Counterterrorism

A Bureaucratic Failure, Not a Scandal A BUREAUCRATIC FAILURE, NOT A SCANDAL John Bradshaw, NSN Executive Director January 19, 2016 | USA News As a former foreign service officer who served in several small U.S. posts overseas, the 2012 attack at the Benghazi facility had a particular resonance for me. But from the beginning, it was clear to me that this was not a political scandal, but the tragic outcome of two interacting forces: bureaucratic inertia at the State Department that led to chronic inadequate security for U.S. posts, and the propensity of foreign service officers to continually push against the boundaries of the security envelope. The various investigations of the attack, including the Accountability Review Board chaired by former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, all concluded… Read More ›

Hyperbole is not a Strategy December 18, 2015 While all the candidates on the Republican debate stage in Las Vegas criticized Democrats on national security issues, very few of them presented anything resembling a clear strategy for tackling the threats facing the United States. Instead, they substituted tough talk, threats, and fearmongering for strategy, showing that they know how to scare people, not solve problems. Jeb Bush thinks we need “to destroy ISIS before it destroys us.” By saying that, Jeb Bush showed that he has no idea what kind of threat ISIS is or how to combat it. If every ISIS combatant assembled in one place, their roughly 30,000 fighters would be fewer than the total number of soldiers in a two U.S. Army… Read More ›

Donald Trump Is Helping the Terrorists Win By Steven Simon and NSN Advisory Board Member Daniel Benjamin December 15, 2015 | POLITICO American politics are undermining American national security. In their jockeying for the Republican presidential nomination, GOP contenders—Donald Trump above all—have managed to exacerbate dramatically the two U.S. weaknesses most likely to erode our country’s safety: fear and Islamophobia. The United States has made tremendous progress in the fight against terrorism since September 11. Yet it has also become all too clear that we are short of the kind of societal resilience that is essential for our success in fighting terrorism. Beyond that, we lack a shared recognition of the importance of the American Muslim community in preventing the spread of extremism. In recent weeks,… Read More ›

NSN 2016 Update: Return to the Dark Side December 4, 2015 In recent days, conservative candidates for president have revived the rhetoric of the immediate post 9-11 period and have seemed almost eager to play into the hands of ISIS, campaigning on policies that reinforce ISIS’s claims that the West is engaged in religiously-motivated warfare against all Muslims. Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and Donald Trump all want to bring back waterboarding. While these candidates agree that the United States should start torturing people again, none of them have provided any reason to believe that torture gathers information that could not be gathered by lawful methods. There are, however, strong reasons not to bring back waterboarding: not only is it torture, and therefore a war crime,… Read More ›

Mainstreaming Hate: The Far-Right Fringe Origins of Islamophobic and Anti-Refugee Politics Policy Brief by J. Dana Stuster and Samuel Davidoff-Gore December 2015 To read the full report, click here. The National Security Network (NSN) is pleased to release a new policy brief, Mainstreaming Hate: The Far-Right Fringe Origins of Islamophobic and Anti-Refugee Politics. Since the November 13 terrorist attack in Paris, politicians have seized on reports of participation in the attacks by alleged Syrian refugees to impugn U.S. efforts to resettle 10,000 refugees displaced by the Islamic State and the violence of the Syrian civil war – a relatively small number of refugees in relation to the overall number of people displaced from Syria and the burden on other nations accepting Syrian refugees. These political… Read More ›

Clinton preps for battle with GOP Benghazi Committee October 20, 2015 | Fox News David Mercer, NSN Board of Directors member, discusses the Benghazi Committee on Fox New’s Strategy Room. To watch the original interview posting, click here. Read More ›

A “No” to Iran Means No Forever By Samuel Berger August 2015 | POLITICO There is a notion cultivated by opponents of the Iran nuclear agreement, attractive to members of Congress under intense pressure to vote no, that congressional rejection of the agreement will enable U.S. negotiators to reach a better deal. The expectation is, that with a further turn of the screws, we can pressure the Iranians to give more and/or we give less. But it can’t happen. The agreement needs to be judged on its merits and the consequences of rejecting it need to be confronted without the illusion that there will be another, easier chance. Opponents cannot escape through a trapped door marked “later.” There is no later, this is the end of… Read More ›

Imagine, a Good News Story on Pakistan By Tara Sonenshine, Member of the NSN Advisory Board July 27, 2015 | The Hill We are so used to stories about Pakistan that include terrorism, violence, bombs and bullets. Similarly, we are used to stories about failed foreign aid, fraud, waste, abuse, charities that don’t do what they promise and a growing sense that we have so many problems at home, so why bother doing anything abroad? Into that cynical vortex comes a Washington Post story with a very different and welcome message about a part of Pakistan that is using outside money and inside determination to prove the critics wrong and remind us why we should care and why we should support cross-cultural engagement. In a remote… Read More ›

The Limits of Iran’s Regional Ambitions Policy Brief by J. Dana Stuster July 9, 2015 The reach of Iran’s foreign policy has exceeded its grasp. For all its efforts to maintain its sphere of influence and expand its power in the Middle East, it has gained little from its interventions. Tehran has consolidated its control over the leadership in Damascus and South Beirut, but these allies are stretched thin and seeing their power and influence recede. Meanwhile, Iran is increasingly challenged in Iraq by the Islamic State and resurgent U.S. diplomacy. In Gaza, Tehran has ceded its influence with Hamas to the same governments supplying its opponents in Syria. Far from an ascendant actor in the region, Iran is currently fighting the greatest challenge to… Read More ›

To Counter Violent Extremism, Focus on the Young By Tara Sonenshine, member of the NSN Advisory Board July 2, 2015 | The Hill In the run-up to July Fourth, there is increasing “chatter” about the potential for a terrorist attack somewhere in the world this weekend. And behind the fear of violent extremism, is always an unspoken assumption that Muslim youth around the globe are, by and large, inclined towards negative activity, and likely to be recruited and radicalized by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or another terrorist group, and that social media is today’s platform for youth-inspired hatred, hostility and horrific behavior. Both are misleading assumptions and likely to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, ISIS has become very good at targeting… Read More ›