Ramping Down the War on Terror? The Enemy Gets a Vote

National security officials are making known that they do not concur with the Obama Administration’s assessment that the “War on Terror” is ramping down.

First was FBI Director James Comey, who admitted to the New York Times that,

“I didn’t have anywhere near the appreciation I got after I came into this job just how virulent those affiliates had become,” Mr. Comey said, referring to offshoots of Al Qaeda in Africa and in the Middle East during an interview in his sprawling office on the seventh floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “There are both many more than I appreciated, and they are stronger than I appreciated.”

That sentiment has been echoed by NSA director Keith Alexander, who warned the New Yorker, “But I do think people need to know that we’re at greater risk, and there’s a lot more coming my way.”

Likewise The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake speaks to senior intelligence officials, who paint a picture of an Intelligence Community in metaphorical open revolt against an Administration that they insist is downplaying and dismissing vital threats:

One senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast the frustration was that there is pressure from the White House to downplay the threat from some al Qaeda affiliates. “It comes from the top, it’s the message that al Qaeda is all these small franchise groups and they are not coordinated and threatening,” this official said. “It’s the whole idea of getting us out to place resources against something that they don’t think is a problem. It’s not their war, it’s not our conflict.”

Unfortunately the hundred or so American passport-holding jihadists who have flocked to battlefields like Syria  do not agree. For the enemy it will never be “just a local conflict.”

Likewise, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Al Qaeda’s “Shadow Army” waits in the wings for our withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Washington Times notes:

Several lawmakers and former senior intelligence officials have raised concerns that the al Qaeda movement today controls more territory around the world than it did when it was based in Afghanistan under bin Laden before Sept. 11. Concern that Afghanistan may again become a haven for the terrorist network has added another twist to the debate over the extent of the al Qaeda threat facing the United States.

That we are fighting a battle over the nature and size of the threat, so long after 9/11 is a sad indictment of the fact that this country never established clear knowledge of the enemy threat doctrine. Instead we’ve allowed socioeconomic theories to drive our response, as seen most notably in the State Department’s refrain of “economic deprivation” when referring to Boko Haram’s jihad against Christian Nigerians and those they consider apostates.

The reality is that our enemies are self-declared mujahideen, fighting jihad fisabilillah (Jihad in the cause of Allah), in order to establish shariah everywhere, whether it is in Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, or in America. We have failed to understand the goal of the jihadists is not to establish territory under their rule in order to facilitate attacks on America, but to attack America in order to weaken us enough that they can safely establish territory where they can apply shariah. Using that standard, the spread of so-called “affiliates” across the global is not a dispersion of Al Qaeda, but the unchecked growth of jihad, regardless of whether a particular group is in direct communication with senior leaders of Al Qaeda or not.

Only by studying the enemy threat doctrine can we draw an accurate determination of whether the enemy is stronger or weaker, achieving his objectives or falling short.

As the Senate considers revoking or scaling down the authorization for use of military force (AUMF) against Al Qaeda, they should recall the military maxim that “the enemy gets a vote.”