The Sanford School of Public Policy held a debate Wednesday between two counterterrorism experts on terrorist threats. The debaters were FrancesTownsend, former assistant to President George W. Bush for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and ambassador Daniel Benjamin, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department during Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. The Chronicle's Kirby Wilson sat down with Townsend to discuss the current state of terrorist threats in the U.S. and abroad.
The Chronicle: How do you feel about the current administration’s response over the past two or three years to the ever-more volatile political conflicts in the Middle East—specifically Syria and Iraq?
Frances Townsend: Understandably in some respects after we had intelligence failures in Iraq, I think the president has been understandably cautious. But I think the president’s caution and some amount of indecision has gone on for so long that those who would do us harm have been able to take advantage of it. So, a couple of examples: ISIS, the Islamic State, uses horrific terrorist tactics, but behaves more like an irregular army. And that has been clear for some time, probably somewhere between six to nine months. The other piece is, a president’s words and actions have consequences. It was almost exactly a year ago when the president talked about a red line and talked about a military campaign to address the threat emanating from Syria and the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons. We never followed through with that. We never did that.... I would argue the beheading of the two American journalists amounts to an act of war against the United States, but even if you didn’t agree with that, what you do know is that... these foreign fighters... have stated their intention to stage an attack on the United States, although we have not seen evidence that they have tried to do it yet, al-Qaeda did the same thing. Our enemies will signal to us what their intentions are, and we must take them at their word. They are growing the capability to actually act on their intentions, and we have to deal with that before they do. I think it’s very troubling, and I do take issue with the administration’s failure to address this issue.
TC: Do you ever foresee us supporting relatively more moderate Islamist rebels in Syria—such as the al-Nusra front, which has been labeled as a terrorist organization by the United States—to help consolidate rebel forces in that country against ISIS? Or are we throwing our support behind more established leaders such as Assad?
FT: Neither. I wouldn’t characterize the al-Nusra front as a moderate oppositional force. It’s a pretty radical Islamist, extremist force. I don’t imagine the US ever joining forces with them. I don’t imagine the US joining forces with Assad. What we should do—and I don’t know if we will, we’ll hear more from the president—what we should do, and what we should have done a long time ago, was what the president said he was going to do. We should have armed, trained and equipped the free Syrian army. We should have thrown our support behind them much earlier. The president has talked about doing some of this. The money was slow, little of it came, and we did far less of it than the president represented to the American people he was going to do.
TC: Why is it important for the American public to keep up with the ISIS story and other conflicts in the region overall?
FT: Part of the reason I think most Americans don’t keep up with regional issues like this is we’ve got economic issues at home. There are issues that affect the purse, the house, whether its mortgages, banking, health care, there’s a lot. Frankly, what gets the attention of the American people is when you see not just the threat, it’s the beheading of two Americans. When Americans begin to feel insecure to travel around the world, and they feel threatened, that’s what gets their attention.... There is a geopolitical and a regional stability issue that we care about. We care about the safety and security of our allies in the region: Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, but I think most Americans don’t think about that every day. When you see Americans being killed in such a brutal way, it becomes something you can’t ignore.
TC: How troubling to you are the recent stories of Americans who have gone overseas to help ISIS? Is it possible to stop citizens from doing this?
FT: It’s hard. You need intelligence and law enforcement services to work together to try to identify what they are to, to talk to them. It’s very difficult. Actually, you can try to identify people who are likely to be going to the conflict based on what their travel plans are and what you understand about the pipeline into the fight.... Often these people are travelling on false documents, which makes them harder to track when they come back. Some of these people, if they get to the battlefield, they will be killed in the battlefield which we’ve seen. There was an American killed in Syria. But it is very based on the individual facts of the case. There was a woman who was arrested in Denver because she was going, and she admitted when she was questioned, that she was going to marry a Tunisian ISIS fighter, and she was charged with material support. There are things you can do to prevent them from going, but whether or not you have the legal authority to prevent them has a lot to do with the individual case.
TC: What do you think should be done when American citizens are fighting against the US army? In the heat of conflict, how does due process work?
FT: What people don’t fully appreciate is, it’s one thing when you see police shows in the United States. You can apply all sorts of due process inside the United States, where you can control the environment. It’s very hard, in the midst of the battlefield to apply that sort of due process. Again, your bias is always, when dealing with an American to give the benefit of the Constitutional protections they would get at home. But we have to recognize that’s not always going to be possible. That’s why there is a system of military commissions to account for that possibility.
TC: After Seal Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden, you commended President Barack Obama, but you said, “The war is by no means over.” What did you mean by that?
FT: When I congratulated President Obama, I have sat in the Situation Room and I have been there when the president has had to make difficult decisions. He had the best intelligence any president has had since 9/11. In that respect, it had to have made the decision easier for him to take the risk. Having said that, no president takes lightly sending our troops into harms way. They always try to imagine and assess the risk of losing one or all of the team. What are the consequences of attempting it and failing? That would have been a part of President Obama’s calculation, and frankly it takes courage to make those decisions, no matter how they get decided. So that was the point in the congratulations. When I said the war was by no means over, that was because the extremist ideology is really the enemy.... It was a wonderful day for our nation to see justice done, but that did not mean that the ongoing battle against extremism was over.
TC: Where do we stand in that ongoing battle?
FT: I think it is in some respects, it’s pretty humbling. For all of our successes, our capability is better. We are stronger. We have been more effective against the enemy. We have brought justice to Osama Bin Laden, but we have not dealt with the underlying ideology. A senior intelligence official once said to me, “You can’t kill your way to victory, you must learn to drain the swamp.” And we haven’t drained the swamp yet. The swamp is the ideology. I do think we need a more effective means to counter the violent, extremist ideology. That’s not a political statement. At least across two administrations, we have not done that very well. I think we have to figure that out, because otherwise we are going to see this problem.
TC: Do you have any ideas about how to fight that ideology?
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