Safe Haven?

This is interesting, and will almost certainly be seized upon by some (perhaps many) as evidence that the United States is losing the fight against terrorism.

Via CNN:

The State Department's annual terrorism report finds that Iraq is becoming a safe haven for terrorists and has attracted a "foreign fighter pipeline" linked to terrorist plots, cells and attacks throughout the world, a senior State Department official involved in the preparation of the report told CNN.

The report, to be released Friday, also says terrorist groups loosely associated with al Qaeda present the greatest threat to the United States and the world, even greater than al Qaeda itself.

The official told CNN that, with al Qaeda's senior leadership scattered and on the run, autonomous cells inspired by al Qaeda's extremist ideology present a greater challenge because they are smaller, harder to detect and more difficult to counter.

"These micro-actors are launching more attacks, and they are more local and more lethal," the senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report had not been released, told CNN Thursday in an interview. This official cited last July's bombings in London by British Muslims with ties to Pakistan as an example of an increase in attacks by local terrorists with foreign ties.

While the official described al Qaeda as "crippled and constrained without the strategic network" it once had, he said there are still indications al Qaeda is planning a spectacular terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

"We have not been able to deliver the knockout punch to al Qaeda, and there is no doubt they are in the planning stages for something big," the official said.

Upon reading this article, my first question was simply this: how does the State Department define a "safe haven?" Afghanistan under the Taliban was a safe haven when it provided more or less official cover for al Qaeda, and the same could presumably be said for present day Sudan, Syria, and Iran.

But Iraq, where terrorists are actively hunted by domestic and foreign militaries, local police, and civilian tribesmen alike? Al Qaeda's "emir" of Samarra Hamid Al-Takhi might beg to differ with the description of Iraq as a safe haven, as would two of his men gunned down by Iraqi military forces today. I don't have numbers in front of me at this time, but I think it probably safe to assume that Iraq is probably among the least safe areas for terrorists right now.

That groups affiliated with al Qaeda are more of a threat than al Qaeda itself should be self evident at this point, as most of al Qaeda's most experienced leaders and operatives are dead or in deep hiding.

This was never more apparent than when top al Qaeda explosives expert Marwan Hadid al-Suri was killed last week acting as a low-level bagman distributing funds to the families of al Qaeda in Pakistan. A healthy terrorist organization would never put a top operative like al-Suri at risk is such an exposed position unless their trusted mid-level manpower was severely depleted. Thus, the "real" al Qaeda may not be dead, but after five years of being hunted down around the globe, they seem to be more a franchise name than an effective operational force.

The key to destroying terrorism, in my opinion, is to reduce or eliminate entirely state sponsorship and several crimp international support, making it increasingly difficult to transfer men, material or knowledge across regions. If you are successful in do that, you isolate terrorists to a local and regional level. Once you've hampered their mobility, they are forced to carry out attacks more or less locally, in the same areas they draw their support from. As you well know, defecating where you eat is toxic, and for terrorists, increases their risk of being captured or killed significantly. Eventually, public support erodes and such organizations end up gutted and minimalized.

Thus, while these micro-actors are indeed initially more deadly, forcing terror to retreat from a global to a micro-level is a significant improvement in the overall war against terrorism, as it reduces the overall lifecycle of terror organizations. We simply need to make sure we are making state sponsorship of terrorism a too expensive proposition in terms of capital (both political and monetary) at the same time, at which point the war against the tactic of large-scale terrorism may very well be won. The White House has taken steps in the past few days to do just that, clamping down on monetary support with the application of Executive orders against Sudan and Syria in the past days alone, placing significant pressures upon their unstable regimes.

Soon, would-be nuclear state Iran may be among the last of the state sponsors of terrorism, and if they continue down their ill-advised and badly miscalculated gambit for nuclear weapons, they may find themselves in a conflict from which their terror sponsoring regime would not be allowed to emerge intact.

The war on terror is far from over, but it seems from my perspective that the major players are choosing their ground for what may well be the final war against state sponsored terrorism of this modern age in this decade. Modern theofascism and the state support of terrorism arguably began in Iran. It seems fitting that the stage may be set so that it may die there as well.