Vital Interests: I would like to start our discussion of counter-terrorism in a broad historical context. Going back to the 1960s and 1970s what did countering terrorist activity look like?

Aaron O’Connell:  If we want to examine terrorism since the late 1960s or early 1970s, there are a few key facts that will shape the discussion. Two things were going on at the time. There are leftist insurgencies inside the United States, groups like the Weather Underground, the Symbionese National Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, and many other groups. There were also international groups which carried out attacks, primarily in Europe and the Middle East. Altogether, those domestic groups were responsible for about four times as many terrorist incidents in the United States in the 1970s than we have today. While there were many more terrorist incidents in the 70s than there are today, the death toll was very low. In the United States there were mostly bombings that didn't kill anybody.

What follows in the 1960s and 70s is that the United States tries a number of diplomatic endeavors to create an international standard on terrorism, including a UN convention. They tried to create a UN convention against terrorism, and it falls apart. They're just not able to get all the nations of the world to agree to these U.S. terms and concepts of terrorism. So as a result, they turn much more towards domestic U.S. law, and other approaches, rather than trying to form an international consensus on terrorism, because they can't get everybody to agree.

VI: So during this period how are American agencies carrying out counter-terrorism operations? There was the FBI investigating domestic incidents, the CIA looking into international groups, and military special ops groups focusing on their own targets. Was there coordination, or different agendas?

Aaron O’Connell: The short answer is no, they didn’t work together very well. The White House did create a Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism in 1972, which was replaced by a “White House Working Group” in 1977. This working group was probably the most cross-talking, cross-pollination that occurs in the U.S. government, but these things were actually mostly happening in a disjointed manner. In 1972, after the bloody attack by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September during the Munich summer Olympics, the military starts creating a fleet of antiterrorism teams, and developing Special Forces who can do hostage rescues. And that all is clearly antiterrorism work, but they're looking at  it from the narrow lens of the military task of, say, rescuing hostages - not combating terrorism worldwide.

That is separate from the diplomatic efforts the United States was trying to generate. There was a multilateral convention signed on protecting diplomats. There's another one on hijackers, how they're going to be extradited or prosecuted. This is happening on a diplomatic front, but with no real connection to the military’s efforts.There wasn't a unified, whole government approach to it by any stretch of the imagination.

VI:  After the end of the Vietnam War, many radical leftist groups that were aligned with the antiwar movement faded away.  But weren’t there also antecedents to what are now called Alt-Rights groups who were threatening or carrying out violent terrorist attacks in the United States?

Aaron O’Connell: A final point on the leftist groups, and then we'll move on to the Alt-Right and the 90’s groups. The key point here is that, yes, there were four times as many terrorist incidents in the 1970s than today. There are two reasons that this violence ends. Number one is a change in foreign policy. The end of the war in Vietnam removes a lot of the animosity towards the U.S. government. Second is good police work. We can talk about whether or not they overreached in some places, but it's law enforcement tools, being rigorously applied, that actually reduced the capabilities of these violent groups.

Some of those law enforcement tools are militarized, such as the creation of SWAT teams. But a lot of them are just the normal tools of crime solving. The way that they found some of the most important members of Patty Hearst's gang was one fingerprint on one piece of newspaper stuffed inside of a mattress.

VI: So really good police work?

Aaron O’Connell: That's good police work. It really is. That's what leads to the diminution of these constant bombings from these leftist groups inside of the United States. What follows after Vietnam, as those groups diminish, is that, yes, we have new groups rise up. They are, I think, perhaps smaller than the large number of groups that were opposed to the war in Vietnam and were willing to use violence, but now we start getting groups like Bob Mathews and The Order, and certainly Timothy McVeigh. Both are inspired by the 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries.

The Branch Davidians were not white supremacists, so we should put them in a separate category. They are, without question, violent and enamored of guns, but they are motivated by an apocalyptic vision of the Bible. That is pretty different from Bob Mathews, the Aryan Nations, Timothy McVeigh, all of whom share a number of ideological similarities. They all believe the government is coming to disarm its citizens, and that there is a race war on the horizon, so the white supremacist movement of the 1990s links these two things together, blending fears about government overreach and fears about the diminution of the white majority in the country.

