With every year that the 9/11 attacks recede into the past, it seems easier for the United States to move on from terrorism. That impulse has become all the more appealing in the wake of COVID-19, a pandemic that is killing more Americans every few days than were lost on September 11, 2001. Since that tragic day, there has been not one successful, externally directed, large-scale terrorist attack on Americans, and attacks by Islamist homegrown terrorists have declined, too. Several years have now passed since the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) perpetrated its horrific attacks in Paris and Brussels. In Iraq and Syria, the group’s so-called caliphate lies in ruins.
But it is important to remember that none of this happened by chance. As I saw in the final two decades of my 42-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, most recently as acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the United States’ post-9/11 counterterrorism effort has been nothing short of extraordinary. That campaign is the closest the country has come since World War II to addressing a transnational threat with a whole-of-government, whole-of-society, and even whole-of-world approach. The U.S. government took the fight overseas, identifying and killing countless terrorist leaders. It used sophisticated screening to keep terrorists from slipping into the United States, and it made the country a difficult place to operate for terrorists who were already inside. It worked with the private sector to make cyberspace and financial networks less hospitable for terrorists. And it shared more information with more partners, domestic and foreign, than ever before.
