Obama praises Obama's policies for 'breaking the back' of terrorism

[Draggingtree]

American Thinker:

December 7, 2016

Obama praises Obama's policies for 'breaking the back' of terrorism

By Jack Hellner

President Obama is saying this week how his policies are beating the terrorists.

 

This certainly isn't the first time he has said this. In 2012, before the election, Obama repeatedly said the terrorist groups were decimated and on the run. (Of course, most of the media went along.)

 

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

Yup Got em on the run now!

 

Here Is Your Complete List Of Islamic Terror Attacks During The Obama Administration

 

Islamic State claims nearly 600 suicide attacks in first six months of 2016

[Valin]

Related

Al Qaeda Assessment Off the Mark
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
8th December 2016 - The Cipher Brief

(Snip)

TCB: What were some of the strongest elements of President Obama’s counterterrorism policies?

 

DGR: There were a few. One is that looking at domestic issues through a CVE lens is positive. Not that there’s a great deal of proof of the efficacy of these efforts -- the monitoring and evaluation of CVE has been lacking, though I believe it can and will be improved. But I don’t think there’s a real alternative to important parts of the paradigm that the administration has worked to advance on the CVE front.

Second, the Obama administration’s focus on greater collaboration with allies and trying to ensure that the U.S. was not the only one bearing the share of the cost was positive. That approach was discernable very early on. Under President Obama, the U.S. was focused on doing things in ways that the rest of the world could understand as rooted in principle and rooted in a set of ethics that they could identify with.

 

TCB: What were some of the weakest?

 

DGR: On the negative side of the ledger, if one looks at the number of countries that violent, non-state actors have brought to ruin or have cleaved apart, it’s rather alarming. This ranges from Mali to Libya to Yemen, to Iraq and Syria, none of which were on fire in this way at the beginning of President Obama’s watch.

So what went wrong? Obviously, not all of this can be attributed to the President’s policies. In places like Yemen, there were so many different factors that were working against stability in that country. We’d be far from an ideal place there regardless of who’s in office.

 

But we can reasonably criticize the decision to intervene in Libya. That’s where things really went off the rails. The Libya intervention ended up creating more regional chaos, at a time when there were already governments being overthrown in Egypt and Tunisia. Libya has remained a jihadist hotbed since Muammar Qaddafi’s fall, and the war there directly led to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s (AQIM) takeover of northern Mali, which is of course connected to the jihadist insurgency that today exists in northern Mali. Libya’s instability threatens Tunisia and Egypt.

 

A second thing I would point to is that the Obama Administration’s evaluation of the decline of al Qaeda’s core was, in my judgment, not correct. Therefore, I believe that counterterrorism policy has often proceeded from a mistaken set of assumptions.

 

That leads to a third major problem: there seems to be a great deal of the politicization of intelligence under President Obama. If you look at the great reporting done in the Daily Beast by Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef on the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) intelligence scandal, in which certain CENTCOM leaders seem to have altered analysis or to have heavily pushed it in favor of an optimistic conclusion on ISIS, there is a notable lack of alarm in the administration, given how many CENTCOM analysts signed onto the Inspector General complaint. In a well-functioning system, when you have dozens of analysts raising their hands and screaming about the politicization of intelligence, the administration should really be concerned. This is particularly true when those analysts are directly working on efforts to defeat a foreign adversary. Instead, you had leaders in the intelligence community, such as Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper himself, criticizing the whistleblowers. That’s a powerful signal that intelligence is being politicized.

 

Overall, the Obama Administration was given a hard task. I don’t think they did a great job, but the community of experts outside of government have been under-critical these past few years. That’s unfortunate.

 

TCB: Were there any counterterrorism issues that President Obama failed to address, or dealt with inadequately?

 

DGR: The big issue that the Obama Administration didn’t address is al Qaeda’s rebranding. This is something that I have written about a lot, but al Qaeda played itself off of ISIS’ rise and brutality, and also off of the Iran-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) competition, to frame itself as a more palatable alternative to ISIS.

In this way, al Qaeda has been able to gain operating room in countries where it didn’t have it before. In Jordan, Abu Qatada and Abu Mohammad al Maqdisi are out of prison. So too is Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. Al Qaeda in Syria is receiving state support. In Libya, you have al Qaeda operating very openly. Al Qaeda loyalists are heavily involved in the political process, control territory on the ground, and there is not much alarm. Organizations that have sponsored al Qaeda are able to operate openly after so much effort was put into shutting them down in the years after 9/11.

 

At some point people will wake up to this rebranding as being big news and a big strategic problem.

 

(Snip)

 

[Valin]

Bruce Hoffman Weights In

Comprehensive Terrorism Strategy Needed
December 8, 2016 | Bruce Hoffman

(Snip)

TCB: Under President Obama, we’ve seen the weakening of al Qaeda, the rise of ISIS, and more recently the decline of ISIS and the rise of al Qaeda. What should we expect moving forward in the next year?

 

BH: Both groups have successfully locked us into a strategy of attrition. They understand that they cannot defeat us militarily but instead seek to undermine confidence in our elected leaders, polarize polities, and create profound fissures in our society that they believe will wear down our resolve to resist their depredations and threats. Too often in the past we have precipitously declared that we are on the verge of victory only to see our adversaries rebound from even the most consequential setbacks. We pay a price for that over time that inadvertently plays into the terrorists’ strategy of attrition.

 

Public expectations rise as we are told victory is at hand, only to plummet in the wake of some new attack, and therefore as the war on terrorism seems to drag on. Each new terrorist attack appears to generate not just new fears and anxieties, but tears at the fabric of our society creating an atmosphere where popular pressure can drive a liberal democracy to embrace increasingly illiberal means in hopes of enhancing security.

 

Accordingly, the main challenge that we face is in breaking this stasis and frustrating this war of attrition that terrorists seek to keep us enmeshed in. To do this, we have to more decisively engage, dismantle, and defeat these organizations and their networks.

 

This is not to say that what we’ve been doing so far is ineffective and has not been successful, but that it clearly hasn’t been enough. What is required today is a more comprehensive, more systemic and aggressive counterterrorism strategy. We have to very critically start asking questions about why the host nation militaries we are training are failing in their efforts to take the war to the terrorists. We need to step back and assess what we’re doing now and why it is not producing decisive results so that we can break this stasis once and for all.

 

(Snip)