Global Security After the War On Terror

Yet the key challenge going forward will be how states can and should adapt to the changing character of the terrorist threat. The risk in the West is increasingly shifting from threats posed by Islamist-inspired terrorist organizations to domestic and home-grown terrorism, including far-right extremism and terrorist actions by white supremacists. Both in the UK and in the US, police forces have assessed that right-wing terrorism is a faster growing and bigger threat than Islamist-inspired extremism. According to a dataset by CSIS, far-right attacks account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the US since 1994. In 2018 and 2019, far-right terrorist acts were responsible for over 90% of deaths due to terrorism in the US. In the UK, far-right terrorism presents the fastest growing threat. Far-right terrorism is not an isolated problem however - attacks are taking place on a global scale. In 2011, Andres Breivik killed 77 people in Norway. In 2019, Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in the Christchurch attacks.

What we know for certain is that the international security landscape is perhaps more fragmented than it was 20 years ago, with a wider range of security challenges and threats. These require an equally wide range of policy responses. 

How has the War on Terror shaped international security in the last 20 years?

The "War on Terror" was announced by US President George W. Bush on September 20, 2001. He addressed the US Congress stating, "our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated". The US-led intervention in Afghanistan remains the only time NATO’s mutual defense clause (Article 5) was invoked. Since then, the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq, led a military air campaign in Libya, and remained largely on the sidelines while civilians were massacred by the Assad regime in Syria.

There have been two significant dimensions to the counter-terrorism paradigm which came into being in response to 9/11. The first is that, in the US and Europe at least, the response to 9/11 led to a shake-up of the countries’ security apparatuses. The failings of the American intelligence community to share intelligence and data prior to September 2001 was quickly recognized as a deadly error. Former UK MI5 Director John Sawers recently described it as a shift from a "need to know basis to a dare to share" within the intelligence communities. In the US, the response to 9/11 led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, bringing together its domestic intelligence services and law enforcement agencies under one umbrella, leading to the development of the significant security apparatus in existence today. In addition to this, the response to 9/11 led to a shift from monitoring traditional state-based threats to networks of non-state actors which operated in a far more fluid way. This called for new surveillance tools, including drones and internet monitoring. 

Some of the anti-terrorism measures that were legalized include extended police powers to search homes, restricted movement, or the closing of religious sites deemed radical. These measures have been criticized for their perceived infringement on civil liberties.

This problem goes beyond the West. In the Middle East, the "terrorist" label has been deployed by repressive regimes to stifle opposition and activism. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad named his political opponents "terrorists". Egypt’s counterterrorism bill broadly defines terrorism as "infringing the public order, endangering the safety, interests or security of society", which in practice has been used to prosecute journalists, activists and critics of the regime. China and Russia equally use their counter-terrorism legislation to silence critics.

The second dimension of the response to 9/11, which in itself is a consequence of the counter-terrorism paradigm, are the unintended impacts of the counter-terrorism framework. Since 9/11, states have increasingly expanded the mandate of their counter-terrorism legislation and sanctions from criminalizing acts of terrorism to criminalizing the support of terrorism too. The UN Security Council has increasingly called on its Member States to criminalize broader offenses related to terrorism, including the financing of terrorism. However, this has had unintended adverse impacts on humanitarian organizations and their operations. Assets or resources provided for humanitarian action could be criminalized, thereby negatively affecting the provision of relief to affected civilians in conflict zones. This is particularly challenging in conflict zones where large swathes of civilians live in areas controlled by organizations designated as terrorist groups, such as areas held by Al Shabaab in Somalia and ISIS affiliates in Syria.

In recent years, some member states and the EU have sought to mitigate the impact of counter-terrorism legislation on humanitarian action through humanitarian exemptions, which means that a restriction - whether financial or otherwise - does not apply when the purpose of the action is to provide humanitarian aid.

Yet putting this into practice remains challenging - and exemptions can be slow to process. The result is that the post-9/11 counter-terrorism paradigm continues to hinder the provision of impartial humanitarian assistance to civilians in conflict zones.

Have counter-terrorism efforts eroded the credibility of the West? If so, how?

The US and its allies have claimed to have intervened in Iraq and Afghanistan, among others, in order to "preserve freedom" and "bring human rights" to the citizens in these countries. Yet, these claims have been directly undermined by some of their responses to 9/11. The objective of upholding the principles of justice stand in direct contrast to the documented human rights abuses in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, at US detention facility Guantanamo Bay, and CIA black sites and the detention of hundreds of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members in "legal black holes", to circumvent the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, detainees continue to be held without charge at Guantanamo Bay.

At the same time, the counter-terrorism paradigm of the past 20 years has led to some uneasy alliances. In the name of fighting terrorism, Western countries have continued to cooperate closely with states with whom they share few values. The US-Saudi partnership on counter-terrorism against ISIS in Iraq has been viewed as a paradox considering the fact that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. Equally, in Yemen, US weapons sold to Saudi Arabia have since been sold on by Saudi Arabia to buy loyalty among local militias. This includes the Abu Abbas brigade, a group linked to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, of which the founder was declared a terrorist by the US in 2017 - yet the group continues to be supported by Saudi Arabia. The realpolitik of the counter-terrorism paradigm is still very much in place today. 

Finally, there is the question of whether there is will among the US, the UK, France, and other Western countries to become involved in other long-term counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations, of the kind that Iraq and Afghanistan embodied. France remains engaged in counter-terrorism operations in the Sahel, working with a wide range of coalition partners. But following the US’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the question remains how keen President Biden may be to engage troops on the ground again. Russia and China, as well as non-state actors, may well seek to capitalize on any ‘’military footprint fatigue" in their strategic calculations, and expand their influence across the Middle East - the precise opposite of the US’ foreign policy objectives.

Copyright: Sarah Silbiger / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP