis off the list to appease Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, which will have to deal with the network long after Americans leave.

Today, there is once again a fierce debate inside the Obama administration on whether to put the Haqqani Network on the terrorist list. At the same time, a debate rages over whether to delist the MEK. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ordered the U.S. State Department to evaluate the designation as pressure mounts within the department for a new strategy for dealing with the Iranian regime, which it acknowledges is the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism.

It appears we are dangerously inconsistent when it comes to the FTO list. Potential friends are branded as terrorists, and avowed enemies avoid a stigmatized identity that could help sap their mystique, funding and support. Both decisions should be reversed immediately, and the whole FTO strategy needs to be examined. The FTO list should be an instrument for counterterrorism, not a tool of negotiation in which hundreds of lives – not to mention American prestige – are used as leverage.

How are insurgents able to continue launching deadly attacks in Afghanistan 10 years into the U.S.-led war there? Part of the blame — perhaps even the bulk of it — lies with Pakistan’s army and its powerful intelligence arm, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known by the acronym ISI.

For decades, Pakistan has conducted a proxy war in Afghanistan through Islamist insurgent groups that it has created, nurtured and supplied. There is considerable evidence that these groups are managed not by “rogue” ISI elements, as has sometimes been asserted, but by the agency itself. The ISI is a disciplined military institution that answers to the orders of the military command, a point former Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf often emphasized. The current Pakistani army chief, army Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, was director of the ISI under Musharraf, and he headed the organization during 2005, when the Taliban began to make a strategic comeback in Afghanistan, operating from protected sanctuaries in Pakistan.

Today, three Pakistani-supported proxy groups are fueling the insurgency in Afghanistan: the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s smaller terrorist group, Hezb-i-Islami. Not one of them has been placed on the U.S. State Department’s official list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Putting these groups on the list would make them subject to a range of U.S. sanctions, and it should be done immediately. There is extensive documentation in the public record — and extensive classified intelligence documentation — of their attacks on American forces inside Afghanistan, including the Haqqani network’s deadly attacks at the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters last month. As Adm. Michael G. Mullen, outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee recently, the Haqqani network “acts as a veritable arm” of the ISI.

The U.S. campaign against global terrorism cannot succeed as long as Pakistan’s army and ISI continue to support terrorist sanctuaries and training facilities inside Pakistan. The same training camps used to prepare thousands of Afghan, Pakistani and Arab fanatics to cross into Afghanistan also churn out global terrorists like the Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad, who tried to bomb Times Square last year.

Americans need to realize that terrorists’ attempts to strike the United States from sanctuaries in Pakistan will occur again and again unless their bases are closed down. Bombs targeting American cities will inevitably become more lethal with time. Today they are conventional. Tomorrow they are likely to be biological, chemical or nuclear.

Washington has long considered Pakistan an important ally, and so has tread lightly for fear of alienating the nuclear-armed and strategically located country. But it is time to add an “or else” to our dealings with Islamabad.

In the weeks since Mullen’s harsh language before the Senate, members of the Obama administration have sought to soften the rhetoric somewhat. White House spokesman Jay Carney described Mullen’s comments as consistent with U.S. policy but said that he would not have used Mullen’s language. Other officials, speaking on background, said Mullen’s remarks weren’t reflective of U.S. policy.

But there are also indications that the U.S. could be finally ready to adopt a tougher approach. The day after Mullen spoke, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly requested “that the State Department take the additional step of listing the [Haqqani] network as a foreign terrorist organization,” noting that the organization “meets the [legal] standards” for this designation. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the State Department was completing a “final formal review” preparatory to listing the organization. And at his Wednesday White House press conference President Obama warned that “there’s no doubt that, you know, we’re not going to feel comfortable with a long-term relationship with Pakistan if we don’t think that they are mindful of our interests as well.”

These are steps in the right direction, but they don’t go nearly far enough. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations’ “soft” policy of persuasion mixed with bountiful aid and expectations of progress has failed. The U.S. needs to take a much harder stance on Pakistan’s promotion of Islamist terrorism in the region and globally.

Washington has the capability to bring great pressure to bear on Pakistan to encourage it to change course. The U.S. should privately and clearly convey to Pakistan’s army and ISI that it will be compelled to implement escalating measures if Pakistan does not close down the ISI-sustained terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan. The U.S. should also enlist other nations for regional and global coalitions to contain the terrorism coming from Pakistan. No Muslim government supports the sanctuaries in Pakistan exporting violent extremism. Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, Afghanistan, the Central Asian republics and Western Europe all wish to see them dismantled.

Among other pressures the U.S. can bring to bear are the severance of all military and economic aid, the designation of the three Afghan terrorist organizations as foreign terrorist organizations, the naming of Pakistan itself as a state sponsor of terrorism and the declassification of information exposing the terrorist bases in Pakistan and the ISI’s involvement in them.

Pakistan has hinted lately that it would turn to China and Iran if the United States ramps up pressure. But neither China nor Iran would like to see a Taliban government return to Kabul, nor would they wish to spend the huge sums it would take to shore up Pakistan’s listing economy.

The Obama administration needs to implement a Pakistan policy that serves America’s national security interests. It must be constructed for the long term and be responsive to Pakistan’s actions. There should be incentives employed to encourage the dismantling of terrorists organizations that the ISI has created and sustained. And there should be consequences if it does not.

The United States cannot afford to indulge Pakistan’s support for terrorism any longer. The risks of sticking with the status quo are greater than the risks of adopting a tougher approach.

Last month in Kabul, a man posing as a Taliban peace emissary managed to pass checkpoints, iron gates, and security guards with explosives tucked away in the folds of his turban, on his way to meet former President Burhanuddin Rabbani in his home.

Mr. Rabbani, head of the High Peace Council in Afghanistan, offered his guest a welcoming hug and unsuspectingly triggered the deadly bomb. Similarly, in July, the mayor of Kandahar, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, and a few days earlier, a top religious leader in southern Afghanistan, were assassinated by bombs concealed in turbans. The latter detonated in a mosque.

It is as though life is imitating art and these terrorists are acting out the Danish cartoons that prompted violent, sometimes deadly riots in more than a dozen Islamic countries in 2006. At the heart of the violent fury was an offensive representation of the turban. Some of the 12 controversial cartoons conjoined the turban with the sword, or with its modern counterpart, the bomb. This was identified by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then the Danish prime minister, as his country’s worst international crisis since World War II.

The turban, like the veil, predates Islam. Never mentioned in the Koran, it appears more than 20 times in the Old Testament as a symbol of prophecy among the Israelites. “He set the turban on his head, and on the turban, in front, he set the golden plate, the holy crown, as Yahweh commanded Moses” (Leviticus 8:9).

Putting on the turban, however, evolved into a synonym for conversion to Islam. It became the signal vestment of the Prophet Muhammad, who is frequently quoted in the hadith literature as saying, “My community shall not fall away so long as they wear the turban.”

For centuries, Muslims identified this headgear as a symbol of honor, dignity, piety and distinction. According to a number of authoritative Islamic narratives, all major religious figures, beginning with Adam, were turbaned. So were the angels. Islamic painting abounds in depictions of prophets, kings, and political dignitaries whose crowns of hair are fully covered. The turbans come in different fabrics, colors, shapes, styles and sizes. At times, they are works of art in themselves, with long or short trailing ends, adorned with jewelry, decorated with feathers, embroidered with peacocks and ostriches.

During the 1920s, reformist politicians in Iran and Turkey banned the turban. They viewed it as a sign of reactionary obscurantism, an obstacle to modernity. But many men, especially clerics, defiantly refused to remove their turbans. They viewed the prohibition as blasphemous and as irreverent as the unveiling of women. Some successfully resisted these decrees and ultimately received a dispensation from the government to continue wearing their turbans.

My grandfather was one such renegade. I vividly recall, as a toddler, hiding in the welcoming folds of his brown cloak every time he visited our home. Ever so gently, he would invite me out of my fortress, as he reached into the labyrinthine recesses of his black turban — his magician’s box — and produced not a bird, but a bird’s egg.

I had started talking late as a child, and when I finally did, it was an indecipherable mumbo-jumbo. Quail eggs, it was believed at the time, would help children who were late talkers reach their verbal milestones. My grandfather brought me those delicate and therapeutic eggs, nestled in his turban. It is there, in the fold of his turban, that my first words, like my first memories, were hatched.

It is painful to think of my grandfather’s turban as the headgear of choice for villains in popular books and films, like the blockbuster animated movie “Aladdin”; the educational children’s television program “The Electric Company”; or the international bestseller “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” And it is distressing to listen to people who call it “a diaper on the head,” or who view it as a marker of terrorism, a flag separating “us” from “them.” But it is most difficult to see Muslims use the life-affirming turban as a tool of destruction and death, desecrating that revered symbol, the treasure in my memory trove, the key to my locked tongue.

The killing of the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki on Sept. 30 is arguably the most significant attack on Al Qaeda since Osama bin Laden’s death in May.

While Mr. Awlaki’s death may temporarily destabilize Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and hinder the group’s ability to inspire militants in the West, it is unlikely to deal a mortal blow to Al Qaeda.

Evidence shows that killing terrorist leaders — or “decapitating” terrorist organizations, in military parlance — rarely ends violence on its own and can actually have adverse consequences. Indeed, killing prominent leaders can motivate their followers to retaliate and increase sympathy for the militants’ cause among civilians.

Simply focusing on the leadership of a terrorist organization rarely brings about the group’s demise. My study of approximately 300 cases of singling out the leadership of 96 terrorist organizations globally — including Al Qaeda and Hamas — between 1945 and 2004, shows that the likelihood of collapse actually declines for groups whose leaders have been arrested or killed.

For established terrorist organizations that are more than 20 years old, the likelihood that eliminating leaders will destroy the organization declines significantly. In fact, it becomes counterproductive as a group becomes more established.  Large groups can bounce back from the removal of leaders; this almost never cripples groups with more than 500 members. Also, religious and separatist groups are difficult to destabilize. In fact, religious groups that have lost their leaders are less likely to fall apart than those that have not.

In the case of Al Qaeda, these patterns suggest that the deaths of high-ranking members may destabilize the group in the short term, but will not be effective in bringing about its decline.

Al Qaeda, formed in 1988, is more than 20 years old, an age at which groups become more stable. It is also a religious organization, making it more resistant to attacks on its leadership. And finally, many observers believe that the group has more than 500 members — which puts it over the threshold at which terrorist organizations become more resilient and capable of surviving leadership attacks.

This is not to say that Mr. Awlaki’s death is insignificant. Mr. Awlaki had a unique ability to motivate would-be militants in the West and was linked to the shootings at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, the plot to blow up a Detroit-bound flight on Dec. 25 that same year, and the 2010 attempted bombing in Times Square.

But Mr. Awlaki’s killing is unlikely to weaken Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in a significant way. The organization has a leadership structure in place that should be unaffected by his loss, and his death will not hinder the group’s ability to attack targets in Yemen. Indeed, the political crisis there has provided an opportunity for the group to expand.

And while it may be difficult for Al Qaeda to replace someone with Mr. Awlaki’s unique ability to attract and inspire militants in the West, it has an ideological resonance that transcends leadership. The doctrine upon which the group is based is not dependent upon leaders, like Bin Laden or Mr. Awlaki, for its reproduction.

The decentralized nature of Al Qaeda’s organization — with its regional affiliates operating largely independently — further increases its ability to withstand leadership attacks. A weakened affiliate would not have long-term implications for the operational capacity of the organizational core.

While Mr. Awlaki’s death was a major tactical victory, research suggests that over time, Al Qaeda will survive this and other recent attacks. Focusing on leaders alone is not enough to undermine it.

It is important to follow up these attacks in ways that will weaken a group’s ability to attract new recruits. Withdrawing ground forces from Afghanistan could undermine one of the causes for which the organization has been fighting. Moreover, providing critical social services in communities where Al Qaeda and other militants operate could eliminate opportunities for them to gain further local support. Undermining the local support upon which groups depend, rather than focusing primarily on killing their leaders, should be a cornerstone of Washington’s counterterrorism policies.

Yemen is a sanctuary for al Qaeda terrorists that is barreling into civil war and instability. Add into this the fact that tens of thousands of Yemenis hold U.S. passports, and Yemen emerges as the perfect habitat for a new al Qaeda threat: the American terrorist.

Three high-profile terrorists with U.S. citizenship have been killed in Yemen. Kamal Derwish, also known as Ahmed Hijazi, was killed in Yemen in 2002 while traveling with other al Qaeda operatives, including the organizer of the USS Cole attack. Derwish was the reported leader of the Lackawanna Six, the group of Yemeni-Americans from New York who traveled to Afghanistan in early 2001 to attend al Qaeda training camps.

The second two were killed Friday in the same U.S. airstrike. One was Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric known for his savvy use of the Internet for recruitment. He was linked to Malik Nidal Hasan, the American Army psychiatrist charged with carrying out the worst shooting spree ever on an American military base, and was known to have encouraged the Nigerian “Underwear Bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to try to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day in 2009.

The other U.S.-passport-holding terrorist killed in Friday’s airstrike was Samir Khan, a Saudi-born Pakistani raised in Queens, N.Y. He lived in North Carolina until moving to Yemen to become editor of al Qaeda’s propaganda magazine, Inspire.

There are tens of thousands of Yemeni-Americans living in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, who hold American passports. They not only have the right to travel to the United States whenever they choose, but they also have the right to apply for immigrant visas for their supposed family members. The inherent security gaps in this process pose a very real threat. I saw this firsthand while serving as vice consul at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen.

Because Yemen has only been unified since 1990, many of the legally issued documents in that country contain fraudulent information. In order to receive a birth certificate, death certificate or any other national documentation, a Yemeni national simply appears with two of his neighbors, who all attest to the veracity of the information, and a new document is issued.

Documents supplied for visa applications, therefore, may appear legitimate but could provide benefits to people who are not entitled to them. In most cases, this is simply an attempt to escape from the poorest Arab nation. But we should make no mistake that it also could be used by those who want to perpetrate terrorism against the United States.

In addition to the Yemeni-American population in Sanaa, there also is a large population of American citizens who have traveled there after converting to Islam to study Arabic and the Koran. These people are easy recruiting targets for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Al Qaeda is known for adjusting its tactics and techniques. It is only a matter of time before it relies more heavily on Americans to conduct these attacks. Believing the death of al-Awlaki has eliminated al Qaeda’s Western connections is foolish. For several reasons, Yemen’s growing instability offers al Qaeda the perfect sanctuary in the midst of chaos and economic desperation.

