(Dobbs) All We Know Is That They Lie In Wait
The Wall Street Journal calls it "a ticking time bomb."
For several years I lectured about terrorism for the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab. What I always said was, sometimes we make the terrorists move, but we don’t make them go away.
The massacre at the music hall last month in Moscow proved that.
Russia has fought Islamic terrorism since the beginning of this millennium. Obviously they’ve never won. Terrorists seized a theater in Moscow in 2002. More than a hundred hostages died. Two years later they stormed an elementary school in the Caucuses. More than 300 died, half of them children. Then new terrorists sat in wait until they killed more than 140 at the fateful concert.
When the U.S. went into Afghanistan more than 20 years ago in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, we proved it too. We didn’t eliminate al Qaeda, we only chased them out. They dispersed to almost every continent on earth. After we invaded Iraq a year later, we left a leadership vacuum which gave birth to ISIS. Now there are ISIS cells, and copycats, and wannabes, in every corner of the planet.
One of them claimed responsibility for the murders in Moscow. Another was behind the catastrophic suicide bombing in 2021 during the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul. Nearly 200 people died, including 13 ill-fated American soldiers.
They’ve also killed dozens of Taliban in Afghanistan. And 90 citizens at a Revolutionary Guards observance in Iran. They take on superpowers, they take on rival extremists. They don’t play favorites.
Terrorist groups have different names, different faces, different slogans, different causes. The Tajiks who shot up the Russian concert hall don’t look like the terrorists from Boko Haram— which loosely means “no western education”— who are still kidnapping schoolgirls, hundreds at a time, in Nigeria. And the men of Boko Haram don’t look like the terrorists from al-Shabab (which means “the youth”) who carry out bombings all over Somalia and sometimes take their fatal violence into Kenya. And none of them look like the terrorists who massacred Israelis from Hamas.
But these terror groups and others— in the Philippines, in Peru, in Paris and elsewhere over the years— have one thing in common: they all live and breathe to inflict fear. They all live and breathe to shatter the peace. They all fit the definition of terrorism: violence against non-combatants— translation: civilians— for social or political gain. According to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the different branches of ISIS alone, just in the past year, have claimed what they would call credit for almost 1,100 attacks around the world in which nearly 5,000 people were killed or wounded.
This is the war on terror that we— and yes, the Russians— are fighting today.
Time was when war meant that one nation’s army went up against another nation’s army. There were military bases, there were front lines. Each side’s goal was to defeat the other side’s armed forces.
The war on terror is different. Terrorists have sponsors but no central state. They have no uniformed troops. And maybe the most challenging part: they have no short timeline, no sense of urgency. Unlike us, they do not come from quick-fix societies. They can bide their time and make their plans not in the framework of months but in the framework of years. The commander of the U.S. Central Command recently warned that the “ISIS-K” terror group “retains the capability and the will to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in as little as six months with little to no warning.”
Terrorist groups have mushroomed because instability in certain parts of the world has worsened, and that’s where they get their fighters. Intelligence estimates put the number of ISIS-K fighters as high as 6,000. Another 9,000 are imprisoned in different camps in Syria and eventually could end up integrating with their fellow anarchists. And that doesn’t count the other branches of ISIS, let alone the other terror groups around the globe. The Wall Street Journal late last month referred to it all as “a ticking time bomb.”
What’s more, they don’t have to field battalions of soldiers to inflict their pain, they just have to prepare a handful of terrorists. Russian police have arrested a total of only about a dozen people, the four gunmen and some accomplices, for the concert hall attacks. On 9/11, even if there were dozens more behind them, it only took 19 suicidal terrorists to change the world.
The Olympics start in Paris at the end of July. After the Moscow massacre, France raised its terrorist threat level to the maximum. What Moscow taught us— particularly after learning that the United States gave Russia a highly specific warning that the concert hall might be a target— is that terrorists are hard to find and harder to stop. During the Cold War we always knew that we would almost see enemy missiles coming if an enemy attacked us. During the war on terror, all we know is that enemies lie in wait.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
As always, Greg, a necessary article! If you havent yet read Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra, do. Great explanation of the constant source of terrorists (going back centuries) and what and who are really the enablers.
I agree with everything you said except calling them fighters which is a more respectable name than they deserve. A fight is the last thing they want. Mass Murder of innocent noncombatants is not fighting. It is murder. Plain and simple, they are killers, not fighters.