VI: After the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the acknowledgement that there had been  failures in intelligence, there was a general consensus that a revamping of government agencies was necessary and the Department of Homeland Security was created.  Can you explain the impact this refocusing of government efforts has had over the past twenty years?

Aaron O’Connell: I think the key point here is that the United States took a decidedly militaristic approach to terrorism right after 9/11. Whether this was done based on the difficulties of multilateral diplomacy or whether it was based in the natural antipathy towards multilateralism that existed in some quarters of the Bush administration, I am not sure.

But the point is that the Bush administration immediately discarded the option of treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter, and instead decided that it was a military matter. That then led to an over-militarized approach to terrorism that has persisted over the last 20 years, which has not lessened the threat of terrorism to Americans in the homeland. 

The offensive components of our counter-terrorism strategy since 9/11 have been either the military, the Department of Defense, or the militarized portions of the CIA, and I don't think either one of those approaches has worked very well.

VI: What can be said about the War on Terror 20 years after it began? Are we winning or losing? What do the statistics say?

Aaron O’Connell: The statistics on terrorist attacks, deaths, groups, and fighters all paint a pretty convincing picture that what we've been doing so far to reduce terrorism around the world isn't really working. On balance, there are five times as many global terrorism deaths now compared to a period just before, or indeed just after, the 9/11 attacks. The first key point - five times more attacks are happening now than were happening on average per year before September 11th. Second, the estimated numbers of what we call Islamist-inspired insurgents, which is to say, groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, those estimated numbers of terrorist fighters have quadrupled, and the total number of terrorist groups around the world has doubled. There are more terrorist groups now, 20 years after September 11th, than when we started this war on terror.

So there are more terrorist insurgents around the world then there were when we started the Global War on Terror. The number of actual deaths from terrorism around the globe have increased by five fold. Clearly, something's not working.

VI: Why is that? Why hasn’t the U.S. been successful?

I think the major problem is that there are some misunderstandings in how to manage terrorism and how to strengthen states or harden states against the terrorist threat. 

If you meet with American diplomats and soldiers who've served in these terrorism-prone states and ask them "What are we doing there?" or "What's the job?" you'll probably get an answer about state weakness. They will say, "The reason that there's terrorist violence in the country is that the state lacks capacity. It's too weak, it doesn't have the institutions or the people to actually protect their own citizens." I think that's a faulty assumption.

It is not that the states are too weak. It's that the states are strong in specific ways, and the way that they are strong is in having criminal patronage networks that allow certain members of the state to do whatever they want, and that leads to such degrees of predation and corruption that the people turn towards insurgent groups, rather than turning towards the government. 

So that's problem one. We keep talking about state weakness, as if we just need to strengthen the state's institutions, but that approach ignores the fact that in many cases, the state is part of the problem.

We have been strengthening states like Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Have those strengthening efforts worked? Not really. All of the countries we've intervened in militarily since September 11, 2001 have lower political stability than they did when we intervened. That's not my opinion, that’s the World Bank’s Governance indicators - and the bank’s metrics and methodology are pretty specific and rigorous. 

Problem number one is misunderstanding a dysfunctional state. A state that provides carve outs and immunities for warlords or corrupt actors. If we mistake that as a state weakness, we will keep pouring money into the state that is in itself causing part of the problem.

Point two is that our primary tool for dealing with strengthening those states have been military personnel and military dollars - security assistance, and indeed, sometimes, actual troops to try to provide the security temporarily while the state's institutions mature and strengthen. We have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that those efforts have not worked well at all. We have tried in at least two countries to build, out of whole cloth, functioning, accountable security services, national police, and armies.

None of those national forces are really working well today. The reason they're not working well is we're doing it with military forces who are pursuing military goals, military metrics, and military measures of effectiveness. We can train the Iraqi Army to assemble on a point, march up a hill, and have their trucks and logistics meet them at the top. That says nothing about the political unity of the Iraqi Armed Forces, because that's not a military consideration.

