Martha Crenshaw on Why Counter-Terrorism is So Difficult

Jonathan Faust: According to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, forty-four percent of the American public believes that a terrorist attack is “very” likely to happen in the next few months — the highest percentage recorded since October 2001. To what extent do you feel that the threat of another mass shooting or wide-scale terrorist attack is imminent?

Martha Crenshaw: It is extremely unpredictable. Terrorist incidents, believe it or not, are actually rare events, much more rare than, for example, criminal homicide, automobile accidents, death by cancer, etc. So there’s not a pattern. We do know that it appears that ISIS has decided to target Western countries, and the attacks in Paris, where a team was assembled some months earlier to organize an attack, seem to be a case in point. Whenever there’s a major incident like that, particularly one that is as tragic and destructive as Paris, it makes you think that you are going to be next on their list. Nonetheless, I don’t think that even our intelligence agencies know whether they are planning anything.

We had the San Bernardino attacks, but from what we read in the media, which is our main source of information, it’s not clear that they were directed by ISIS, though apparently they were inspired by ISIS’s online propaganda. But we don’t really know that there’s currently a campaign of terrorism being mounted by ISIS or that there are plans in the works. We have to think that something might happen, but we can’t say where it would occur.

JF: According to the same poll, the public appears to have little faith in President Obama’s handling of terrorism and the threat from the Islamic State. In April, you and Gary LaFree are coming out with a new book, Countering Terrorism, the subtitle of which, No Simple Solutions, seems particularly appropriate in light of recent events. You argue that we still find it difficult to define who it is we are fighting, what we are fighting, and the best ways to eradicate terrorist threats. You also look at the strategies that have failed and those that have worked, with an attempt to suggest what we can do in the future. What strategies do you consider to be our biggest failures, and should we have anticipated their failure?

MC: The purpose of the book isn’t to criticize any particular decisions or strategies or policies, or even to recommend specific steps. Actually, we are somewhat sympathetic with all policymakers who have had to deal with terrorism from the beginning, which includes President Nixon, Carter, Clinton, and both Bushes.

The focus of the book — which we actually wanted to call “Why Is Counter-Terrorism So Difficult?” — is an attempt to say what is so inherently difficult about terrorism. Part of it is exactly what we were discussing before: that terrorism is rare and unpredictable. There’s a great temptation on the part of government policymakers to take a single event and to view it as the beginning of a series of attacks. You could certainly put 9/11 in that category. You can understand why, in the absence of good information, they would think that it’s likely to happen again.

We argue, however, that that is actually a very dangerous policy to take, to assume that a terrorist attack is the beginning of a sequence and then to overreact to it. We are aware that the kinds of figures you are giving about public opinion make it hard not to do something when there’s terrorism, and hard to say to the public, look, this might or might not happen again, but it probably is a rare event and won’t happen. If something happens, politicians are held to blame for it. So, fear — fear of failure, fear of making policy mistakes — may lead governments to overreact. If you look at the U.S. reaction to 9/11, a lot of measures were taken in the weeks and months after the attack, before we had time to assimilate or think about it, and we are still stuck with those consequences. It’s very hard to undo policies that are undertaken in a crisis mode.

JF: Are you referring to the Patriot Act?

MC: Yes, and many other actions. For example, Guantanamo and other actions, such as various immigration reforms that are outside of the Patriot Act, are hard to undo once you get them on the books. One of the policy recommendations that we make is to think long and hard before enacting such legislation. And the corollary to that is to think ahead of time about what you might do if there were some sort of really, really catastrophic terrorist attack. Don’t wait for it to happen and then react, but think that if a really bad thing should happen, what measures should we then take without having to act in haste. Of course, that’s hard advice to follow because we don’t know exactly what form an act of terrorism will take, but if we look at 9/11, we can see how it created a fear of immigration. And now after Paris, we have a fear of returning foreign fighters, and we have to ask ourselves whether those fears are based on the facts about what happened or whether they are a matter of perception about what’s going on.

JF: In that vein, could the entry of Syrian refugees into the country pose a serious threat to U.S. national security? How thorough is the current vetting process? Is there any way to make it stronger?

MC: I think that the current vetting process is actually very strong. One of the things that has been mentioned, of course, in the public arguments about this process is not selling guns to people who are on the no-fly list and improving the sharing of information across national borders. I have a data set that I have compiled looking at plots against the United States since 1993, and I don’t think that we have any refugees among the would-be perpetrators. We have maybe three, out of something like 147 people on whom we have information, who could be considered to be returning foreign fighters. That’s not very many since 1993.

So, yes, potentially a refugee could perhaps commit an act of terrorism. However, other than our fears that a refugee might deliberately try to gain entry into the country, fears caused largely by the Paris attacks, where someone had a false passport of a Syrian refugee, what does that tell us? We have a recent case where a couple of Iraqi refugees apparently said they wanted to go back and fight in Syria or Iraq. Most people who want to go fight abroad do not want to attack at home. That’s just a fact. So, I don’t think that the refugees pose a greater problem than people who are citizens or who came in on a fiancé visa, like the San Bernardino attackers. They were just off the radar screen in terms of what you would suspect: a married couple is very rare. I only myself know of one other case. We had a couple involved in a suicide bombing in Jordan. Of course, I haven’t looked at this systematically, but I can’t remember any other such cases. Yet, who would have thought of that? A married couple with a baby? You leave the baby with the mother-in-law and go shoot people? Nobody would have predicted this.

