Terror thrives and multiplies, with America too many steps behind

The ground truth about the spread of terrorism will be a hard one for many Americans to swallow after 13 costly years of war. Terrorism is spreading worldwide. Our enemies have sustained our blows, adapted and grown. Two questions loom large as a consequence: Where did we go wrong, and what do we do now?

Recent headlines support the conclusion that global terror trends are heading in an ever-more-dangerous direction. In early June, the Rand Corporation released a study that detailed the growing threat. It reports that in 2007, there were 28 Salafi-jihadist groups like Al-Qaida. As of last year, there were 49. In 2007, these groups conducted 100 attacks; last year, 950. The study estimates that there were between 18,000 and 42,000 such terrorists active seven years ago. The low-end estimate for last year, at 44,000, is higher than the top estimate for 2007, and the new high-end estimate is 105,000.

The Obama administration rightly argues that "core Al-Qaida" has sustained "huge" damage. But "core Al-Qaida" no longer poses the principal threat to the U.S. homeland. That comes, according to the Rand report, from Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. As Rand summarizes the report: "Since 2010, there has been a 58 percent increase in the number of jihadist groups, a doubling of jihadist fighters and a tripling of attacks by Al-Qaida affiliates. The most significant threat to the United States, the report concludes, comes from terrorist groups operating in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan."

As legitimate as the questions that have emerged in the Bowe Bergdahl case may be, they are secondary to the deteriorating situation associated with the war the recently released prisoner went to Afghanistan to fight. There is no denying that the contempt for Congress shown in failing to inform it of the deal — even as perhaps 100 in the administration knew of it — starkly reveals the cynicism behind last year's faux deferral to Congress on Syria. But it would be far more cynical to continue with the Obama team's variation on the "mission accomplished" misrepresentations of his predecessor.

The war in Iraq was not over or won when we said it was. Nor is the war on terror won or the threat it poses resolved simply by no longer using the term or suggesting our goal was merely to inflict damage on the tiny fraction of terrorists who were associated with the 9/11 attacks. The reality is that we are still fighting the last war on terror even as a new set of risks looms.

In its recent assessment, "Country Reports on Terrorism 2013," the State Department acknowledged the trend. The report takes particular note of the threat posed by foreign extremists in Syria, which has become a kind of petri dish in which a growing global terror threat is being cultivated. The news that one recent suicide bomber in Syria was an American and that one of the attackers behind the recent shooting at the Jewish Museum of Belgium spent time in Syria suggests how this threat may evolve over time. It's not unlikely that, if left unchecked, the long-term consequences of a cadre of fighters trained in Syria who will soon return to their home countries will be one of the darkest legacies of that war — a legacy that may well echo the long-term costs associated with training jihadists in the battle against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s, among whom, of course, was Osama bin Laden.

On just one day last week, Pakistani Taliban claimed credit for an attack on Karachi's international airport that killed 30 people, while in Baluchistan, 23 Shiite pilgrims were killed in gun and bomb attacks. (A follow-up attack on the Karachi airport's security academy occurred less than 48 hours later.) That same day, 52 people were killed in bombings in Baghdad. Elsewhere, a female suicide bomber attacked a barracks in Nigeria. Scores more died in the fighting in Syria — many at the hands of the government, to be sure, but many also as victims of extremists.

This compounds ISIS gains in Fallujah and across Anbar Province. Should the Iraqi government fail to regain control of this region, the consequences of an extremist rump state on Jordan's eastern border and of conflict with Kurds in the north are grave. Such a scenario is quite possible, in fact; 11 years after the United States went to war with Iraq we could be on the verge of seeing it fracture into an extremist Sunni state in the west and an Iranian puppet state in the east — perhaps the worst possible outcome we could have envisioned. It raises the question: What is the opposite of "mission accomplished?" And another: Who lost Iraq? (That the destabilization that caused this was triggered by an Afghan-based extremist's group attack on the United States is illustrative of how unpredictable, convoluted and widespread the aftershocks of terror attacks can be.)

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, we had a number of reactions to the trauma it caused. Some were natural — like seeking to exact a punishment on those behind the attacks. Some were sound national-security policy — like seeking to keep the attackers from ever attacking us again. Some were dangerously ill-considered — like invading Iraq. Some were damaging to our national standing — like surveillance overreach or the use of torture.

Today, we are learning the lessons of this period of reaction, this era in which so many of our initiatives seemed to be driven by fear of a future attack. That is why it would be both ironic and perilous for us to fail to learn one of the first lessons of what happened on 9/11, which is that in today's globalized, technologically empowered world, there is no such thing as a distant problem. All can make their way to our doorstep with lightning speed.

This does not mean we must intervene everywhere against everyone. The first war on terror was clearly mismanaged in many sometimes profoundly damaging ways. Indeed, some of our best antidotes to the risk posed by terror are not war at all but good intelligence, good police work, and a renewed focus on economic, social and institutional development. Certainly, invading and destabilizing extraneous countries only makes matters worse.

One of the most pervasive problems behind the first war on terror was national narcissism — the sense that now that this problem that had afflicted so many for so long had taken a big enough toll on us, it was all about us, entirely up to us to handle in whatever way we saw fit, the laws of nations and the international community be damned. But there is another insidious consequence of such nationalism. It is the mistaken belief — the one that afflicted us before 9/11 and was one of its proximate causes — that if such problems did not impact our shores and our people, they never would; they weren't our concern. We can't let such a view delude us into complacency now.

President Obama's recent West Point speech — which suggested that we could now safely start to hand off such issues to partners on the ground — has, in the case of Pakistan and Iraq, been debunked within the last few days. We cannot put this effort on autopilot and forget about it. Instead we must develop new strategies and new active and committed alliances — like finding ways to work more closely with the Chinese, who face a similar threat at home, reinvigorating how the Atlantic Alliance works together on such issues, and working more closely with the more moderate Sunni states in the Middle East. Our new efforts will require more aid (and unlike with some of our Syria promises, aid that is swiftly delivered when it can make a difference). They will mean more technical assistance and training. More shared intelligence. More military support and, yes, action when it is the only and best available option. And above all it will mean a sense of urgency that should be associated with any endeavor, like this one to protect our citizens and interests, in which we are so clearly losing ground.