If you let the military focus on training the security forces alone, they're only going to measure military effectiveness. Unfortunately, what we saw when ISIS marched into Iraq in 2014 is that the Iraqi forces didn't collapse because they didn't know how to use their weapons. They didn't collapse because they couldn't march in an echelon formation. Iraqi forces collapsed because there was within them Sunni factions who felt completely alienated from the government of Baghdad.  That surprised everybody, and the reason it surprised us is because we had only been letting the DoD run all the training, and not approaching a political strategy to actually get unity and consensus between different factions in the government.

That's point two of what’s gone wrong, an overly militarized approach has actually focused on only military metrics, and we failed to consider the political metrics. 

The final point is I think that having military forces in these countries in an  effort to strengthen their institutions generates antibodies. It creates blowback. The Israelis like to say, "Look, sometimes with terrorism you have to mow the grass." You have to keep killing the bad actors in order to keep the weeds from growing, and that will give the state time to generate its own institutions, its own effective security. I think that's misguided.

I think there's a flawed assumption that you can mow the grass with violence in order to buy time for the government. In fact, having foreign troops on foreign soil using violence waters the grass. It feeds the grass, it generates narratives that anybody would use to rise up in opposition because no one likes foreign forces on their soil.

VI:  If these are the realities, and these are the failures, what is the path to success? How do you create viable political institutions and circumstances in these countries that can counter and deal with their domestic terrorist groups?

Aaron O’Connell: I think step one is to change the subject of the sentence, "we.”  The United States will not and should not single-handedly try to create institutions in other countries. We can aid our allies and partners towards shared goals, like reducing terrorist attacks and governing ungoverned spaces. We can have cooperation on those fronts. 

What we need to do to succeed is to have a clear consensus that the long term strategy for our shared goal is that this government creates an effective, workable security institution - with American help, but without going over to the dark side. We should not be  using the types of tactics and the types of practices that are not, first, congruous with American values and, second, are not pragmatic and sustainable in the long run. We shouldn’t be spending taxpayer dollars on them

What does that mean in practice? It means, first of all, more and better auditing. It means stopping the use of all these DOD waivers to get around actual legal guidance on how we should spend taxpayer dollars. We should stop giving the Afghan military waivers for their abuses of children, for their theft of fuel, for their doctored logs, for their ghost soldiers on their many rolls and rosters. 

All of that is short-sighted because we think we're trying to make progress in the short-term, and we miss the fact that we're undermining the security institutions and the legitimacy of the partners of government itself. We have sacrificed sustainable long-term change for the illusion of military progress. That's one thing we can change.

The second thing we can do is we can actually empower the State Department to have a much larger role in reconstruction and security assistance than it currently has. Our progress in Afghanistan and Iraq were effectively controlled by the military commander of the war. That makes sense when you're fighting a war, you obviously want your generals in charge. But the goal in these wars was not just to conquer Baghdad, turn it over to somebody else, and go home. We tried to do that, and it just didn’t work. So, “the mission” so to speak became something different: to cooperate with the government we are in partnership with, to achieve shared goals. That's politics and diplomacy. We've let the military have too large of a role and, as a result, the DOD’s narrow view of what constitutes military success has produced end states that are not actually congruous with our long-term political goals.

VI: If the United States should not be going it alone in assisting states counter-terrorism efforts, are there international partnerships that the Americans can be part of that are more effective in these situations? 

Aaron O’Connell: There sure is, I can give you a few. NATO is one. Afghanistan has been a NATO mission almost from the very beginning. It has had a number of problems, but those problems aren't because NATO can't do this job. NATO’s problems stem partly from the fact that, for the first three years, the United States refused to contribute troops to ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, and refused to lead the NATO coalition in Afghanistan. During the critical first three years of the Afghanistan War, the Rumsfeld-led Defense Department said, in effect, "We can't tie our troops down here doing any kind of security patrolling or state building. We have to be ready because the next terrorist attack may come wherever. Let the UN and NATO handle security in Kabul and reconstruction while we hunt Al Qaeda.” I don’t know anyone that thinks those decisions made Afghanistan safer or more stable. 

In fact, the U.S.’s decision to stay out of nation-building in the early years of the Afghanistan War completely delegitimatized the security infrastructure we were trying to create in 2002 and 2003. 