JF: Do you feel that stricter domestic gun regulations would lessen the threat of a terrorist attack in this country? What specific types of regulations would you implement?

MC: I think it’s a much broader problem than terrorism, because a lot of the shootings in this country that were enormously deadly were not related to terrorism at all. They didn’t appear to have a political purpose. The school shootings, movie theater shootings — these were disturbed individuals. You can’t explain these incidents it in terms of jihadist or Islamist principles.

I think also that we have a category of people who have mental problems and who — when asked why they did something — might say “because of ISIS,” but they could easily say because of a Batman movie or anything else that’s sailing in their minds. So, I think that the need to implement stricter gun control goes well beyond terrorism. I wouldn’t want to say that implementing gun control would prevent acts of terrorism, which, again, are rare and random. That said, I do think that we need better gun control. I would certainly favor more restrictions on who can purchase a gun, and more information and more background checks on people who do purchase guns.

JF: What kind of security threat is posed by the Mexican border? Can potential terrorists simply go to Mexico and then enter the U.S. along with the other illegal immigrants being smuggled across? Does that pose a serious national security threat?

MC: We don’t have any record of this happening, and we’ve had illegal immigrants coming across the border for quite some time, and we’ve had Al Qaeda trying to get people into the United States since before 9/11. So we might say, well, it must not be quite as easy as it seems, or they would have tried it. Presumably, they could, but they would probably need a Spanish-speaking person to do this. There have been people who have been convicted of charges of violence or assisting Al Qaeda or ISIS who probably did speak Spanish. They were of Hispanic origin and might reasonably be assumed to speak Spanish, not necessarily, but they could have, so it’s not impossible. But, as I said, there has not been a case that I know of, at least [not one]that is public information.

If you look at the people who have crossed into the U.S., either gotten visas or come illegally, I don’t really see that there’s any pattern. And certainly, we’ve cracked down on this a lot since 9/11. Most of the restrictions were on immigrants. The more we began to relax some of them, the more we began to perceive the threat as being a much more homegrown threat. The majority of people who have been involved in plots to commit violent acts of terrorism in the United States were U.S. citizens. They didn’t need to cross a border.

JF: Given the recent San Bernardino shooting, has self-radicalization become as big of a threat as (or perhaps even a bigger threat than) foreign radicals carrying out attacks?

MC: Since the bombings in Madrid, and particularly after the bombings in London, and a report by the New York Police Department on homegrown terrorists or radicalization, we’ve been worried about it as a problem. We have worried that jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS are just ignoring the borders by appealing directly to people who are already residents or citizens of the country.

My data show that in the period since 1993 (I chose that date because that was the first bombing of the World Trade Center) through December of 2015, we’ve only had a little over a hundred plots. This number includes plots that came off, as well as plots that didn’t come off. That’s bad, but that’s only a hundred cases in twenty-two years. A majority of these plots involved people who had not traveled abroad, but it’s more a problem of people who’ve gone abroad to train, than people fighting abroad. When they do, it’s usually in the use of explosives. That’s no guarantee that they can build a bomb that will work; sometimes, they build bombs and they don’t work, even though they’ve trained. So the problem has been small, and there’s no one pattern by which people became convinced that they needed to commit an act of violence.

There’s a lot of concern about lone wolves as part of the homegrown issue, i.e, that all it takes is one person watching something on the Internet. We did find a number of plots in which there was just one person who was accused of a plot, but in the majority of those cases there was a government informant in on the plot, and the government informant told the person that they were a member of Al Qaeda or a member of ISIS. The person thought the informant belonged to a group. So, exactly what was going on in the minds of these people, how they got the original idea, is really hard to know from the facts that are available.

JF: To clarify: of those one hundred plots, were those primarily self-radicalized individuals or foreign radicals?

MC: It’s a mix, but increasingly over time they are not agents of a foreign group directly. They are likely to be indirectly inspired. They say that they are jihadists. Most commonly, they’ll say that they are opposed to American policies, Americans are killing Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and that they are opposed to what the U.S. is doing. You also see a little bit of a copycat phenomenon. So after Major Nidal Hasan and the Fort Hood shootings, there were three or four instances of people who apparently acted alone and said that they were inspired by Major Hasan.

JF: Regarding Major Hasan, I read something about him being influenced by Anwar al-Awlaki over social media. How has the rise of social media enabled the proliferation of jihadist ideology?

MC: Certainly, the U.S. government thinks that it’s a major factor. As I’m sure you know, leaders of the government were out here last Friday visiting with the Silicon Valley executives, trying to deal with this problem. There’s going to be a panel on social media here at Stanford pretty soon. So, we regard it as a very serious problem. Whether someone can, however, actually become a serious threat to security just by this kind of communication is really hard to say. Many people would say that you’re not going to be recruited as a serious operative without face-to-face communication. They are not going to trust you. So what they do is use social media as the entrée, and then they groom people in person.

Major Hasan, for example, was apparently influenced by al-Awlaki, and he had been in Internet email conversation with al-Awlaki, as well. I’ve heard that their emails were innocuous — at least that’s what the people who investigated Major Hasan before he committed the attack thought: that these were just innocuous inquiries about what it take to be a good Muslim and the parameters of being in the U.S. military fighting Muslims. I don’t know what was in his communications, but he did reach out for closer contact. Nonetheless, Major Hasan was exceptional in many ways: a major, in the U.S. army, and a psychiatrist. He was kind of unusual.

Jonathan Faust, a sophomore studying international relations, is a staff interviewer at Stanford Political Journal.