First, Yemen is on the brink of all-out civil war. This gives al Qaeda political leverage and removes any threat of an internal security threat.

Second, Yemen will run out of water in as little as six years. This potentially will lead to conflict over, control of and access to water and will be a source of leverage over the population.

Third, the country’s oil supply will run out within a decade. The loss of revenue and jobs may further destabilize Yemen and offer al Qaeda a population desperate for employment of any sort.

The United States must work with its allies in the region to curb the threat of civil war in Yemen. Saudi Arabia shares a border with Yemen and already has experienced spillover from the fighting in the north. It is not in Saudi Arabia’s best interests for Yemen to plunge into all-out war.

Yemen’s water issues are solvable. Desalination plants along its extensive coast are one option. Water treatment plants are another. The costs are small compared to the price of not investing in these.

Job creation is essential for Yemen, just as it is for all of the Arab Spring countries. The League of Arab States should come together now for a regionwide jobs plan.

After the successful operations that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, al-Awlaki, Khan and others, it is tempting to think we are gaining ground in the fight against terrorism. Yes, we are successful in targeting individuals. But given its political, economic and environmental landscape, Yemen is becoming the perfect habitat for a new wave of terrorism.

HACE quince años, a mediados de septiembre de 1996, su Majestad la Reina Doña Sofía, por su preocupación social, presidió y participó en varias de las conferencias impartidas en el I Encuentro Internacional sobre Biología y Sociología de la Violencia, en que intervenían especialistas de gran categoría tanto en los campos de la Biología como de la Sociología, incluyendo al premio Nobel Jean Dausset y a Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt —discípulo de Konrad Lorenz y uno de los máximos exponentes de la etología humana—, además de otras personas que, sin ser científicos, han manifestado su repulsa a la violencia, como doña María Barroso de Suárez, Su Alteza Real Doña Ana de Orleáns y doña Corazón Aquino. Todos ellos se reunieron en Valencia durante varios días como consecuencia de una larga conversación con mi hijo mayor, James, neuropsiquiatra en un hospital en San Diego que además colabora con la Policía americana, por lo que ha tenido amplia ocasión de conocer el tema muy directamente, y le preocupan las complejas relaciones de la genética y el medio ambiente en el desarrollo de la conducta violenta.

Como consecuencia de dicha reunión, y dadas las repercusiones sociales que ocasionó, la Fundación Valenciana de Estudios Avanzados creó, en colaboración con el Gobierno valenciano, el Centro Reina Sofía, dirigido por el profesor José Sanmartín bajo la Presidencia de Honor de la Reina, quien nos hizo el honor de acudir a visitarnos en la primera sede. Por cierto, que la noche anterior a su visita, durante la persecución policial a unos delincuentes, parece ser que una de las patrullas policiales colisionó con la fachada del edificio en que nos ubicábamos, y apenas pudimos cubrir los daños antes de la llegada de Su Majestad.

En ese primer encuentro, acabé mi intervención con una frase que, desgraciadamente, es cada vez más cierta: «La violencia de cualquier clase, especialmente el terrorismo, es paradójicamente “el arma del débil contra el fuerte”».

El terrorismo se ha extendido progresivamente, especialmente después de la invasión de Irak, y con el incremento en número de algunas de las más peligrosas modalidades de terroristas, sobre todo aquellos que se inmolan para causar un daño en áreas no bien protegidas porque carecen de objetivos estratégicos en los tradicionales valores de la guerra. Por todo ello, y siguiendo la tradición de los jurados de los premios Rey Jaime Ide hacer un manifiesto anual sobre un tema candente, se eligió este año el terrorismo como motivo de preocupación. El texto, como de costumbre, se envió a los principales líderes mundiales. Dice:

«Los jurados de los premios Rey Jaime I 2011 constatan que, por desgracia, el terrorismo ha aumentado mucho en los últimos años, de modo que hoy en día todos nos encontramos expuestos a sus consecuencias. El conjunto de las naciones debería reforzar su compromiso de erradicar el terrorismo y reducir el daño que produce, así como su influencia perniciosa sobre la sociedad. Este propósito debe incluir una firme voluntad de lucha contra la injusticia social y condena clara de las estrategias de la violencia y el terror».

Generalmente, tenemos respuestas apropiadas a los manifiestos de los jurados, pues no es baladí que muestren una preocupación común por un tema en torno a una veintena de galardonados con el premio Nobel y otros importantes efectivos sociales en cualquiera de sus campos. El manifiesto de 2011 fue firmado por 19 premios Nobel y relevantes personalidades como Isabel Tocino, Manuel Marín, Rodrigo Rato, Regina Revilla, Antonio Garrigues Walker, Carlos Zurita, Ana Pastor, Petra Mateos-Aparicio, Plácido Arango, Juan Roig, Miguel López Alegría, Manuel Elices, Enrique Macián, María Garaña, Luis Javier Navarro, Von Leoprechting, Edouard Janssen, Sánchez Asiaín, etc.

Como en pasadas ocasiones, han respondido al manifiesto numerosos jefes de Gobierno, pero por su interés quisiera reproducir la respuesta de la Sra. Irina Bokova, directora general de la Unesco, que traducida diría:

«Quisiera agradecerle la carta en la que me envía la Declaración contra el terrorismofirmada por los eminentes miembros del jurado de los premios Rey Jaime I en su edición de 2011. La referencia a la escalada terrorista que hace la Declaración ha encontrado un trágico y muy doloroso eco en los dos ataques terroristas acontecidos en Noruega el pasado 22 de julio de 2011, donde asesinaron a más de setenta personas, la mayor parte de ellos jóvenes comprometidos a participar activamente en asuntos de índole global.
Como estoy segura que sabe, los atentados han sido categóricamente condenados por el secretario general de Naciones Unidas, el señor Ban Ki-moon, y el presidente de la Asamblea General, Joseph Deiss. El manifiesto emitido por el Consejo de Seguridad reafirma que «el terrorismo en todas sus formas y manifestaciones constituye uno de las más serias amenazas a la seguridad y la paz internacionales, y que todas las acciones terroristas son actos criminales e injustificables, independientemente de las motivaciones, el lugar, el momento y los sujetos que las cometan».

Unesco, por su parte, ha estado directamente involucrada en el desarrollo del borrador de la Estrategia Antiterrorista global de las Naciones Unidas (A/RES/60/288), adoptada por consenso en la Asamblea General del 8 de septiembre de 2006, y la organización participa activamente en los grupos de trabajo de la Fuerza de Implementación antiterrorista, en particular en relación con iniciativas que disuadan y descorazonen a los extremismos y fanatismos, y con las áreas de experiencia de la Unesco: educación, ciencia, cultura, información y comunicación.

El 19 de septiembre de 2011 se celebrará en Nueva York un importante simposio sobre Contraterrorismo Internacional con los auspicios del secretario general Ban Ki-moon y la Ctitf. Será mi ocasión, como moderadora de una de las sesiones de trabajo de promoción del diálogo, de referirme a esta Declaración y a la importancia de estas afirmaciones apoyadas por figuras líderes en el mundo de la ciencia, la cultura y la empresa, para perseverar en nuestros esfuerzos de mantener la unidad frente el terrorismo.
Esté usted seguro de que tengo intención de usar esta Declaración de los jurados de los premios Rey Jaime I en cuantas ocasiones se me presenten para referirme a ella. Le agradezco de nuevo el haber compartido esta Declaración con Unesco».

Si abre el periódico, uno cualquiera, posiblemente encontrará algún atentado, algún joven que, voluntaria o forzosamente, se ha inmolado, vidas segadas sin sentido, que arrastran muchas vidas inocentes más. Esperemos que esta barbarie disminuya, y cuanto hagamos para frenarla es poco. Es quizá el principal deber frente a la más preocupante de las amenazas sociales.

Vimos estos días en Inglaterra a la ruptura social y el vandalismo inquietar a la población hasta el punto de movilizar gran número de efectivos de la Policía. Es otro ejemplo de que el terror y la intranquilidad no afectan solo a los países menos desarrollados y de que el terrorismo es una preocupante responsabilidad mundial.

Osama bin Laden’s death was cheered, I suspect, by 99.99% of Americans. But there was that 0.01% — and a slightly higher number abroad — who doubted the legality of simply pumping two bullets into the Al Qaeda leader rather than trying to arrest and Mirandize him.

Likewise, amid the general rejoicing over the death of Anwar Awlaki, one of the leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a few civil libertarians are raising questions about whether the U.S. government had the right to kill an American citizen without a trial. And it wasn’t just the New Mexico-born Awlaki, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Yemen, who died in a CIA drone strike in Yemen on Friday. Also killed was Samir Khan, a propagandist for the group who was born in Saudi Arabia but grew up in New York and North Carolina and retained American citizenship. How could President Obama order their assassinations?

That’s like asking if it was lawful to kill Confederate soldiers at Gettysburg. Like the rebels during the Civil War, Awlaki and Khan gave up the benefits of American citizenship by taking up arms against their country. They, and other Al Qaeda members, claim to be “soldiers” in the army of Allah; it is only fitting that their avowed enemy, the Great Satan, would take their protestations seriously and treat them just like enemy soldiers. If it’s lawful to drop a missile on a Saudi or Egyptian member of Al Qaeda, it’s hard to see why an American citizen should be exempt.

The pressing question is not whether killing Awlaki was the right thing to do — it was — but what impact his killing will have. That’s a tougher call. Other terrorist organizations have been able to survive, even thrive, after the deaths of important leaders.

Hezbollah’s secretary general, Abbas Mussawi, was killed by an Israeli helicopter strike in 1992, but his successor, Hassan Nasrallah, turned out to be an organizational genius. Today, under Nasrallah’s leadership, Hezbollah has become the dominant force within Lebanon. Likewise Hamas has consolidated its control of the Gaza Strip despite the loss of numerous senior leaders to Israeli missiles, bombs and hit teams. And Al Qaeda in Iraq only became more deadly after its founder, Abu Musab Zarqawi, was killed in an American airstrike in June 2006.

It remains to be seen whether Al Qaeda’s central organization will survive the loss of Bin Laden — it might not — but if so, Al Qaeda would be the exception to the rule. Most terrorist groups have shown enough resiliency to go on killing even after the loss of top leaders.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula surely will fall into the resilient category, unless the U.S. can bring a lot more pressure on the group than is currently the case. U.S. drone strikes in Yemen are not unprecedented, but they are rare; they are nowhere near as common as strikes in Pakistan, which have managed to kill one senior Al Qaeda leader after another. (Being Al Qaeda’s operational chief is said to be the most dangerous job in the world.)

The U.S. may be ramping up to carry out a similar campaign against AQAP; there are published reports about the CIA building a new airfield in the Persian Gulf region for such a purpose. If the CIA is able to put more Predators and other drones over the skies of Yemen 24/7, it can do considerable damage to AQAP and slow its ability to make up for leadership losses. Even then, however, it is unlikely that AQAP can be defeated from the air.

Both the American and Israeli experiences in their respective wars on terror have clearly taught one lesson: The only way to stamp out a determined insurgency is to put boots on the ground. When the Israeli army reentered the West Bank en masse in 2002 in response to the second intifada, it was able to stamp out Palestinian terrorist cells. Because the Israelis are unwilling to reoccupy Gaza, they cannot defeat Hamas. Likewise, Al Qaeda in Iraq was only defeated (if not eliminated) by multiple “surges” of ground troops — not only of U.S. forces but also of Iraqi security forces and the Sunni militia known as the Sons of Iraq.

But, barring another 9/11, there is scant chance of U.S. troops invading Yemen. And the ramshackle Yemeni government, which is facing its own internal rebellion, is in no position to police its territory. As a result, AQAP has accomplished something that Al Qaeda central never achieved: It has been able to control ground. Its growing dominance in southern Yemen is unlikely to be shaken by Awlaki’s demise.

The challenge for American policymakers is to figure out how to fill the security vacuum in Yemen. That’s much tougher than using a Predator to fire a Hellfire missile, but unless we come up with some way to bring a modicum of stability to this turbulent land, the death of Awlaki is likely to be a fleeting victory.

Democracy always favors dialogue over confrontation. So, too, in Pakistan, where the terrorists who threaten both our country and the United States have gained the most from the recent verbal assaults some in America have made against Pakistan. This strategy is damaging the relationship between Pakistan and the United States and compromising common goals in defeating terrorism, extremism and fanaticism.

It is time for the rhetoric to cool and for serious dialogue between allies to resume.

Pakistan sits on many critical fault lines. Terrorism is not a statistic for us. Our geopolitical location forces us to look to a future where the great global wars will be fought on the battleground of ideas. From the Middle East to South Asia, a hurricane of change is transforming closed societies into marketplaces of competing narratives. The contest between the incendiary politics of extremism and the slow burn of modern democracy is already being fought in every village filled with cellphones, in every schoolroom, on every television talk show. It is a battle that moderation must win.

Our motives are simple. We have a huge population of young people who have few choices in life. Our task is to turn this demographic challenge into a dividend for democracy and pluralism, where the embrace of tolerance elbows out the lure of extremism, where jobs turn desolation into opportunity and empowerment, where plowshares take the place of guns, where women and minorities have a meaningful place in society.

None of this vision for a new Pakistan is premised on the politics of victimhood. It pivots on a worldview where we fight the war against extremism and terrorism as our battle, at every precinct and until the last person, even though we lack the resources to match our commitment. When Pakistan seeks support, we look for trade that will make us sustainable, not aid that will bind us in transactional ties. When we commit to a partnership against terrorism, we do it in the hope that our joint goals will be addressed. When we add our shoulder to the battle, we look for outcomes that leave us stronger.

Yet as Pakistan is pounded by the ravages of globally driven climate change, with floods once again making millions of our citizens homeless, we find that, instead of a dialogue with our closest strategic ally, we are spoken to instead of being heard. We are being battered by nature and by our friends. This has shocked a nation that is bearing the brunt of the terrorist whirlwind in the region. And why?