The sad story of Afghanistan is that we walked away from the endgame almost at the outset. We walked away from an opportunity to empower future President Hamid Karzai by providing him enough security and help to allow him to institute a new order in a country where the number of troops and the capacity for violence really does matter. Because we wouldn’t contribute troops to ISAF and then shifted focus to Iraq, Karzai was never able to pressure his rivals and say: "Listen warlords, it's my way or the highway, because I've got American troops and all of NATO here and together we’re going to build a national police force and a national army.” I often wonder if we would have seen a very different Afghanistan had we actually given Karzai the tools to create a better monopoly on force in his country.

VI: Other than NATO, are there partners in the Middle East, in Africa, in Latin America? I know there's a lot of military-to-military cooperation that goes on, and they stage their own kind of scenarios about how to respond to things. In the non-military sphere, are there organizations that have constructive conversations and ideas and models that can be looked at?

Aaron O’Connell: Yes, there are. What's happening in Somalia right now is we have African Union forces operating under UN authority in order to train new Somali forces and to provide a bulwark against Al-Shabaab. That's wise and appropriate. We, of course, should share the burden with the people who are going to be most affected by the danger these groups pose.

I guess what I'm suggesting is, we've done two things wrong over the last 20 years in how we enter into these partnerships. First, we asked too much in Iraq and Afghanistan in just suggesting, "We'll do the kinetic stuff first, and then you all run everything that comes after without much American leadership."

That was an error, and it produced what was called the Lead Nation concept in Afghanistan, which was a disaster. Italy took justice sector reform, Germany said it would train a police force, the British committed to eradicating illicit poppy growing.  None of it worked. So the conclusion I’ve come to in these moments is that to go after a terrorist security problem, we can't walk away from reconstruction or even follow from behind. We have to lead.

Point two is, even as we do that, we have to pay just as much attention to the political and diplomatic arenas as we do to the narrow security terrain that the military is comfortable operating on.

That means much more shared diplomatic effort to produce solutions, rather than just military plans for how we're going to build up an army and build up a police force. Because when those things fail, they don't fail because of lack of money or lack of direction, they fail because the political layer is too weak to control the security institutions, and they get bought off or appropriated by other actors.

VI: To move this interesting conversation to a conclusion what are the most important things that the next administration should consider to confront the global spread of terrorist activity, so we do move in the directions you are recommending?

Aaron O’Connell: I think most urgently we have to abandon two major errors of the last four years. What I've been describing thus far are trends of militarization and short-sightedness that apply across Bush, Obama and Trump. But in the last four years, we've seen these things go on steroids. Specifically, Trump, upon taking office, escalated military operations in almost every single country where we're already using lethal force. We've seen that that hasn't worked. We've seen that that's led to more civilian deaths, and indeed more American deaths. 

Number two, President  Trump has also disregarded and disrespected multilateral approaches even more than President George W. Bush did. That hasn't worked. Mr. Trump’s constant calls for NATO to “pay up” has badly alienated some of our closest partners, and that has had effects in Afghanistan as well. 

What most significantly needs to change is that the United States must think about terrorism more holistically, and stop pursuing such military-dominated tactics as the solution. 

We have 20 years of data to show that such approaches only lead to more dead civilians, more dead Americans, more terrorist groups, and more lethal attacks. That can't be the way we should continue. 

I'm not advocating withdrawal and I'm not advocating a pacifist approach to terrorism.There are times when military force is necessary, but we need just as much attention to how we strengthen the political institutions of a nation, and how we cooperate with all of our partners and allies to get there and share the burdens of security and reconstruction. We need to remember that our alliances are the core of America’s global strength. We need to insist that the partnerships we create with these terrorist-prone states are being done in long-term sustainable ways that comport with American values, since it's American dollars that are paying for some of that work.

VI: We'll see in the next year or two what kind of leadership the United States can demonstrate in countering the continuing real threats to the security of the global community from terrorist entities. 

Aaron O’Connell: It's going to be interesting.

Aaron O’Connell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of Research at the Clements Center. Previously, he served as Director for Defense Policy & Strategy on the National Security Council at the White House, where he worked on a range of national security matters including security cooperation and assistance, defense matters in Africa, significant military exercises, landmine and cluster munitions policy, and high-technology matters affecting the national defense, such as autonomy in weapon systems.  He is a 22-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps.