Counter-Terrorism as a U.S. National Security Priority

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In remarks given in January 2010, the U.S. State Department’s coordinator for counter-terrorism policy, Daniel Benjamin, declared that a critical test for anyone’s counter-terrorism policy is “to see how they emerge from contact with a genuine terrorist event.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Benjamin gave relatively high marks to the Obama Administration of which he is a part, though he admitted that the “underwear bomber” episode of December 23, 2009 – which we shall discuss further below – showed that some of its most important “operating assumptions were no longer adequate.”

Benjamin is hardly wrong that how a government handles “a genuine terrorist event” is certainly an important test of CT policy. Members of the public, however, might place a higher premium upon the prevention of such events in the first place. It is the ambition of CT policy, after all, to be prophylactic, rather than just effectively responsive. Particularly in light of U.S. authorities’ confusion and failure to act – despite being warned ahead of time, by the underwear bomber’s own father, of the perpetrator’s jihadist predilections – Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was rightly derided for having smugly proclaimed after the failed attack that “the system worked.”Napolitano seems to have meant that the government’s response to the incident went “properly, correctly and … very smoothly,” but of course being merely responsive to attacks is obviously inadequate.

Rather than assessing U.S. operational readiness, however, this essay will focus upon questions of CT prioritization, and the place of counter-terrorism within a philosophical or ideological framework that shapes approaches to governance. These issues of conceptualization and prioritization can have real relevance to policy effectiveness, but the connection is indirect. Nevertheless, since it remains useful to assess governments’ broad philosophy of CT, let us explore such matters through the prism of the Obama Administration’s first year or so in office.