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the world’s most powerful democracy compromised its fundamental values to accommodate a dictator in Pakistan. Since then we have lost 30,000 innocent civilians and 5,000 military and police officers to the militant mind-set that the U.S. government is now charging that we support. We have suffered more than 300 suicide bomb attacks by the forces that allegedly find sanctuary within our borders. We have hemorrhaged approximately $100 billion directly in the war effort and tens of billions more in lost foreign investment. The war is being fought in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, yet Washington has invested almost nothing on our side of the border and hundreds of billions of dollars on the other side.

We fight an ideology that feeds on brutality and coercion that has taken the lives of our minister for minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, and Gov. Salman Taseer, among thousands of others. And we have seen our greatest leader, the mother of my children, assassinated by a conspiracy that was powered by the same mind-set we are now accused of tolerating.

Both our nations need to learn from history. South and Central Asia is a region of complexity and nuance where mistakes repeat dangerously and where many empires have floundered. In the 10 years that NATO has been in the neighborhood, it has not even attempted to choke the world’s largest production of narcotic contraband that funds terrorist activity. Yet we struggle to hold the line against the tidal wave of extremism that surges into Pakistan each day from internationally controlled areas of Afghanistan. While we are accused of harboring extremism, the United States is engaged in outreach and negotiations with the very same groups.

The Pakistani street is thick with questions. My people ask, Is our blood so cheap? Are the lives of our children worthless? Must we fight alone in our region all those that others now seek to embrace? And how long can we degrade our capacity by fighting an enemy that the might of the NATO global coalition has failed to eliminate?

As the United States plans to remove its ground forces from Afghanistan and once again leave our region, we are attempting to prepare for post-withdrawal realities. The international community abandoned Central and South Asia a generation ago, triggering the catastrophe that we now find ourselves in. Whoever comes or goes, it is our coming generation that will face the firestorm. We have to live in the neighborhood. So why is it unreasonable for us to be concerned about the immediate and long-term situation of our Western border? History will not forgive us if we don’t take responsibility.

Where do the United States and Pakistan go from here? We are partners in a world where broadcasts and bombs know no borders. We fight a common menace. We share the same democratic values and dreams for a moderate, modern, pluralistic, democratic South and Central Asia. We jointly appreciate that trade, job creation and manufacturing will dry up conscripts for the extremist banner, yet we never saw Congress approve the Reconstruction Opportunity Zones that were meant to secure vulnerable livelihoods. We are on convergent policy tracks, but our rhetoric has split us onto divergent roads.

The recent accusations against us have been a serious setback to the war effort and our joint strategic interests. It is not as if Pakistanis will stop reclaiming our terrain, inch by inch, from the extremists, even without the United States. We are a tenacious people. We will not allow religion to become the trigger for terrorism or persecution.

But when we don’t strategize together, and when an ally is informed instead of consulted, we both suffer. The sooner we stop shooting verbal arrows at each other and coordinate our resources against the advancing flag of fanaticism, the sooner we can restore stability to the land for which so much of humanity continues to sacrifice.

On Friday, an American drone flying over northern Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — a Qaeda affiliate. Mr. Awlaki helped support an attempted attack on a Detroit-bound flight in 2009 and had been linked to other attempted attacks in the United States.

Drone strikes against terrorists outside of so-called hot battlefields like Afghanistan have become commonplace during the Obama presidency, and have reportedly decimated the leadership of Al Qaeda and its affiliates. What made this strike unusual, however, was that Mr. Awlaki was an American citizen, having been born in New Mexico.

This fateful new step in our ever-expanding war against terrorists — intentionally killing an American citizen — is fraught with the danger of executive overreach or mistakes. But the Obama administration has done an admirable job to date of balancing these potential dangers against security imperatives.

The United States did not claim the power to kill Mr. Awlaki because of his political views or because he was a mere member of a Qaeda affiliate against which Congress had authorized the use of force. It claimed the power to kill him, rather, because he was an operational leader of a Qaeda affiliate that had been involved in terrorist plots on American soil and because he was hiding in a country that lacked the capacity to arrest him and bring him to justice.

Nor does the killing of Mr. Awlaki mean, as Glenn Greenwald charged in Salon, that “due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality.” An attack on an enemy soldier during war is not an assassination. During World War II, the United States targeted and killed Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Moreover, the United States knew there were many American citizens in the German Army during World War II, but it did not alter its bombing practices as a result.

And while no court approved the killing of Mr. Awlaki, it is not accurate to say that he was targeted without due process. What due process requires depends on context. In a lawsuit brought last year that sought to prevent the government from targeting Mr. Awlaki, a federal judge ruled that in wartime the Constitution left it to the president and Congress, not the courts, to decide military targeting issues.

Even with this ruling, there is an understandable concern about the president’s making a decision to kill an American citizen. This is why the Obama administration has gone to unusual lengths, consistent with the need to protect intelligence, to explain the basis for and limits on its actions. Mr. Obama’s senior counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, made clear in a recent speech that, outside traditional battlefields, the United States targets only individuals who threaten American security. Moreover, there is an extraordinary process inside the government to ensure that this standard is met.

Before someone like Mr. Awlaki is targeted, multiple intelligence sources support the conclusion that he is a dangerous threat, top lawyers from many agencies scrutinize the action, policy makers at the highest levels of government approve the action after assessing its legal and political risks, and the Congressional intelligence committees are informed about the intelligence community’s role in the operations.

It is true that these internal targeting procedures gave Mr. Awlaki less due process than he would have received from a court. And these procedures are no guarantee against mistakes (though judicial process provides no such guarantee either).

That said, these procedures are wholly unprecedented in war, and they exceed anything the law requires. The caution inherent in this internal process is appropriate to guard against mistaken or imprudent actions when targeting individuals who have the power to wreak havoc on America while hiding among civilians in faraway places.

Such a cautious approach is especially appropriate when an American citizen is targeted. The president has a duty to keep the country safe. So far, it appears, the Obama administration is exercising this duty lawfully and with caution. Such caution, however, does not guarantee legitimacy at home or abroad. There are relatively few complaints in American society about the drone program, but drones are becoming increasingly controversial outside the United States on the ground that they violate international law.

The Obama administration has tried to explain the basis for its actions under international law just as it has under domestic law. But its international law arguments are more controversial. The administration claims that strikes in places like Yemen are consistent with the United Nations charter because the other country consents to them or is unable or unwilling to check the terrorist threat, thereby bringing America’s right to self-defense into play. Moreover, the White House argues that such strikes comply with international law-of-war duties to distinguish civilians from attack and use only proportionate force.

These international-law arguments are unconvincing to those who deny the possibility of a war in many nations against nonstate actors, and who are deeply worried about the asymmetrical power that drones possess — precluding, as they do, the need to put American soldiers at risk. Drone critics are increasingly mobilizing forces — at the United Nations, through human rights advocacy and litigation, and in other arenas — to attack the American drone program and make it more costly to use.

This campaign will only gain steam after today’s strike in Yemen. The Obama administration cannot afford to ignore these efforts, but it also cannot give in to them.

It can perhaps release a bit more information about the basis for its targeted strikes. It is doubtful, however, that more transparency or more elaborate legal arguments will change many minds, since the goal of drone critics is to end their use altogether (outside of Afghanistan).

While the administration must continue to manage its critics, it cannot afford to forgo using drones, which are an accurate, successful and cost-effective counterterrorism tool whose value will only grow as the United States withdraws its troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The news that confronts Americans about the decade-long counterterrorism campaign defining the post-9/11 era is increasingly episodic, and for good reason. The death of Osama bin Laden, the killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi, questions about Pakistan’s commitment to the grisly operations against militants in that devastated country — all these are overshadowed domestically by debt problems, a looming election, global warming and a host of other issues worthy of national debate. And they come after a decade in which the number of Americans killed in terrorist attacks is far lower than any observer could have guessed 10 years ago. Americans’ attention has shifted from terrorism, thankfully, and that shift should gratify any security professional.

The popular perception that these terrorists’ deaths mark an accelerating decline among the terrorist groups that threaten the United States, particularly on its home shores, represents an accurate view that the leadership of these groups is disappearing at a remarkable rate. The professionals working against these groups day to day could not help but view the loss of so many al-Qaeda leaders in the border region of Pakistan, the setbacks of the al-Shabab militants in Somalia, the decimation of the al-Qaedist jihadists in Indonesia and the criminalization of hostage-taking al-Qaeda sympathizers in North Africa as signs that the flow of violent Islamist groups that grew after 9/11 has ebbed.

For those of us sitting in a chair at the nightly meetings with CIA Director George Tenet in 2002 and the years afterward, however, the view was not so rosy. Attacks across the Islamic world seemed to represent not only the hydra-headed operational capabilities of a loose, far-flung al-Qaedist movement but also the success of an ideology that led so many formerly local jihadists to go global, accepting the al-Qaeda mantra that the United States and its allies represented the head of the snake. The successes of recent years have erased the sense, during those days, that it was the jihadists on the offensive, while we played defense. No more.

But this same episodic focus — occasional stories marking the decline of various individual leaders — masks a reality that Americans struggle to face: This adversary is not a group, nor is it represented by any individual. It is an ideology, the corrupting vision that American military, cultural and political invasions into Muslim lands must be countered and that the use of indiscriminate violence is an appropriate counter. The Abu Ghraib photos, U.S. policy toward Palestine, photographs of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan — all these have fed the belief among the fringe who represent potential al-Qaeda recruits that the United States represents a threat, in their own homelands.

This idea, that youth led by corrupt leaders should turn to al-Qaeda as an answer, had great resonance a decade ago, when al-Qaeda was seen as having stood up to America, and before this decade, during which al-Qaeda operations have killed many innocent Muslims in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa. These killings have radically undercut the appeal of this idea, and the Arab uprisings this year have replaced a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda by ousting unpopular leaders. But these events have not destroyed al-Qaedism. Not yet.

There have been more arrests of al-Qaedist Americans in the past few years than ever before. These people are on the West Coast and the East Coast, in the South and the Midwest, all with their own homegrown plots, coming at us at a rate that we did not see when I first shifted to the FBI from the CIA in 2005. Very few of these individuals are al-Qaeda members; all, though, have absorbed al-Qaedist ideology. They are believers, not recruits. And their numbers have unmistakably increased.

We may be right in looking at reports of the deaths of jihadist leaders overseas as representing a death knell for some of the most significant groups that have threatened America. U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement operations have combined, with foreign partners, to eviscerate these groups more effectively than we would have expected, even a few years ago.

We would be wrong, however, in confusing the demise of a few leaders or their formal groups with the death of the ideology they sought to spread or the revolution they still intend to inspire. Witness the arrests in this country and the arrests in Europe. Al-Qaedism isn’t close to dead yet. Ideas live far longer than people, and this idea has proven roots. The adversary we face benefits from a long view, looking at the world through a lens of decades or centuries.

We will want to mistake the deaths of al-Qaeda leaders with the death of an ideology. But in the midst of unmistakable successes, we have to match our adversaries by learning to be as patient as they are. Celebrations, or even premature judgments about our successes, would be a mistake. We are far from finished with al-Qaedism, even if al-Qaeda fades.

The prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is again in the news. The two Americans released this month by Iran have reported that when they complained about conditions in their Tehran prison, the jailers would “immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay.” Such is the power of symbols.

Symbols are important, and we ignore them at our peril. But even in these hyperpartisan times, when symbols are baseball bats used by thugs in the public square to beat reason senseless, I like to pretend that the truth is worth pursuing. And one part of that truth is that conditions at Guantanamo are vastly superior to those at any maximum-security prison on the U.S. mainland.

I say this as the lawyer who has been involved in challenges to Guantanamo longer than anyone in the United States. I was counsel of record in Rasul vs. Bush, the first Guantanamo case in the Supreme Court, and today represent Abu Zubaydah, who was the first person tortured by the CIA and the man for whom the infamous torture memos were written. After our victory in Rasul, I was one of the first lawyers to go to the prison, and by now I cannot count the number of times I have returned there.

Conditions were not always as they are today. Beginning in late 2002 and continuing well into 2004, the interrogation techniques at Guantanamo were equal parts crude and cruel. It was stupidity, sometimes torture, and no amount of after-the-fact rationalization can make it better. Living conditions were likewise appalling, at first to facilitate the interrogations and later as a result of a misguided crackdown after three prisoners committed suicide. But interrogations have long ended, and since late 2006, conditions have improved.

That, in turn, should dispatch another myth: that improvements at the base are somehow the work of the Obama administration. Such drivel reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of American government. The fact is that the great majority of the senior career officers in the U.S. military never wanted to make Guantanamo into the pit that it became in late 2002. But it was not until late 2006 that the iron grip of Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel and later chief of staff David Addington loosened enough that the officers could reclaim the prison and begin to reshape it in a more humane form. The military deserves the credit for improvements at the prison, not the Obama administration.

But if we agree that the truth is worth pursuing, then we should not stop halfway. We should not stop, as partisans may like, with the acknowledgment that conditions are much improved. The whole truth is that the prison remains a disaster. While the great moral bankruptcy of the base was once its conditions, today it is the shameful fact that scores of prisoners who have been cleared for transfer by two administrations remain in custody.

No one suggests they have committed a war crime; no one suggests they will be prosecuted in military or civilian court; everyone involved in their detention agrees they pose no threat to the United States and that they should be transferred to their home countries. Yet they languish for no better reason than because truth cannot breathe in this toxic atmosphere. They may never hold their children, or say goodbye to a dying mother. Their fate is the four walls of a prison cell, and the country should not congratulate itself on the fact that once the prison was worse.

Some say the prisoners may challenge their detention in court. They may seek, as the lawyers say, a writ of habeas corpus. But no one takes that seriously anymore. For all the foolish talk about judicial independence, the same hysteria has settled over both the Capitol and the courthouse. Today, the judiciary is to law not quite what the Chicago Black Sox were to baseball, but every bit what Keystone was to cops.

Yet so ridiculous the whole debate has become that even to utter these words risks a special sort of opprobrium — the mark of the traitor, either to the left, which is committed to using any excuse to bash the prison, or to the right, which invokes any falsehood so long as it helps keep every prisoner there forever. Today, what passes for intelligent discussion summons to mind James Russell Lowell, from more than a century ago:

I loved my country so, as only they

Who love a mother fit to die for may;

I loved her old renown, her stainless fame.

What better proof than that I loathed her shame?

(Versión en inglés)

En la conmoción que siguió al 11 de septiembre del 2001, la pregunta que más se hacían los norteamericanos, que acababan de toparse por primera vez con el extremismo islámico, era «¿Por qué nos odian tanto?». La respuesta simple que a muchos norteamericanos les resultaba tranquilizadora era que «los otros» estaban celosos de la riqueza de Estados Unidos, de sus oportunidades, de su democracia y de lo que ustedes tienen (intente defender esta misma idea ahora, con la recesión económica norteamericana). Sin embargo, Norteamérica y sus instintos civilizadores estaban siendo sometidos a una dura prueba en todo el mundo.

Ahora que Estados Unidos entra en el undécimo año de la guerra más larga que jamás ha librado -la de Afganistán- sin que todavía se le vea un final, mientras el vecino Pakistán se encuentra al borde del cataclismo, la cuestión se está planteando a la inversa: ¿por qué los norteamericanos nos odian tanto? Una ola de antiamericanismo está barriendo Afganistán y Pakistán. Incluso en Irak, donde de nuevo está presente Al Qaeda con aires de venganza y de donde se espera que salgan en este mismo año los últimos 45.000 soldados estadounidenses, está creciendo el antiamericanismo.

La respuesta más beligerante a ese sentir mayoritario es que los norteamericanos son imperialistas que odian el islamismo y que sus denominados instintos civilizadores no tienen nada que ver con la democracia o los Derechos Humanos. La respuesta benévola es que esos pueblos no odian a los norteamericanos sino las políticas que los dirigentes norteamericanos practican. La guerra empequeñece a todo el mundo y a todos los estados, incluso a los victoriosos, de modo que ¿por qué ha de ser diferente Estados Unidos?

Tras el 11-S, el primer ministro británico Tony Blair, y el presidente Bush empeñaron ante el mundo su palabra de que occidente no iba a tolerar por más tiempo ni estados fracasados o inviables ni el extremismo y, sin embargo, en la actualidad hay por el mundo más estados fracasados que nunca. El mensaje de Al Qaeda se ha propagado por Europa, África y la América continental, donde antes no se había sabido jamás de su existencia, y todas las religiones y culturas están produciendo sus propios extremistas (no hay más que ver la reciente matanza de Noruega).

La hambruna, la escasez, la pobreza y el fracaso económico se han multiplicado más allá de toda medida mientras que el cambio climático ha desencadenado inundaciones y sequías terribles, lo que ha traído miseria sin cuento de forma imprevista a millones de lugares. Todo esto no es culpa del 11-S pero, en las mentes de muchas personas, las catástrofes a las que ahora debemos hacer frente son consecuencia de las guerras de Estados Unidos, aunque también esta nación sea una víctima de sus propias guerras y de este mundo en cambio.

De las dos invasiones, la de Irak y la de Afganistán, y de la operación de salvamento de Pakistán, el fracaso más llamativo de Estados Unidos ha sido su incapacidad de contribuir a la reconstrucción del Estado y de la nación allí donde han ido a la guerra. Organizar un Estado consiste en instaurar unas instituciones y un sistema de gobierno que es posible que no hayan existido nunca con anterioridad, como en el caso de Afganistán, o que hayan estado en manos de dictadores sin piedad, como en Irak. Construir una nación consiste en ayudar a los países a desarrollar su cohesión nacional, cosa que Pakistán no ha conseguido llevar a cabo desde su creación, mediante el desarrollo de la economía, de la sociedad civil, de la educación y de la formación.

En el Gobierno de Bush, tanto la organización del Estado como la construcción de una nación eran poco menos que palabrotas. Algo menos en el Gobierno Obama, pero todavía no se las llama por su nombre y, oficialmente, ya no forman parte de la estrategia en Afganistán o Pakistán. Sin embargo, la tan cacareada estrategia antiinsurgencia -COIN- formulada por el general David Petraeus con el fin de derrotar a Al Qaeda depende enormemente de que se mejore el sistema de gobierno, se reconstruyan instituciones como el ejército y la policía propias y se le dé a la población un futuro: en otras palabras, de que se pongan en pie un Estado y una nación.

Sin embargo, a pesar de los miles de millones de dólares invertidos en esta estrategia, la parte social del programa se ha visto reducida al mínimo y se ha dejado en manos del ejército de Estados Unidos y de la CIA, que han transformado la COIN en un instrumento puramente militar. En Afganistán, operaciones militares nocturnas, asesinatos selectivos a cargo de las US Special Operations Forces -Fuerzas de Operaciones Especiales- y ataques de aviones teledirigidos a cargo de la CIA han reemplazado los bombarderos B-52 que siguieron al 11 de septiembre como armas preferidas por los norteamericanos para acabar con los talibán, aunque el coste, en términos de muertes de no combatientes, está siendo excesivamente alto como para que la población local lo pueda soportar.

Los afganos se manifiestan ahora en las calles cada vez que resulta muerto un civil. En Pakistán, los ataques de aviones no tripulados han hecho que toda la población monte en cólera porque nadie es capaz de cuantificar cuál es su grado de éxito en la eliminación de Al Qaeda. John O. Brennan, consejero de Obama, declaró en junio que, durante todo un año, «no se ha registrado ni una sola muerte colateral» achacable a los ataques de los aviones no tripulados. La CIA en tela de juicio por víctimas civiles en los ataques de aviones teledirigidos, tituló The New York Times el 12 de agosto de 2011. La CIA podrá reivindicar que los aviones no tripulados han acabado con 600 activistas sin matar a un solo civil, pero a ver qué afgano o qué paquistaní se puede creer eso.

Estados Unidos invadió Afganistán e Irak sin tener siquiera un plan sobre cómo iban a gobernar ambos países. La CIA por procedimientos clandestinos, una fórmula infalible para socavar el predominio civil. Los antiguos caudillos afganos, de los que los talibán se habían desembarazado en los años 90, la CIA volvió a emplearlos. Se metamorfosearon como mariposas, de caudillos en empresarios, en traficantes de drogas, en transportistas, en magnates inmobiliarios, pero debajo del traje nuevo de Armani seguía estando el mismo caudillo odiado por la población. Así pues, los afganos culpan a los norteamericanos de haber resucitado a sus torturadores antes inactivos.

La corrupción es galopante, pero no solo porque los gobernantes sean unos cleptómanos. Los norteamericanos tienen que asumir una parte muy importante de la culpa por haber adjudicado sustanciosos contratos a personas a las que no debían haberlos adjudicado, hurtando al Congreso la exigencia de responsabilidades y transparencia y no ocupándose de poner en pie una economía en lugar de enriquecer a unos pocos. Todas estas dejaciones (caudillos, corrupción, víctimas civiles) han contribuido a alimentar una variedad diferente y viscosa de antiamericanismo.

Entretanto, la ayuda norteamericana y el desarrollo económico de Pakistán y Afganistán se han centrado en «proyectos de efecto rápido», con la idea de ganarse la voluntad de los ciudadanos pero, como el puré instantáneo de sobre, se desinflan a la misma velocidad. La responsabilidad de fondo, de ayudar a estos estados a desarrollar una economía propia y a crear puestos de trabajo, se ha dejado a la buena ventura. Afganistán está a punto de caer en una recesión económica aguda en cuanto se marchen los cien mil soldados norteamericanos y las decenas de miles de afganos que trabajan para ellos se queden sin trabajo.

En Pakistán, la gente no ve ningún beneficio económico duradero de los 20.000 millones de dólares que Washington ha volcado desde 2001. Grandes cantidades de material militar, pero ni un embalse, ni una universidad, ni una central eléctrica.

El ejército de Pakistán siempre ha pensado que no era consultado suficientemente por los Estados Unidos y que no estaba considerado un verdadero aliado, así que se montó sus propias defensas a base de apoyar simultáneamente tanto a Bush como a la renaciente insurgencia talibán. Hay otra cara en la moneda del antiamericanismo. A los dirigentes políticos de Afganistán y Pakistán les ha venido muy bien exacerbarlo para su propia supervivencia o para justificar sus equivocaciones. Karzai es un maestro consumado a la hora de derramar lágrimas para describir hasta la última perfidia de los norteamericanos al mismo tiempo que no acierta a luchar contra la corrupción ni a hacer posible un mínimo de buen gobierno.

Los intentos de los norteamericanos por cambiar este curso de las cosas, unas veces a base de zanahorias y otras a base de palos, son objeto de continuos desaires mientras que los gobernantes civiles se mantienen en un segundo plano, muertos del miedo de que los aplaste cualquiera de los dos elefantes macho. Entretanto, las voces del extremismo se dedican ahora a equiparar el anti-americanismo con denuncias de que la democracia, el liberalismo, la tolerancia y los derechos de las mujeres son conceptos occidentales o norteamericanos.

Nada va a ir a mejor durante un tiempo muy largo, porque tanto el Gobierno de los Estados Unidos como el de Pakistán son, en cierto sentido, el reflejo exacto el uno del otro. El ejército de Estados Unidos y la CIA dominan las decisiones que se toman en Washington sobre Afganistán y Pakistán. Lo mismo que el ejército de Pakistán y sus servicios secretos hacen en Islamabad.

Tras la trágica muerte de Richard Holbrooke el año pasado, a quien Obama no hacía el menor caso pero que ideó una estrategia política para guiar la toma de decisiones en Estados Unidos, no ha habido una estrategia política de los norteamericanos sobre Pakistán o Afganistán. Diez años después, debería estar claro que, en esta parte del mundo, las guerras no pueden ganarse pura y simplemente por la fuerza militar ni debe delegarse la toma de decisiones en los generales.

En Afganistán, 10 años después del 11-S, la guerra más larga que recuerda Estados Unidos está llegando a su fin.

Pero para muchos afganos, este es el décimo año de la ocupación estadounidense y la última fase de una batalla contra los extranjeros que se ha estado librando desde 1979.

Durante la última década, Afganistán y la región han sufrido las terribles consecuencias de la constante guerra; solo en Afganistán, ha habido decenas de miles de víctimas y cinco millones de refugiados.

De hecho, la década del 11-S tuvo su origen en Afganistán, en los reductos de las montañas donde Osama bin Laden, acogido por los talibanes, planeó los ataques contra Estados Unidos. Afganistán fue el primer frente de batalla de EE UU en la “guerra contra el terrorismo” posterior al 11-S.

El presidente Barack Obama ha dicho que 10.000 de los 100.000 soldados estadounidenses que hay en Afganistán se retirarán este año, seguidos de quizás otros 20.000 el año que viene. En 2014, la mayor parte de la coalición dirigida por EE UU y la OTAN, formada por 140.000 soldados de 48 países, se habrá marchado.

Por lo que he presenciado durante mis últimas visitas a Afganistán, la perspectiva de un repliegue deja a muchos afganos preocupados por una posible toma del poder por parte de los talibanes, aun cuando las fuerzas de seguridad afganas contarán con unos 305.000 miembros en 2014.

A los habitantes del inestable Pakistán y de las repúblicas vecinas de Asia Central más vulnerables -Tayikistán, Uzbekistán y Kirguizistán- les preocupa el aumento del extremismo islamista, la penetración en sus fuerzas de seguridad de grupos militantes afiliados a Al Qaeda y la ruina económica.

Pakistán, con más de cien armas nucleares en su arsenal, se encuentra en una peligrosa situación de declive, enfrentado con EE UU y sin el liderazgo que tan desesperadamente necesita.

Un leve indicio de esperanza para Afganistán lo constituye el continuo diálogo entre EE UU y los talibanes. Lo que se debate es nada menos que el final de la guerra.

He seguido cada giro que ha dado este proceso, como lo hice hace dos décadas cuando la ONU, Rusia, Pakistán y EE UU negociaban la retirada de las tropas soviéticas de Afganistán.

El presidente afgano, Hamid Karzai, ha estado hablando con los talibanes desde 2007. Su embajador era su hermanastro Ahmed Wali Karzai, que fue asesinado el 12 de julio (una muerte que no ha hecho más que intensificar la desconfianza entre los talibanes y el Gobierno afgano).

Los talibanes siempre han dicho que querían unas conversaciones cara a cara con los estadounidenses. Alemania se convirtió en el mediador. En 2001, los alemanes acogieron una reunión en Bonn que estableció el Gobierno afgano provisional y nombró a Hamid Karzai presidente.

El 28 de noviembre de 2010, en un pueblo a las afueras de Múnich, los talibanes vieron cumplido finalmente su deseo. Dos diplomáticos estadounidenses celebraron una sesión de 11 horas con representantes vinculados al líder talibán, el mulá Mohamed Omar. A petición de los talibanes, también estaban presentes representantes de Catar.

Entonces y ahora, la premisa de las conversaciones es que ninguna retirada occidental de Afganistán ni transición a las fuerzas de seguridad afganas puede llegar a buen puerto sin una reducción de la violencia, el fin de la guerra civil entre el Gobierno afgano y los talibanes y un pacto político garantizado por Pakistán y otros Estados vecinos.

Hace poco estuve hablando con un antiguo dirigente talibán en Kabul que sigue en contacto con los líderes talibanes, pero no está autorizado para hablar ante los medios de comunicación. Me dijo: “El problema fundamental es el que hay entre EE UU y los talibanes, y consideramos que el Gobierno afgano es un problema secundario”.

Hay mucho en juego. Todas las partes temen que la marcha de EE UU permita que Al Qaeda y sus aliados extremistas se recuperen en Afganistán, lo que amenazaría aún más la seguridad del centro y el sur de Asia, que ya es la región más peligrosa del mundo, con su explosiva mezcla de terrorismo, armas nucleares y Estados fracasados.

Por tanto, la responsabilidad de los aspirantes a pacificadores es todavía mayor. Desde entonces, se han celebrado dos rondas más de conversaciones: en Doha, Catar, el pasado febrero y de nuevo en Múnich, en mayo.

Inicialmente, las conversaciones giraron en torno a las medidas para fomentar la confianza. Primero, los estadounidenses tenían que comprobar que los representantes talibanes tenían autoridad para negociar. Las conversaciones abarcaron la posibilidad de suavizar las sanciones de la ONU contra los talibanes, liberar prisioneros talibanes en Afganistán y abrir una oficina de representación de los talibanes, posiblemente en Doha.

El 17 de junio, en lo que constituyó un importante impulso para el proceso, el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU aceptó una propuesta de EE UU para separar a los talibanes de los seguidores de Al Qaeda en la lista de terroristas mundiales que Naciones Unidas mantiene desde 1998.

Tres días después de la reunión de Doha, la secretaria de Estado Hillary Clinton anunciaba que EE UU iba a lanzar “una ofensiva diplomática para que este conflicto avance hacia un resultado político que destruya la alianza entre los talibanes y Al Qaeda, termine con la insurrección y contribuya a crear no solo un Afganistán más estable sino una región más estable”.

Hay muchos aguafiestas en el juego, entre ellos Al Qaeda y sus aliados en Pakistán y Asia Central, que se sentirían traicionados por la paz en Afganistán y tratarían de sembrar más caos mediante sabotajes y asesinatos.

Por eso es crucial que las conversaciones y la identidad de los representantes sigan siendo secretas, para impedir que el proceso sea saboteado.

Muchos observadores se muestran escépticos, y con razón. El general David H. Petraeus, el jefe militar saliente de EE UU en Afganistán, calificaba las conversaciones de “preliminares” y añadía que “desde luego, no alcanzarían la categoría suficiente para ser denominadas negociaciones”.

¿Por qué, entonces, conversan siquiera los talibanes? Dada su fuerza, ¿qué les detiene para esperar la retirada de EE UU y la OTAN y, acto seguido, librarse del corrupto Gobierno de Karzai y simplemente hacerse con el control del país?

Mis conversaciones con los talibanes dejan claras varias cosas. No quieren que la marcha de EE UU deje un vacío que pueda hundir a Afganistán en una nueva guerra civil. Quieren distanciarse de Al Qaeda (llegando incluso al extremo de afirmar que no permitirán que Al Qaeda regrese a suelo afgano). Y están modificando el riguroso código islámico que impusieron en los años noventa. Ya están intentando poner fin a todos los ataques contra las escuelas y permitir que los colegios de niñas y de niños convivan.

Los talibanes también están cansados de ser al mismo tiempo invitados y rehenes de los servicios secretos de Pakistán, que los han apoyado clandestinamente desde que empezó su insurrección en 2003. Ahora estos servicios secretos quieren asegurarse de que cualquier proceso de paz contempla las demandas paquistaníes. “Queremos negociar la paz como afganos, no como títeres de Pakistán”, afirmaba el exdirigente talibán en Kabul.

Por encima de todo, los talibanes son muy conscientes de que si intentan hacerse de nuevo con el poder, se verán rápidamente aislados y se les negará toda asistencia internacional para ayudar al pueblo afgano. Y en seguida volverían a ser tan impopulares como lo eran durante los meses finales de su régimen en 2001.

Finalmente, como afganos, los guerreros talibanes simplemente quieren irse a casa. Muchos de ellos viven en campos de refugiados infestados de malaria en Pakistán. Están agotados por el alto número de víctimas causadas por los ataques con aviones no tripulados y los bombardeos de las fuerzas especiales de EE UU.

El poder de Karzai se está erosionando deprisa dado que se enfrenta a múltiples crisis políticas y económicas. Pero es esencial que cree un consenso dentro del país entre los grupos étnicos de Afganistán para que apoyen las conversaciones de paz (y que Occidente contribuya a crear un consenso similar en la región).

Existe un posible calendario. En diciembre, los alemanes van a conmemorar el 10º aniversario de la reunión inicial en Bonn y la esperanza es que los talibanes participen de algún modo. ¿Podría esa sesión, en contra de todas las probabilidades, señalar el comienzo de la década posterior al 11-S?

Diez años después, ¿en qué punto nos encontramos?

Al Qaeda aún no está muerta, por supuesto.

Del Sahel a Yemen, de Nigeria a Uzbekistán, o en el Cáucaso, el cáncer terrorista no deja de metastatizarse.

Desgraciadamente, en Afganistán, los talibanes, que eran su ejército de reserva más numeroso, progresan también aprovechando la retirada anunciada por los occidentales.

Los grupos yihadistas paquistaníes que investigué en 2002 y 2003, Jahis-e-Mohamed, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi y otros, que entonces se coaligaron en torno a la muerte de Daniel Pearl, siguen prosperando, y no solo en las zonas tribales del país, sino en Karachi e Islamabad.

Y nada nos dice que en este preciso instante, en el momento en que escribo estas líneas, un nuevo Jálid Sheij Mohámed, el arquitecto del ataque de 2001 contra las torres gemelas de Nueva York, no esté preparando otro golpe de un nuevo estilo, una especie de ataque aniversario, igual de mortífero.

Pero lo cierto es que esa no es la tendencia de fondo, la verdadera, y que, si hacemos un balance honesto de estos 10 años de lucha contra Al Qaeda y sus sucursales, dentro y fuera del mundo arábigo-musulmán, tenemos que reconocer que, si no en desbandada, los asesinos están en serio retroceso.

Está la muerte de Bin Laden, que, digan lo que digan de la estructura descentralizada de la organización, de su red de franquicias, ha sido un golpe muy duro para ella.

Está la cuestión paquistaní, que, lo repito, está lejos de haber sido resuelta, pero, al fin, ha quedado planteada y, en cierto modo, eso era lo esencial: qué diferencia con los años de Bush, en los que había quien se obstinaba en tratar como Estado aliado, o incluso amigo, al más canalla de los Estados canalla, al que daba cobijo a los cerebros de la organización, la base de la Base, su base de retaguardia, su base de masas, su base política, ideológica, económica, financiera.

Está el trabajo de los grandes servicios secretos occidentales y árabes, que, como un día sabremos, a lo largo de toda la década han venido desbaratando codo con codo algunos intentos de reedición de la tragedia que hoy se conmemora en Nueva York y en el resto del mundo, con sus casi tres mil víctimas (incluyendo a los heroicos bomberos de la ciudad).

Está el mundo arábigo-musulmán, cuyos titubeos, por no decir cobardías, ya han sido bastante fustigados como para no saludar ahora la toma de conciencia de la que está siendo escenario. Todo comenzó con los facebookers de Túnez y El Cairo, que descubrieron que había otra solución para la juventud del país, que no la confrontación aterradora y, en el fondo, cómplice, de la dictadura y la yihad: ¿qué es eso que ha dado en llamarse “primavera árabe”, sino -según la hipótesis más pesimista- la reducción del yihadismo al rango de una ideología entre muchas, de una ideología perdida entre las demás, marginada y, lo que es más importante, privada del aura de la que disfrutaba cuando pretendía valerse de todo el prestigio que traen de la mano la radicalidad, la audacia y el monopolio de la oposición a las dictaduras de turno? Y continuó con los rebeldes de Bengasi, que descubrieron con estupor el rostro de un Occidente del que, según habían oído desde pequeños, solo podían esperar que les chupase la sangre y, de pronto, les tendía la mano, los salvaba de una masacre anunciada y los ayudaba a liberarse de un yugo que ellos asumían como invencible: creo que la guerra de Libia es el primer golpe -y un golpe probablemente fatal- contra esa idea del “choque de civilizaciones” que, antes de ser norteamericana, fue una idea de los Locos de Dios y, a partir de ahí, el terreno, el caldo de cultivo, la argamasa de sus organizaciones terroristas. Por esta razón la considero como una antiguerra de Irak, lo contrario de esa especie de castigo colectivo, de réplica, que quería ser también la guerra estadounidense en Bagdad, así como un acontecimiento decisivo en términos históricos.

Finalmente, y por consiguiente, está el hecho de que la parte que aún sobrevive de esa internacional del terror aparece cada vez más, incluso a ojos de aquellos a quienes debería seducir y enrolar, como lo que siempre ha sido -aunque lo fuese en secreto-: una organización criminal, un gang, la mayoría de cuyas víctimas se cuenta, hasta nueva orden, entre los mismos musulmanes, y cuyos padrinos nunca vieron el islam de otro modo que como una coartada, un instrumento de reclutamiento y de poder, una tapadera… ¡Que la vergüenza caiga sobre ellos! Esta nueva lucidez representa un progreso decisivo, pues un gang, por poderoso que sea, ya no puede aspirar a ese estatus mágico de Gran Organización que ofrece un proyecto de civilización alternativo a unos pueblos crédulos, drogados por la sumisión…

No digo que la partida haya terminado, sino que ha cambiado de naturaleza. Y que ahora tenemos los medios y el valor necesario para librar esta batalla, esta operación policial planetaria que va a consistir en aislar cada vez más los últimos focos del terror; y lo haremos juntos: los moderados del mundo arábigo-musulmán aliados con los occidentales. Al Qaeda ha perdido.

Los ataques terroristas perpetrados por Al Qaeda el 11 de septiembre de 2001 tenían la intención de hacer daño a Estados Unidos, y lo consiguieron, pero en formas que Osama bin Laden probablemente nunca imaginó. La respuesta del presidente George W. Bush a los atentados puso en riesgo los principios básicos de Estados Unidos, socavando su economía y debilitando su seguridad.

El ataque a Afganistán posterior a los ataques del 11 de septiembre fue comprensible, pero la posterior invasión de Irak fue totalmente ajena a Al Qaeda, a pesar de que Bush trató de establecer un vínculo. Aquella guerra que se eligió librar se convirtió rápidamente en una guerra muy costosa, y alcanzó magnitudes que fueron más allá de los 60.000 millones de dólares que se dijeron al principio, ya que a una colosal incompetencia se sumaron tergiversaciones deshonestas.

De hecho, cuando Linda Bilmes y yo calculamos los costes de la guerra para Estados Unidos hace tres años, la cifra conservadora osciló entre 3 y 5 billones de dólares. Desde aquel entonces, los costes han aumentado todavía más. Debido a que casi el 50% de las tropas que regresan cumplen los requisitos para recibir algún tipo de paga por incapacidad, y hasta el momento más de 600.000 de ellos han sido atendidos en instalaciones médicas para veteranos, ahora calculamos que los pagos por incapacidad y asistencia médica en el futuro alcanzarán en total una cifra que va de 600.000 a 900.000 millones. Sin embargo, los costes sociales, reflejados en los suicidios de veteranos (hasta 18 por día en los últimos años) y las desintegraciones familiares, son incalculables.

Aun en el caso de que Bush fuese perdonado por llevar a Estados Unidos y a gran parte del resto del mundo a la guerra con pretextos falsos y se le perdonara por tergiversar el costo de dicha decisión, no hay excusa para la forma en que eligió financiarla. La suya fue la primera guerra en la historia pagada enteramente a crédito. Mientras que Estados Unidos entraba en batalla, teniendo déficits ya muy elevados por su recorte de impuestos del año 2001, Bush decidió lanzar una nueva ronda de alivio tributario para los ricos.

Hoy en día, Estados Unidos centra su atención en el desempleo y el déficit. El origen de estas dos amenazas al futuro del país se puede remontar, y no en poca medida, a las guerras en Afganistán e Irak. El aumento en los gastos de defensa, junto con los recortes tributarios de Bush, conforman la razón clave por la que Estados Unidos pasó de un superávit fiscal del 2% del PIB cuando Bush fue elegido a su lamentable déficit y situación de deuda de hoy en día. El gasto público directo en dichas guerras, hasta el momento, asciende a aproximadamente dos billones de dólares, lo que significa 17.000 por cada hogar estadounidense, y aún hay facturas pendientes que aumentarán dicha cifra en más del 50%.

Es más, como Bilmes y yo mismo argumentamos en nuestro libro The Three Trillion Dollar War (la guerra de los tres billones de dólares), las guerras han contribuido a la debilidad macroeconómica de Estados Unidos, lo que ha exacerbado su déficit y deuda. Entonces, como ahora, la agitación en Oriente Próximo condujo a precios del petróleo más elevados, lo que obligó a los estadounidenses a gastar en importaciones de petróleo un dinero que de otra manera podría haberse gastado en la compra de bienes producidos en Estados Unidos.

Pero en aquel entonces la Reserva Federal escondió estas debilidades creando una burbuja inmobiliaria que condujo a un boom de consumo. Se necesitarán años para superar el excesivo endeudamiento y la crisis inmobiliaria resultantes.

Irónicamente, las guerras han debilitado la seguridad de Estados Unidos (y del mundo), una vez más en formas que Bin Laden no hubiera podido imaginar. Una guerra impopular hubiera dificultado el reclutamiento militar, pero como Bush trató de engañar a Estados Unidos sobre los costos de la guerra, financió insuficientemente a las tropas, incluso negándose a hacer gastos básicos; por ejemplo, fondos para vehículos blindados y resistentes a las minas que son necesarios para proteger vidas estadounidenses o fondos para la adecuada asistencia médica de los veteranos que regresan. Un tribunal de Estados Unidos dictaminó recientemente que los derechos de los veteranos habían sido violados. (¡Sorprendentemente, el Gobierno de Obama afirma que se debe restringir el derecho de los veteranos a apelar ante los tribunales!).

La extralimitación militar ha provocado el predecible nerviosismo sobre el uso de la fuerza. Otros se han dado cuenta de ello, y eso también ha debilitado la seguridad de Estados Unidos. Pero la verdadera fuerza de Estados Unidos, en vez de encontrarse en su poder militar y económico, se encuentra en su poder blando, en su autoridad moral. Y dicho poder también se debilitó, ya que Estados Unidos violó derechos humanos básicos como el hábeas corpus y el derecho a no ser torturado, lo que puso en duda su compromiso histórico con el respeto al derecho internacional.

En Afganistán e Irak, Estados Unidos y sus aliados sabían que para alcanzar la victoria a largo plazo se necesita ganar corazones y opiniones. Pero los errores cometidos en los primeros años de dichas guerras complicaron la ya difícil batalla. El daño colateral de la guerra ha sido enorme: según algunas versiones, más de un millón de iraquíes han muerto, ya sea de manera directa o indirecta, a causa de la guerra. Según algunos estudios, al menos 137.000 civiles han muerto violentamente en Afganistán e Irak en los últimos diez años; solo entre los iraquíes hay 1,8 millones de refugiados y 1,7 millones de personas desplazadas dentro del mismo país.

No todas las consecuencias fueron desastrosas. Los déficits -a los que las guerras financiadas con deuda han contribuido tan poderosamente- han forzado ahora a Estados Unidos a afrontar la realidad de sus restricciones presupuestarias. El gasto militar de Estados Unidos sigue siendo casi igual al gasto que hace el resto del mundo en su conjunto, dos décadas después del fin de la guerra fría. Algunos de los gastos que se aumentaron fueron destinados a las costosas guerras en Irak y Afganistán y a la más amplia guerra global contra el terrorismo, pero la mayor parte se desperdició en armas que no funcionan contra enemigos que no existen. Ahora, por fin, esos recursos serán reasignados, y Estados Unidos probablemente obtenga mayor seguridad pagando menos.

Al Qaeda, a pesar de no haber sido derrotada, ya no parece ser la amenaza tan importante que surgió con los ataques del 11 de septiembre. Pero el precio pagado para llegar a este punto, en Estados Unidos y en los demás países, ha sido enorme, y en su mayoría evitable. El legado estará con nosotros durante mucho tiempo. Vale la pena pensar antes de actuar.

El 11 de septiembre se vivió, de entrada, como imposible. Los testigos no creen lo que están viendo, las desvalidas autoridades se creen en plena ciencia-ficción, los prudentes que quieren mantener el sentido común lo pierden al fabular delirantes conspiraciones (la CIA, los judíos, misteriosos especuladores inmobiliarios). Aun así, lo imposible tuvo lugar y a ese lugar no por casualidad se le nombró Zona Cero, o sea, el espacio devastado de las primeras experiencias atómicas. Tampoco hay casualidad alguna en que las autoridades supremas sean introducidas manu militari en los refugios antinucleares: se ajusta el imposible nuevo al imposible antiguo. El apocalipsis hace acto de presencia, pero no del modo en que estaba previsto a lo largo de la guerra fría. Hay que reaprender a “pensar lo impensable”, como lo prescribía un célebre libro de estrategia nuclear de los años cincuenta.

Por fulgurante que parezca, un acontecimiento no es nunca un comienzo absoluto. Una vez disipado el espanto general, es obligado hacer constar que el ataque de Nueva York no es radicalmente inaudito ni en su inspiración, ni por sus actores, ni incluso en su modo operativo. La estrategia del pánico mediante el incendio de las ciudades y el enloquecimiento deliberado de la población fue teorizado hace siglo y medio por el nihilismo ruso, por Bakunin, Netchaiev, o por el mismo Dostoievski. El proyecto de tener como objetivo indiscriminado a los civiles no data de septiembre de 2011, desde Guernica, los fanatismos profanos o celestes han despoblado sin remordimientos al siglo XX. El modo operativo tampoco carece de antecedentes: el objetivo fue atacado en 1993 (en el subsuelo, con un vehículo cargado de explosivos); el medio, un avión desviado, se ensayó en Navidad de 1994 (el Airbus de Argel debía abatirse sobre París). En cuanto al carácter suicida de los asesinos erigiéndose en misiles humanos -”¡viva la muerte!”- solo puede parecerle inverosímil a los ingenuos: bolcheviques, nazis e integristas de toda calaña abundan en sacrificadores profesionales resueltos a sacrificarse ellos mismos por “el bien de la causa”. Las piezas del rompecabezas se desplegaban así en el desorden, faltaba el concepto que permitiera imaginar lo inimaginable.

Incluso si algunos responsables norteamericanos o europeos presentían la existencia de un riesgo mayor, la ventaja seguía perteneciendo a Bin Laden, que calculaba con antelación sus jugadas. Cuando unos meses antes el comandante Masud intentó que París se movilizase, solo le acogió un puñado de “intelectualoides”, también dos o tres diputados. Puertas cerradas tanto en El Elíseo (Chirac) como en Matignon (Jospin), recepcióncalamitosa en un pasillo del Quai d’Orsay. Masud proponía una alianza contra los talibán y estos le asesinaron dos días antes de atacar Nueva York; más tarde, demasiado tarde, sus tropas liberaron Kabul. El 11-S no era fatal, a condición de prevenir su posibilidad. Se ha explicado la ceguera general por la parálisis burocrática (CIA contra FBI) y las rivalidades en el vértice. Explicaciones demasiado cortas: una visión incisiva y consensuada de los riesgos que se corrían en común hubiera barrido esos conflictos rituales y fatigosos. Por el contrario, el prejuicio de vivir “el final de la historia” embriagaba a nuestros buenos apóstoles: ¡la guerra fría ha terminado, las amenazas mayores se han abolido!

El optimismo estratégico celebraba la desaparición del Gran Enemigo Único: ya no hay adversario omnipresente, por tanto, ya no hay adversidad. Este razonamiento falaz servía de pasaporte para el mejor de los mundos: los presupuestos militares se disolvían, la paz universal estaba al alcance de la mano, tan solo subsistían los “conflictos de baja intensidad” que devastaban los suburbios del mundo sin inquietar a las metrópolis repantingadas en su seguridad. El 11-S hace pedazos ese quietismo compartido: de Kabul en llamas al derrumbe de Manhattan la consecuencia es directa. En política como en economía, basta con pretender que una crisis general está definitivamente excluida para bajar la guardia y abrir las puertas al desastre: el Cándido de Voltaire y su crítica del optimismo leibniz-panglossiano debe convertirse en introducción obligada a toda geopolítica del siglo XXI.

Diez años más tarde, ¿hemos franqueado el círculo encantado de nuestros sueños eufóricos que tan caro pagamos? Sí y no.

Sí: Estados Unidos revaluó sus alianzas incondicionales. ¿Acaso no había suministrado Arabia Saudí su ideología (el salafismo) a Al Qaeda, su financiación y una base de reclutamiento (14 de los 19 piratas aéreos eran hijos de la buena sociedad saudí)?

Consecuencia teórica: “El hecho de que durante 60 años las naciones occidentales hayan excusado y se hayan acomodado a la falta de libertad en Oriente Próximo en nada ayudó a nuestra seguridad, porque a largo plazo la estabilidad no puede ser comprada al precio de la libertad” (G. W. Bush, 7/11/2003).

Consecuencia práctica: Sadam Husein, perdonado en 1991 como efecto de la presión saudí al precio de la doble masacre de kurdos y chiíes, es ahorcado. Más tarde, a los déspotas presa de los levantamientos populares “se les deja plantados” (Túnez, Egipto, Libia). Mediterráneo, Oriente Próximo salen de una historia fría y de sociedades heladas. La losa de plomo salta para bien, ya que en todas partes las reivindicaciones democráticas dan cuerpo a sueños de libertad. O para mal, ya que hay que contar hasta tres: 1. Una juventud inquieta parcialmente afín a la Ilustración; 2. Unos partidos religiosos que sueñan con el califato; 3. Unos aparatos militares que nadan en la corrupción, propensos a reprimir. Con, en la trastienda, unos Padrinos (Rusia y China) que apoyan en Irán y en Siria la podredumbre de los poderes torturadores.

No: las ilusiones de un optimismo engañoso oscurecen otra vez los cerebros dirigentes. Una vez eliminado Sadam, Washington estimó resuelto el problema. En mala hora. El asesinato de iraquíes por otros iraquíes, gran deporte del difunto régimen, continuó con otras etiquetas. Todavía hoy -con la excepción quizá de Túnez-, los países que celebran su primavera no parecen muy inmunizados contra la peste del terrorismo, de la intolerancia, de la xenofobia y de las guerras tribales.

La Unión Europea tiende al dejar hacer de las no intervenciones, mariposea y se divide. Cuando, con británicos y franceses a la cabeza, los europeos osan emprender una intervención humanitaria armada (¡bravo!), corren el riesgo de cantar victoria demasiado deprisa: lo siguiente a Gadafi promete ser tan tenso como lo siguiente a Sadam si los que condenaron a muerte a las enfermeras búlgaras pasan, una vez hechos al cambio, por demócratas de pura cepa. Y si a las redes de Al Qaeda, que han saqueado los arsenales del antiguo régimen, se les toma por monaguillos. El viejo continente navega a ciegas. Sus complacencias respecto a la Rusia putiniana, corrompida hasta los huesos, violenta y nihilista, protectora de los Asad, dan prueba de hasta qué punto se olvida la lección disuasiva del 11-S.

Bin Laden ha muerto, su red sobrevive dispersa. Pero la capacidad de daño que golpeó a Manhattan persiste. Fueron suficientes unas regiones fuera de la ley (eso nunca falta), unos padrinos sin escrúpulos (que tampoco faltan), para que un pequeño grupo armado con cúteres golpeara en el corazón de la potencia mundial número 1. ¡Imaginemos los estragos si lo hubiera hecho en una central nuclear! El paradigma de Hiroshima ha prescrito, en adelante, la capacidad de asolar la historia y de poner fin a la aventura humana escapa al monopolio de los grandes estados. ¿En provecho de quién? En provecho de no importa quién. “Una vez derribados los límites de lo posible, es difícil volverlos a levantar”, dejó dicho Clausewitz, anunciando que la era de las batallas con megamasacres no se acabó con Napoleón. La Belle époque se burló de ello, pero el siglo siguiente lo confirmó. Bin Laden ha desaparecido, pero no la estrategia de los odios radicales y sin piedad.

Los atentados terroristas del 11-S en EE.UU. provocaron en todo el mundo unas ondas de choque de las que Pakistán todavía no se ha recuperado. En realidad, la participación pakistaní en lo que el ex presidente Bush llamó la “guerra global contra el terror” produjo consecuencias abrumadoramente negativas al lanzar el país al primer plano de la atención internacional en un momento en que no estaba en absoluto preparado para conciliar los intereses del mundo con los propios.

La implicación de Pakistán en la guerra contra el terror resultó ser mucho más costosa de lo esperado en términos económicos. Además, acentuó las tensiones dentro de la sociedad pakistaní y desestabilizó la capital comercial del país, Karachi, debido a la entrada de un gran número de refugiados pastunes que trastocaron el delicado equilibrio étnico de la ciudad.

Como dijo el entonces presidente Pervez Musharraf en sus memorias publicadas en el 2006 y en muchos discursos pronunciados después de abandonar el cargo, le resultó imposible desoír la petición de EE.UU. de convertir a Pakistán en aliado en la lucha contra la amenaza terrorista procedente de Afganistán. Musharraf permitió que el espacio aéreo nacional se utilizara para lanzar ataques contra Afganistán. Puso a disposición de las fuerzas estadounidenses y de la OTAN la red de carreteras para transportar suministros hasta el país vecino, carente de salida al mar. Musharraf y sus socios no previeron que, tras su derrota, un gran número de talibanes y sus partidarios de Al Qaeda se introducirían en Pakistán. Y, entre ellos, Osama bin Laden.

A medida que los huidos establecían refugios en el cinturón tribal del país, desde donde no tardaron en lanzar ataques contra las fuerzas estadounidenses y de la OTAN en Afganistán, creció la presión sobre Pakistán para que utilizara la fuerza para acabar con esos residuos de los combates. Pakistán aseguró que no tenía la capacidad para hacerlo y también dio a entender que no formaba parte de sus intereses estratégicos convertir en enemigos a esos grupos; necesitaría a algunos de ellos para proteger (y proyectar) sus intereses en Afganistán una vez que las fuerzas extranjeras abandonaran el país.

Esas exigencias y posturas opuestas originaron muchas disputas entre Pakistán y Occidente. EE.UU., en particular, deseaba una respuesta mucho más enérgica por parte pakistaní. El deterioro de la relaciones con EE.UU. cuando los comandos de ese país se infiltraron en Pakistán para matar a Bin Laden fue la culminación del desengaño mutuo.

Es cierto que Washington ha enviado ayuda: unos 15.000 millones de dólares a lo largo de la última década. Sin embargo, el grueso de esos recursos ha ido a parar a los militares pakistaníes. Y, aunque los encargados estadounidenses de formular políticas creen que esa cantidad supone una generosa compensación por la ayuda recibida, los funcionarios pakistaníes sostienen que las pérdidas económicas de la extensión del terrorismo por todo el país son mucho mayores. El Gobierno ha calculado que esas pérdidas ascienden al 5% del PIB, o 9.000 millones de dólares al año: seis veces el importe anual de la ayuda. Peor aún ha sido la repercusión sobre la composición étnica del país. Algunos sectores de la población pastún se organizaron para llevar a cabo operaciones contra el ejército y objetivos civiles fáciles. Un grupo, Tehrik e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), logró atacar diversas instalaciones militares, incluido un cuartel del ejército en Rawalpindi, y ocupar brevemente el valle de Swat, a sólo cien kilómetros de Islamabad, la capital. El TTP también estableció un gobierno islámico en Waziristán del Sur, uno de los dos distritos de la frontera con Afganistán. El ejército consiguió expulsarlo de ambas zonas, pero no sin sufrir un elevado número de bajas. Los talibanes reaccionaron a esas derrotas lanzando ataques terroristas en muchos centros urbanos, sobre todo en el Punyab; y han matado a más de 15.000 en los últimos seis años. Los habitantes del Punyab, la provincia más grande del país (con el 56% de la población y el 60% del PIB), consideran los ataques pastunes como una forma de violencia interétnica.

Semejante violencia es más que evidente en Karachi, hasta donde han huido decenas de miles de personas desplazadas por la guerra que se vive en las zonas tribales de Pakistán. Durante la mayor parte del verano, bandas bien armadas que representan a la comunidad mohajir (descendientes de refugiados procedentes de India llegados a partir de 1947, año de la creación de Pakistán) y a los pastunes han librado batallas por toda la ciudad. Se calcula que 400 personas han muerto en esos combates.

¿Debería haberse negado, pues, Pakistán, a participar en la guerra contra el terror? Al margen de su respuesta a la petición estadounidense de ayuda para erradicar la amenaza de Al Qaeda y los talibanes, la lucha habría acabado llegando al país. Con todo, la guerra podría haberse dirigido de manera que minimizara el coste para Pakistán. Podría haberse puesto un mayor énfasis en conseguir un acuerdo con quienes entre los talibanes estaban dispuestos a trabajar con los gobiernos de Afganistán y Pakistán. La medida del fracaso de la estrategia elegida la da el hecho de que conseguir semejante acuerdo negociado sigue siendo aún hoy una cuestión relevante.

Only those who have stood close to the devastating impact of terror will know how deep the immediate shock and fear runs. I saw the horrendous effects in Norway this July — just as Americans saw them in New York and Washington 10 years ago. Traveling the world for the United Nations and the Red Cross I witnessed the way massive ongoing terror affects society, from Iraq to Afghanistan and from Colombia to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. In the aftermath of a deadly terror attack, a shocked and confused public will always turn to its leaders for answers.

We know what the right answer is. The effective way to confront terror is to reaffirm the values that terrorists want to tear down. The wrong answer is to go over to the “dark side” and fight terror in ways that violate our most basic human rights. The recent discovery by Human Rights Watch in archives in Tripoli of documents that appear to detail how the United States and Britain handed over suspects to Muammar el-Qaddafi’s torturers again underscores the folly of sacrificing our principles in the name of security. The consequences of the American and European breakdown in principled leadership after the 9/11 atrocities will not go away until there has been accountability for the torture and the abuse of detainees.

Confronting terrorism means rigorous, well-resourced and global efforts by police and intelligence services to prevent attacks and bring to justice criminals of the worst kind. It should never mean arbitrary arrests, secret detention and rendition of detainees to tyrants and torture. But this is exactly what happened when American and European leaders willingly left the moral high ground and the legitimacy of lawful response, and instead bent and broke the same international laws that previous leaders had worked for generations to enshrine.

There still has been no real accountability anywhere for the criminal acts that sent terrorism suspects, some certainly guilty and some innocent, from one torture chamber to the next in Europe and the Middle East.

It does not have to be like this. After the massive terrorist attacks in Oslo this summer, the Norwegian leadership, the victims and the general public were remarkably unanimous in declaring that the best response was a vigorous rally around democratic values and the rule of law. After a mass murderer massacred youth leaders and smashed central government buildings — unleashing terror that had not been seen since the Nazi occupation in the 1940s — Norwegians looked for guidance and got it.

From the king and the prime minister, down through the ranks of government and political opposition, the mantra has been that the liberal values of freedom of expression and tolerance are the way to confront terror. There is consensus that this is not a contest to see which side can better break the other — it is a question of proving to everyone that we offer a better alternative — and thus can prevent the recruitment of new terrorists.

Will the Norwegian model trump the many previous examples of terror being met with unlawful and counterproductive methods? The threat from an international group like Al Qaeda is different from that of a domestic terrorist — and no one will know how Norwegians would have reacted had the attack been the work of Islamist extremism instead of home-grown, right-wing extremism.

But the lessons of a decade of terror remain the same: it was a betrayal of our deepest values when our leaders agreed to hand over secret prisoners to the likes of Qaddafi, Bashar al-Assad and Hosni Mubarak, and when some of our countries’ top lawyers bent the law to see how our intelligence services could get away with torture.

This stain will not go away unless there is a criminal investigation of the top Bush administration officials who authorized these crimes.

It is equally important for European officials who actively participated in the C.I.A. programs of rendition, secret detention and abusive interrogation techniques to be fully investigated and prosecuted. Until that happens, the issue will haunt successive U.S. and European governments each time the archives of a tyrant is uncovered and the hypocrisy is exposed.

The best way to honor the victims of terrorism is to prove that we represent a better alternative. It is all a question of leadership. The moral high ground means never opening the torture chamber.

(Versión en español)

In their shock after Sept. 11, 2001, Americans frequently asked, “Why do they hate us so much?” It wasn’t clear just who “they” were — Muslims, Arabs or simply anyone who was not American. The easy answer that many Americans found comforting was equally vague: that “they” were jealous of America’s wealth, opportunities, democracy and what have you.

But in this part of the world — in Pakistan, where I live, and in Afghanistan next door, from which the Sept. 11 attacks were directed — those who detested America were much more identifiable, and so were their reasons. They were a small group of Islamic extremists who supported Al Qaeda; a larger group of students studying at madrasas, which had expanded rapidly since the 1980s; and young militants who had been empowered by years of support from Pakistan’s military intelligence services to fight against India in Kashmir. They were a tiny minority of Pakistan’s 150 million people at the time. In their eyes, America was an imperial, oppressive, heathen power just like the Soviet Union, which they had defeated in Afghanistan.

Now, with the United States about to enter the 11th year of the longest war it has ever fought, far more of my neighbors in Pakistan have joined the list of America’s detractors. The wave of anti-Americanism is rising in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, even among many who once admired the United States, and the short reason for that is plain: the common resentment is that American plans to bring peace and development to Afghanistan have failed, the killing is still going on, and to excuse their failures Americans have now expanded the war into Pakistan, evoking what they did in the 1960s when the Vietnam war moved into Laos and Cambodia. Moreover, while Pakistanis die for an American war, Washington has given favored deals to Pakistan’s archenemy, India. So goes the argument.

The more belligerent detractors of America will tell you that Americans are imperialists who hate Islam, and that Americans’ so-called civilizing instincts have nothing to do with democracy or human rights. A more politically attuned attitude is that the detractor doesn’t hate Americans, just the policies that American leaders pursue.

But both groups feel trapped: Afghanistan is still caught up in war, and my country is on the brink of meltdown. And so now there is something beyond just disliking America. We have begun to ask the question of 9/11 in reverse: why do Americans hate us so much ?

Ten years is a long time to be at war, and to be faced with a daily threat of terrorist attacks. It is a long time spent in an unequal alliance in which the battle gets only more arduous and divisive, especially for the weaker partner on whose soil the battle is playing out. Under such long strain, resentments about intrusions, miscalculations and feckless performance make a leap to an assumption: that Americans must hate Pakistanis because they would otherwise never treat them so carelessly, speak so badly of them, or distrust them so much.

Americans should not be particularly surprised by this. War diminishes everyone and all states, even the victors, and that is especially true if the war is characterized by broken promises and dashed hopes, perceptions of betrayal, and disappointment in an ally. For the people living in this theater of war, the litany of such disappointments is long.

Perphaps the greatest promise made after Sept. 11 by President George W. Bush and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, was that the West would no longer tolerate failed and failing states or extremism. Today there are more failed states than ever; Al Qaeda’s message has spread to Europe, Africa and the American mainland; and every religion and culture is producing its own extremists, whether in sympathy with Islamism or in reaction to it (witness the recent massacre in Norway).

Famine, hunger, poverty and economic failure have increased beyond measure, at least in this corner of the world, where the Sept. 11 plans were hatched, while climate change has set off enormous floods and drought brings untold misery to millions in unexpected places. The latter is not the fault of Sept. 11, but in the minds of many the catastrophes we face stem from America’s wars and the diversion of America’s attention from truly universal problems. In this, America, too, is a victim of its wars and the global changes it has not addressed.

Of the two invasions — Iraq and Afghanistan — and the one state-salvaging operation, in Pakistan, that Americans embarked on in the past decade, America’s most glaring failure has been its inability to help rebuild the states and the nations where it has gone to war. State-building is about setting up institutions and governance that may not have existed before, as in Afghanistan, or that have been in the hands of ruthless dictators, as in Iraq. Nation-building is all about helping countries develop national cohesion, as Iraq still struggles to do and as Pakistan has failed to do since its creation. That is done not by blunt force, but by developing the economy, civil society, education and skills.

Both state- and nation-building were dirty words in the Bush administration. They are less so in the Obama administration, but they are also no longer used to describe the Obama strategy in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Still, the much vaunted counterinsurgency strategy framed by Gen. David H. Petraeus for defeating Al Qaeda depends enormously on improving governance, rebuilding institutions like the local army and police force, and empowering people with a future — in other words, state- and nation-building.

Yet despite the billions of dollars spent on this strategy, America’s social agenda has been pared down and the overall policy left in the hands of the United States military and the C.I.A., for which counterinsurgency is essentially a military tool. In Afghanistan, night raids and targeted killings by American Special Operations forces and drone attacks by the C.I.A. have replaced the B-52 bombers of post-Sept. 11 as the favored tools to deplete the Taliban. The targeting is more precise, but the cost in civilian deaths is still too high for the local population to bear.

Afghans now demonstrate in the streets every time a civilian is killed. In Pakistan, drone attacks have infuriated the entire population because nobody can quantify how successful they are in eliminating Al Qaeda or the Taliban. John O. Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, said in June that for a year “there hasn’t been a single collateral death” as a result of drone attacks. So the C.I.A. may claim that the drones have killed 600 militants and not a single civilian, but what Afghan or Pakistani can possibly believe that? Pakistan has asked for all drone strikes to cease, and the Afghans have asked for an end to night raids. But so far the Americans have not obliged. And anti-Americanism flourishes.

The United States invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq without even a plan as to how it would govern these countries. In both countries, policy was made on the hoof, and much of it was initially implemented in secret — a sure way to forsake civilian empowerment. The former Afghan warlords, whom the Taliban got rid of in the 1990s, were re-employed by the C.I.A. They underwent metamorphoses, like caterpillars to butterflies, from warlords into businessmen, drug dealers, transport contractors, property magnates. But underneath the new Armani suit was the same warlord hated by the people. So Afghans blame the Americans for reviving their dormant tormentors.

Corruption is rampant, but not just because the rulers are kleptomaniacs. The United States must share a major part of the blame in giving huge contracts to the wrong people, forsaking accountability and transparency, and enriching only a few rather than building an economy. All of these failings — warlords, corruption, civilian casualties — have helped breed the new and vicious strain of anti-Americanism.

Meanwhile, American aid and economic development in Pakistan and Afghanistan have aimed at “quick impact projects,” which are intended to win hearts and minds, but which, like instant oatmeal, dissolve quickly. The real business of helping these states build an indigenous economy and creating jobs to replace opium growing and smuggling in the rural lands, where government authority is weakest, was left to chance. Yes, the American military became an employer, but Afghanistan is about to enter an acute economic downturn when 100,000 American troops leave and tens of thousands of Afghans who work for them become jobless.

A recent Congressional report says the United States has wasted at least $31 billion in the awarding of contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in Pakistan, people see no lasting economic benefit from the $20 billion Washington has spent there since 2001. It has bought a lot of military equipment, but no dam or university or electric power plant.

The Pakistani military benefited from those purchases, but it thought it was never consulted sufficiently by the United States and was not considered a true ally. Acting on those assumptions, it created its own safeguards by backing both President Bush and the resurgent Taliban insurgency, and it continued in that vein after President Obama took over. Throughout the war, it has feared that the United States was treating India as the real ally, so it maintained the extremists it had trained in the 1990s to fight its larger neighbor. But nothing stands still, and the military lost control as the extremists morphed into the Pakistani Taliban and began focusing on the state itself.

Pakistan, which is now the fourth largest nuclear armed state in the world, has been gravely destabilized by its involvement in wars in Afghanistan. This, at least, did not begin 10 years ago. It has spanned three decades. The 1980s war against the Soviet Union was fueled by C.I.A. operatives, Saudi money and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Kalashnikovs, drugs, madrasas and sectarian divisions proliferated then, while Pakistan was ruled by an American-backed military dictatorship. Since Sept. 11, Pakistan has again been destabilized by the insurgency in Afghanistan, and for most of that time it was again being ruled by an American-backed military dictatorship.

There is a flip side to this coin of anti-Americanism, of course. The leaders of both Afghanistan and Pakistan have found it convenient to play it for political survival or to explain away their own lapses. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has become a master at spilling tears to describe the latest American perfidy, while failing to fight corruption or provide a modicum of good governance. Similarly, Pakistan’s army and intelligence directorate regularly brief the media and politicians on the long sequences of American betrayals, Washington’s love for India and how Pakistan was trapped in this relationship. These are false narratives — dry tinder for the question “Why do Americans hate us?” — but they have now seeped into the national psyche, the media and the political debate, and countering them is not easy.

That is because the army’s national security objectives, which many Pakistanis still accept as a matter of national identity, are rooted in the last century, rather than in what is needed today. They decree that the army must maintain a permanent state of enmity with India; a controlling influence in Afghanistan and the deployment of Islamic extremists or non-state actors as a tool of foreign policy in the region; and that it must command a lion’s share of the national budget alongside its control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

American attempts to change this course with either carrots or sticks are rebuffed, while the civilian government cowers in the background, not wanting to get trampled by the two bull elephants of American and Pakistani military will. Meanwhile the voices of extremism translate anti-Americanism into denunciations of Americans’ own treasured ideals: democracy, liberalism, tolerance and women’s rights. These days, all are pronounced Western or American concepts, and dismissed.

Pakistanis desperately need a new narrative — one that is honest about the mistakes their leaders have made and continue to make. But where is the leadership to tell this story as it should be told? The military gets away with its antiquated thinking because nobody is offering an alternative. And without one, nothing will improve for a long time, because the American and Pakistani governments are in a sense mirror images of each other. The Americans have allowed their military and C.I.A. to dominate Washington’s policy-making on Afghanistan and Pakistan, just as the Pakistani military and ISI dominate decision making in Islamabad.

Since the death last year of Richard C. Holbrooke, who was devoted to creating a political strategy to underpin American policy-making, but whom President Obama seemed to ignore, there has been no American political strategy for Pakistan or Afghanistan. After 10 years, it should be clear that the wars in this region cannot be won purely by military force, nor should policy making be left to the generals. The questions about who hates whom will become only more difficult to resolve until the warfare ends and national healing begins.

The initial decision to strike back after the 9/11 attacks is easy to understand. History, however, will ask not why the West invaded Afghanistan, but why did it stay so long?

Why, a decade after 9/11, were there still 140,000 coalition troops on the ground? Why were there so many civilian casualties in May and June 2011 — more than in any preceding recorded month? Why had the United States been in Afghanistan for twice the length of World War II?

The conventional answer to all these questions is that Afghanistan still poses an existential threat to global security. In March 2009, presenting his strategy for a surge in troop numbers, President Obama said, “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban … that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

These fears are reinforced by a domino theory that if Afghanistan falls, Pakistan will follow, and the Taliban will get their hands on nuclear weapons.

Every one of these claims is wrong.

First, Afghanistan poses less of a threat to global security than has been imagined. The Taliban are extremely unlikely to be able to seize Kabul, even if there was a very significant reduction in foreign troops. In the unlikely event they succeeded, they are even more unlikely to invite Al Qaeda back: Many Taliban leaders see that connection as their fundamental mistake before 9/11 and believe that if they had not supported Al Qaeda, they would still be in power.

And even with a foothold in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda wouldn’t significantly strengthen its ability to harm the West. The U.S. would respond much more vigorously than it did before 9/11 if Al Qaeda bases were detected in Afghanistan, and the Taliban could offer little protection.

