War on Terror

Gorka brags about the ease with which he and his team have gotten Donald Trump to change direction.

“The danger,” one senior intelligence official told us, is that the team preparing the strategy are all warfighters, seeing America as no different than the Middle East.

When then-President Joe Biden issued the first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism in 2021, it was a response to January 6, basically casting the MAGA rioters as terrorists threatening the very survival of American democracy.

Biden’s 2021 strategy was itself alarming, casting as threats all kinds of Americans, including social media users, gamers, and students. In fact, the strategy led to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security establishing a backchannel with social media and gaming companies like Roblox, Discord and Reddit in order to monitor communications and map networks, approaches it had long used overseas.

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Now, the rewrite of the National Strategy document is shaping up to comport with Trump’s view of the country, the GAO hints and others say, rescinding the previous approach and altering the focus of counterterrorism actions over the next four years. That includes focusing more on Trump’s political opponents and framing petty crimes taking place at day-to-day protests as terrorism.

Counterterrorism is a fancy way for the government to refer to the business of pre-crime. Designed to prevent attacks before they happen, counterterrorism doesn’t need a crime on which to predicate its activities. Counterterror personnel are not law enforcers investigating a crime after it has occurred. They look for predictors of an attack. This process of divination partially relies on so-called “mobilization indicators,” characteristics that could move people to carry out acts of extremist violence.

Ever had a heated argument expressing sympathy for Luigi Mangione or HAMAS? Or bought military-style tactical equipment? Or withdrawn from family? If so, you meet the government’s criteria listed in its 2021 “Mobilization Indicators” booklet, a document intended to help local and state police to spot a terrorist.

These criteria might strike you as creepy because, as the booklet itself concedes, “many of the mobilization indicators included in this booklet may also relate to constitutionally protected activities.” 

“Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” President George W. Bush told the American people in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, noting specifically that such militants had designs on “vast regions” of Africa.

To shore up that front, the U.S. began a decades-long effort to provide copious amounts of security assistance, train many thousands of African military officers, set up dozens of outposts, dispatch its own commandos on all manner of missions, create proxy forces, launch drone strikes, and even engage in direct ground combat with militants in Africa. Most Americans, including members of Congress, are unaware of the extent of these operations. As a result, few realize how dramatically America’s shadow war there has failed.

The raw numbers alone speak to the depths of the disaster. As the United States was beginning its Forever Wars in 2002 and 2003, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in Africa. This year, militant Islamist groups on that continent have, according to the Pentagon, already conducted 6,756 attacks. In other words, since the United States ramped up its counterterrorism operations in Africa, terrorism has spiked 75,000%.

Let that sink in for a moment.

75,000%.