Homeland Security - Michael Chertoff

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of intelligence in the second Bush administration, noted, “Al Qaeda remains the pre-eminent threat against the United States, both here at home and abroad.”1 Indeed, Al Qaeda and its affiliates form a truly global terrorist network, with a presence on multiple continents. While Al Qaeda remains a significant threat to the U.S. homeland, it continues to target societies across the Muslim world that reject its message and its methodology. It has launched numerous attacks against Muslims with ferocity and contempt for human life and dignity.

      Al Qaeda and similar groups have killed thousands of people, mostly Muslims, over the past several years. Among their targets have been political candidates and government leaders. In December 2007, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto by Al Qaeda-allied militants brutally ended her quest to become Pakistan's elected leader again. In February 2008, in Rawalpindi, near Pakistan's capital, a suicide bombing killed that country's surgeon general. Also in February, an Al Qaeda plot was uncovered to assassinate the president of the Philippines.

      But these extremists have seen fit to murder ordinary citizens as well. In November 2005, in Amman, Jordan, a bride and groom and the fathers of the two newlyweds were among the dozens of Muslims slaughtered in the middle of a wedding celebration by a triple suicide bombing. In April 2008, in a town north of Baghdad, at least forty-five people were killed during a funeral for two Sunni tribesmen.

      Every report of wanton killings by Al Qaeda and its affiliates serves as a grim reminder of the lethal threat they pose. But here is the vulnerability that Al Qaeda has now created for itself: this unending slaughter of innocent Muslims sows the potential seeds for Al Qaeda's failure. Simply stated, these acts of extremism are alienating the very pool of people terrorists wish to convert to their creed. Tellingly, the two Sunni tribesmen mentioned above were part of an Awakening Council that was battling Al Qaeda and its minions in Iraq. Within the Sunni sections of Iraq, there has been a rising tide of revulsion against the mounting atrocities of Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters. Sunni leaders have taken up arms to free themselves from these terrorists. Coupled with the American military surge, the result has been a dramatic setback for Al Qaeda in Iraq.

      This undeniable backlash against the extremists is not limited to Iraq. Clerics and other Muslim leaders around the world have begun a dialogue in which the apologetic for violence is emphatically rejected. Salman al Oudah, a well-known Saudi cleric, sent an open letter to bin Laden in 2007 criticizing Al Qaeda's attacks against innocent civilians. In his letter, Oudah asked, “How many innocents among children, elderly, the weak, and women have been killed and made homeless in the name of Al Qaeda?”2 As a result, potential recruits to violent Islamic extremism are hearing an alternative view with growing clarity. They are beginning to learn from respected clerics that those who would recruit them to a creed that glorifies death and destruction are offering a false path.

      Individual Muslims are now questioning Al Qaeda's indiscriminate violence. In a web-based question-and-answer session, al-Zawahiri was forced to strike a defensive tone in the face of sharp questioning of bombings that killed innocent Muslims, including schoolchildren.3 One questioner asked, “Do you consider the killing of women and children to be jihad?” In response to such questions, al-Zawahiri became defensive, alternately denying the charges, claiming that some of the innocents had been used as shields, and awkwardly insisting that Al Qaeda is entitled to destroy people who get in the way of their operations. Coupled with other Al Qaeda statements designed to discredit Muslim religious leaders who are opposing them, it appears that Al Qaeda's leaders are becoming worried about the growing, active opposition from within the Muslim community.

      These are significant developments in the battle against extremism and terrorism. Every effort we make to counter the terrorist threat will fail if terrorist groups are able to recruit operatives faster than we can capture or kill them. Clearly, in the long run, the war against terrorism will be largely won or lost in the recruitment arena. The threat of violent Islamist extremism will not soon pass. Al Qaeda will continue pursuing platforms, recruitment and training opportunities, and laboratories in which to experiment with weapons. Therefore we dare not abandon our vigilance. In the short run, capturing and killing Al Qaeda leaders and operatives; frustrating the flow of their communications, money, and travel; and disrupting their plots are crucial tasks. But the strategic battle will be for the allegiance of a critical mass of Muslims. In that effort, the fulcrum must be a growing counterforce to extremism. It cannot emerge from governments or from their leaders in the West. It must come from within the Muslim community, finding its voice and rejecting the attempts to hijack Islam.

      Although Al Qaeda and its network are our most serious immediate threat, they may not be our most serious long-term threat. There are other terrorist organizations, also driven by radical beliefs and practices, that pose a strategic risk to our nation and its allies. Among them is Hezbollah, a word that literally means the “party of God.” Hezbollah has a history that reaches back to the early 1980s, with its creation as a pro-Iranian Shi`a militia. Long before Al Qaeda was formed, Hezbollah had helped pioneer suicide bombing, including the 1983 bombing of U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Lebanon and the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

      Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage once called Hezbollah “the A-team of terrorists,” and for good reason.4 Having operated for more than a quarter-century, it has developed capabilities about which Al Qaeda can only dream, including large quantities of missiles and highly sophisticated explosives, uniformly well-trained operatives, an exceptionally well-disciplined military force of nearly 30,000 fighters, and extraordinary political influence. Hezbollah shows what an ideologically driven terrorist organization can become when it evolves into an army and a political party and gains a deeply embedded degree of control within a state, as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon's democratic infrastructure. This is, in many ways, a terrorist group that has “graduated” from Mao's second stage of insurgency to the third stage, where it is steps away from ruling part or all of a functioning nation-state. Indeed, looking ahead, there is a real danger that Hezbollah could paralyze or even dismember Lebanon.

      The good news is that Hezbollah's alliance with hostile foreign powers like Iran and Syria has cost it the support of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens who especially resent Syria's history of encroachments on Lebanon's sovereignty. While Hezbollah may not have carried out attacks in the United States itself, it has developed a presence in the Western Hemisphere, specifically in South America. In 1992, it bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing twenty-nine people. Two years later, it murdered eighty-five people by bombing a Jewish community center in that city. These acts disturbingly underscore Hezbollah's reach into the hemisphere, notably in the tri-border areas at the margins of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Hezbollah's patron, Iran, is also forging warmer relations with Venezuela. These developments, only a relatively short distance from U.S. borders, highlight the fact that Hezbollah is not just a Middle Eastern concern.

      In our immediate backyard other terrorist groups with different ideologies also pose a threat. Among the oldest is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). Starting in the 1960s as a Marxist guerrilla group that took up arms against the government, it eventually became a criminal enterprise as well. Today, it engages in a host of activities, from narcotics trafficking and extortion to kidnapping and hostage taking for ransom and political leverage, in order to fuel its ideological efforts and its protracted war against Colombia's duly elected government. Organized along military lines, FARC replicates in the areas it controls the influence that Hezbollah has in parts of Lebanon or that Al Qaeda once had in Afghanistan. Like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, it is listed by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization. And FARC demonstrates what happens when terrorism and organized crime converge, each enabling the other.

      FARC has clear ties to President Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan government and has been hosted by Chavez in that country. When Colombian forces killed a key FARC leader in early 2008, they found computer files that suggested even closer ties with Venezuela than previously known. This connection between a terrorist group and a nation-state notably parallels the relationship between Hezbollah and Iran. And as with Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, FARC has generated significant opposition among the people whose allegiance it seeks. Millions of Colombians rallied against it in early 2008, demanding that it release the hundreds of hostages it has been holding for

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