If the question is about regional stability, Egypt is more important than Afghanistan. If the concern is terrorism, Pakistan is more important. And Pakistan’s security won’t be determined by events across the border but by its own internal politics, economic decline and toxic relationship with India. Afghanistan isn’t strategically important enough to justify the West’s current level of military and humanitarian investment — and failure there is inevitable unless we reverse course.

Consider the conventional wisdom that following the fall of Kabul, the West was distracted by Iraq and maintained too light a footprint in Afghanistan, failing to provide sufficient money or troops for the mission. Afghans who initially welcomed a foreign military intervention were alienated by the slow pace of development and the poor governance. This lack of progress created the opening for the Taliban to return. According to this narrative, it was only Obama’s surge of 2009 that, in his words, “for the first time in years … put in place the strategy and resources” so that by December 2010, the U.S. was “on track to achieve (its) goals.”

An irony is that the “light footprint” of the early years was relatively successful — Al Qaeda members were driven out of the country almost immediately, and very quickly, school attendance improved dramatically, health clinics were rolled out, and mobile telephone usage exploded. Non-state-controlled media outlets were established and elections were held for the first time in decades. These are accomplishments worthy of pride, but sadly, the addition of more troops and resources to the NATO-led mission since 2006 has made the situation worse.

The tens of billions of dollars donated to the government of Afghanistan have undermined its leadership. The fashionable agendas of foreigners on short-term tours and their micromanagement have pushed aside the priorities of Afghan ministers. Many of the reconstruction projects have fueled waste and corruption. What’s more, the increases in foreign troops didn’t improve security: rather the reverse. Helmand is less safe in 2011 with 32,000 foreign troops in the province than it was in 2005, when there were only 300.

When I walked alone across central Afghanistan in the winter of 2001 and 2002, I found Afghan villagers to be hospitable and generous, but also far more conservative, insular and Islamist than foreigners acknowledged. When I returned to the country in 2006, to establish a nonprofit organization, it was clear that their resistance was inflamed by the increasingly heavy presence of Western troops, which allowed the Taliban to gain support by presenting themselves as fighters for Islam and Afghanistan against a foreign occupation.

In June, Obama announced a drawdown of U.S. forces, to be completed in 2014 with the handover of responsibility to Afghan forces. But a political settlement in the next three years is highly improbable because neither the Taliban, nor the Afghan government, nor Afghanistan’s neighbors are showing much commitment to compromise, in part because they still believe they can win.

Many people have pointed out the absurdity of the West’s approach. From 2008 to 2010, I ran the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The center’s research fellows collectively had more than a century of experience on the ground in Afghanistan. Research by fellows such as Andrew Wilder, David Mansfield and Michael Semple proved that our aid projects were increasing instability; that we were undermining any chance of political settlement with the Taliban; and that the Taliban-controlled areas were often more secure than the government areas. Their findings explained why our counterinsurgency strategy was empty and the “surge” was counterproductive, but they were often ignored by the military and political establishment, which has remained defiantly optimistic.

Over the last decade of war, many politicians have trusted charismatic, optimistic generals rather than their own instincts and reason. Concerns about the huge costs of the mission ($120 billion per year for the U.S. alone) and exaggerated fears about what would follow if it failed co-opted almost everyone: Afghan businessmen and foreign contractors, writers and academics. All continued to hope that some magic plan would extract us from humiliation.

At the heart of our irrational persistence are the demons of guilt and fear. Leaders are hypnotized by fears about global security; feel guilty about the loss of lives; ashamed at their inability to honor our promises to Afghans; and terrified of admitting defeat.

Failure in Afghanistan has become “not an option.” This is the fatal legacy of 9/11, because with that slogan, failure has become invisible, inconceivable and inevitable.

When I arrived at my office at the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region on Sept. 12, 2001, the phone was ringing off the hook. Colleagues from around the region were calling to ask: What can we do to help?

My staff had been weighing the same question. By week’s end, local leaders had entrusted the foundation with creating a fund whose sole purpose would be to help individuals and families directly affected by the Sept. 11 Pentagon attack. The Survivors’ Fund was born.

On one level, we were in familiar territory. Since its creation in 1973, the Community Foundation has tackled the region’s greatest challenges — drug violence, inequities in education, natural disasters, the economic crisis. At the same time, we clearly were building a bicycle as we were learning to ride it. We didn’t know how many people we would serve, what their emotional or financial needs would be, or what their personal circumstances were.

Checks began arriving by the boxload. We opened and read every letter — 12,000 in all. One said: “I want to be sure that, although we lost far more people in the World Trade Center, we don’t forget the many people who lost their lives or were hurt at the Pentagon and their families.” Another read: “This is not much. My only son was there and survived. Please make it count for the survivors that have lost loved ones.” Children sent rolls of pennies tied with red, white and blue ribbons. One envelope contained a check for $100,000 from Michael Jordan; it arrived without any fanfare. Before September was over, nearly $600,000 had been collected. By the end of the year, the total was $16 million. It ultimately reached $25 million.

Over seven years, until it closed in 2008, the Survivors’ Fund provided financial and case management support, in partnership with Northern Virginia Family Service, to 1,051 individuals as they came forward on their own schedules and their own terms. Clients included patients so severely burned that they remained in the hospital for months as well as those experiencing anxiety, marital problems, substance abuse or thoughts of suicide. We also served individuals who were not eligible for other relief funds — such as several airline employees who encountered the terrorists.

The goal was to help people heal at their own pace and in their own way, providing support in traditional and nontraditional ways. If learning to play the piano promoted someone’s recovery, we found a piano. We covered the cost of home repairs started by husbands who didn’t survive the attack, and we purchased clothes for family members who lost so much weight because of their grief that their pre-Sept. 11 wardrobes no longer fit. Money from the fund was used to pay non-reimbursed medical bills and for special equipment for those recovering from injuries. Many children and young adults who lost a parent received tuition assistance.

Some survivors could not return to their previous jobs. Paul Hollis said he could not go back to being a firefighter after what he saw at the Pentagon. The Survivors’ Fund paid for him to learn a new trade, sending him to a welding program at Northern Virginia Community College. “I’m still working with fire, but now I’m in total control of it,” he told us in 2005.

At times, it felt uncomfortably like we were playing God. Our distributions committee was forced to make difficult decisions every month in disbursing the fund’s diminishing resources. Fourteen months into the fund, with nearly 50 percent of the assets committed, we refined our guidelines to ensure that the remaining funds assisted those who had the fewest resources and the greatest financial and coping challenges. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about the courage and strength of the survivors we came to know.

Sept. 11 brought our community together in ways no other event has. The Survivors’ Fund represented philanthropy at its best. The philanthropic spirit lives on in our community. I see it every day as people step in to help victims of floods and hurricanes, and those struggling through the economic crisis. The Survivors’ Fund taught us many lessons as a community about emergency preparedness and recovery. For me, it is the ongoing generosity of neighbors helping total strangers that is the richest lesson of all.

Entre las numerosas teorías de la conspiración que circulan a propósito del 11-S, una que aún no he visto es que Osama bin Laden era un agente chino. Sin embargo, camaradas (como solían decir los comunistas), se puede decir objetivamente que China ha sido el mayor beneficiario de los 10 años de reacción de Estados Unidos tras las puñaladas islamistas recibidas en su corazón.

En otras palabras: cuando se escriban artículos sobre el aniversario el 11 de septiembre de 2031, ¿hablarán los comentaristas de una guerra de 30 años contra el terrorismo islamista, comparable a la guerra fría, y la considerarán el rasgo fundamental de la política mundial desde 2001? Creo que no. Lo más probable es que digan que lo que define este periodo en su conjunto es el histórico traspaso de poder de Occidente a Oriente, con una China mucho más poderosa, un Estados Unidos menos poderoso, una India más fuerte y una Unión Europea más débil.

Como señala el historiador de Stanford Ian Morris en su interesantísimo libro Why the West rules-for now, este cambio geopolítico se producirá en el contexto de unos avances tecnológicos de una rapidez sin precedentes, por el lado positivo, y una cantidad de retos mundiales también sin precedentes, por el negativo.

Por supuesto, estas no son más que conjeturas basadas en el conocimiento de la Historia. Pero, si la situación avanza más o menos en ese sentido (o en cualquier otra dirección que no tenga que ver con el islam), la década posterior al 11-S en la política exterior estadounidense parecerá un desvío; un desvío muy amplio y lleno de consecuencias, sin duda, pero no la carretera principal. Es más, si la primavera árabe concreta sus promesas modernizadoras, los atentados terroristas en Nueva York, Madrid y Londres serán auténticos restos del pasado: un final y no un principio. Aunque la primavera árabe se convierta en un invierno islamista, y la vecina Europa se vea amenazada, eso no significa que la lucha contra el islamismo autoritario y violento vaya a ser el rasgo fundamental de las próximas décadas. El islamismo violento seguirá siendo un peligro importante, pero, en mi opinión, no el más decisivo; sobre todo para Estados Unidos.

Podemos examinar esta misma idea mediante una hipótesis. En el verano de 2001, la concepción geopolítica del mundo que tenía el Gobierno de George W. Bush, si es que la tenía, consistía sobre todo en la inquietud por la posición de China como nuevo rival estratégico de Estados Unidos. ¿Qué habría ocurrido si no se hubieran producido los atentados del 11-S y Estados Unidos hubiera seguido centrando su atención en esa rivalidad? ¿Y si hubiera sabido ver que la victoria de Occidente al final de la guerra fría y la consiguiente globalización del capitalismo habían desatado en Oriente unas fuerzas económicas que iban a convertirse en su mayor desafío a largo plazo? ¿Y si Washington hubiera llegado a la conclusión de que esa rivalidad exigía, en vez de más poderío militar, inversiones más abundantes e inteligentes en educación, innovación, energía y medio ambiente, además del pleno despliegue del poder blando de Estados Unidos? ¿Y si hubiera comprendido que, ante el renacimiento de Asia, era preciso reequilibrar la relación entre consumo, inversión y ahorro en Estados Unidos? ¿Y si su sistema político y sus dirigentes hubieran sido capaces de actuar basándose en esas conclusiones?

Aun así, China e India estarían en ascenso. Aun así, habría un traspaso de poder de Occidente a Oriente. Aun así, nos enfrentaríamos al calentamiento global, la escasez de agua, las pandemias y todos los demás jinetes del apocalipsis de la era moderna. Pero cuánto mejor preparado estaría Occidente, y en especial Estados Unidos.

Fin de la hipótesis. Se produjeron los atentados; Estados Unidos tenía que responder. Un Gobierno que, hasta entonces, había buscado algo que diera sentido a su mandato lo encontró con creces. Diez años después podemos decir que la amenaza de Al Qaeda ha disminuido enormemente; no ha desaparecido, porque eso nunca ocurre con el terrorismo, pero sí disminuido. Y esa es una victoria; pero a qué precio.

Estados Unidos libró dos guerras, una por necesidad, en Afganistán, y otra por elección, en Irak. La de Afganistán podría haber acabado antes, con menos costes y mejores resultados, si el Gobierno de Bush no se hubiera lanzado a invadir Irak. Estados Unidos ha dañado su propia reputación y ha debilitado su poder blando (la capacidad de atracción) con horrores como los de Abu Ghraib. Mientras tanto, y en parte como consecuencia de lo sucedido durante esta década, Pakistán, un país nuclearizado, es un peligro mayor que hace 10 años. En el mundo musulmán en general, incluidas las comunidades musulmanas de Europa, existen tendencias contradictorias. Podemos ver muestras de modernización y liberalización, tanto en la primavera árabe como entre los musulmanes europeos, pero también -es el caso de Pakistán y Yemen- de mayor radicalización islamista.

Un gran proyecto de investigación llevado a cabo por la Universidad de Brown sobre los costes de la guerra establece que, durante estos 10 años, “han ido a la guerra más de 2,2 millones de estadounidenses y han regresado más de un millón de veteranos”. Calcula que el coste económico total que han tenido hasta ahora las guerras en Afganistán, Irak, Pakistán y otros escenarios de actuación antiterrorista asciende a una cantidad entre 3,2 billones y 4 billones de dólares. Según sus previsiones de actividad probable hasta 2020, esa suma podría ser de hasta 4,4 billones de dólares. Los expertos pueden no estar de acuerdo sobre las cifras, pero no hay duda de que son gigantescas. Redondeando, representan aproximadamente la cuarta parte de la enorme deuda nacional de Estados Unidos, que a su vez está empezando a acercarse al 100% del PIB.

Pero eso no incluye, en absoluto, lo que los economistas llaman los costes alternativos o de oportunidad. No se trata solo de todo lo que Estados Unidos habría podido invertir en recursos humanos, puestos de trabajo cualificados, infraestructuras e innovación con 4 billones de dólares, o incluso con la mitad de esa cantidad, si se supone -con generosidad- que había 2 billones que eran realmente necesarios para dedicar medios militares, de seguridad y de inteligencia a reducir la amenaza terrorista contra Estados Unidos.

Se trata, sobre todo, de los costes de oportunidad en atención, energía e imaginación. Para entender un país, conviene preguntarse quiénes son sus héroes. En esta década, Estados Unidos ha tenido dos tipos de héroes. Uno, el de los empresarios e innovadores. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. Otro, el de los guerreros: el Marine, el SEAL de la Armada, el bombero, todos “nuestros hombres y mujeres de uniforme”. El otro día, en CNN (no Fox News) oí a la presentadora hablar de “nuestros guerreros”, como si fuera un apelativo neutral y propio del oficio. Y al oír alguna de las historias de valor individual de esos estadounidenses de uniforme, siempre me siento asombrado, inspirado y empequeñecido. Eso tiene que quedar claro en este aniversario. Pero no puedo evitar preguntarme a qué puestos de trabajo van a volver estos valientes. ¿A qué hogares, qué vidas, qué escuelas para sus hijos? Los sondeos de opinión indican que eso es lo que se preguntan también muchos estadounidenses. Sus prioridades están otra vez dentro de sus fronteras.

Lo que dijo el presidente Obama el jueves en su discurso extraordinario ante el Congreso sobre la creación de empleo es más importante para ellos que las palabras que pueda pronunciar, por elocuentes que sean, cuando hable en la catedral Nacional de Washington -con las huellas del reciente terremoto- el domingo, para conmemorar el aniversario del 11 de septiembre. Los guerreros merecen todos los honores, pero los héroes que Estados Unidos necesita hoy son los que sean capaces de crear puestos de trabajo.