OPINION:
Every year on Sept. 11, we commemorate the innocent lives al Qaeda terrorists stole from us on that fateful day.
We continue to be inspired by those selfless heroes among us, like the courageous first responders who rushed into harm’s way to rescue civilians from the burning towers and those extraordinarily brave passengers of United Flight 93, who were the first to take the fight to the terrorists.
Here in Washington, remorseful politicians have routinely held forth about how our nation is safer today because we incorporated lessons learned, such as more seamlessly integrating the U.S. intelligence community with military operations and law enforcement.
But if there’s one thing I learned at CIA, it’s the importance of seeing the world and ourselves through the eyes of our most cold-blooded adversaries.
That’s why our national security demands that we consider not only what we learned from the 9/11 terrorist attacks but also what al Qaeda, the Islamic State group and their affiliates have learned about us over the past 25 years.
Decades ago, before 9/11, al Qaeda was more isolated, without access to social media and the internet. Terrorists knew from experience that we had to be 100% successful at eliminating threats, whereas it only takes one terrorist plot to succeed. But they have grown increasingly sophisticated by studying our nation — not just our warfighters, but public opinion and politicians as well.
The U.S. military has demonstrated the ability to deny terrorists geographic sanctuary by using overwhelming force combined with exquisite raw intelligence. The Islamic State group and al Qaeda terrorists learned that when sanctuary space is eliminated, they must move to new ungoverned areas where they can plot and plan against us.
Al Qaeda, for example, has been expanding in the Sahel region and East Africa. And rather than congregating in one particular region, terrorists are increasingly operating in smaller networks with lighter footprints, making them harder to detect.
When the U.S. does engage in large-scale regime change operations as in Afghanistan and Iraq, we lack the discipline and foresight to produce a realistic post-conflict reconstruction plan. In Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iranian proxy terrorists enjoyed open-field running while we fought al Qaeda.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) created powerful militias and penetrated key Iraqi institutions, such as the interior ministry.
Terrorists expect to lose every kinetic engagement with the U.S. military. Having learned how to manipulate press reporting to win over the public square, Hezbollah and Hamas are notorious for deliberately embedding with civilians.
They have been particularly effective at trapping Israel Defense Forces (IDF) into choosing between allowing terrorists to carry on plotting against innocent Israeli civilians and targeting terrorists in the neighborhoods, schools and hospitals where they hide among the civilian population.
The U.S. has developed a highly sophisticated capability that fuses intelligence collection with precision military strikes to find, fix and finish terrorist leaders and their henchmen. Islamic State group and al Qaeda have therefore learned to create robust succession plans so that the next generation of terrorist leaders can pick up where their deceased leaders left off.
Terrorists have learned that when fighting a democratic nation, taking the fight to our civilian population does not just mean launching terrorist attacks against us. It also means making us feel the pain from spilling blood and treasure to fight them.
That might mean fighting an insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan or launching hybrid asymmetric operations to disrupt the global economy. Iran and its proxy terrorists, including the Houthis, have deliberately targeted shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea, causing collateral damage to the U.S. economy.
Terrorists are well aware that the U.S. is in a never-ending cycle of elections, which can affect foreign policy. We often make national security decisions in one- or two-year cycles, eroding our ability to plan and execute effective strategies.
State sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran, have become sophisticated watchers of U.S. politics, with an eye toward influencing the debate in the U.S., exploiting conflict between our two major political parties and outlasting adversarial U.S. administrations.
The CIA’s human-source penetrations of terrorist groups are vital to our national security precisely because that is how we stay a step ahead of them. This strategy means that we can detect threats and preempt them before any harm is done to our citizens and homeland.
Only by relentlessly stealing the terrorists’ secrets can we reckon with the lessons they have learned and incorporate that vital intelligence into our own tactical and strategic planning.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. He can be reached at danielhoffman@yahoo.com. All statements of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or endorsement of the CIA or any other U.S. government agency.
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