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Release Date: June 5, 2008
Baker Institute for Public Policy
Rice University
Houston, TX
Secretary Chertoff: Thank you, Ambassador Djerejian, for your introduction. I’m delighted to be with you today. I appreciate the opportunity to speak at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, which is one of our nation’s most distinguished academic forums, named after one of our nation’s most distinguished policy makers.
As some of you know, our Department recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. We were established shortly after the September 11th attacks to mobilize our nation to prevent, protect against, and respond to acts of terrorism and other threats to our security.
Reaching our five-year milestone has given us the occasion to look back over the past five years and assess our progress in a number of areas that are central to our mission. For all milestones - that's a very good opportunity to kind of look back. Maybe it's a better opportunity to look forward. The major focuses and activities of the Department of Homeland Security are, in my judgment, basically five in number.
One is to work to prevent dangerous people from coming into the United States and causing us harm. One is to keep dangerous things and dangerous cargo, dangerous weapons out of the country.
The third is to protect our infrastructure should somebody try to attack. That includes not only our transportation, but it includes things like our energy infrastructure, which, of course, is of greater interest to those living in this area.
A fourth is mitigating the effect of either a manmade disaster or a natural disaster by having an effective and swift response.
And finally, there's the task of any large organization institutionalizing the processes and procedures that allow this to work efficiently and allow us to integrate the activities in the Department which began its life in 22 separate components and now has over 280,000 employees.
In each of these five areas I'm pleased to say that as I look back over the 3 1/2 years of my tenure, we've made a considerable degree of progress in developing capabilities that did not exist before September 11, 2001.
Like with any major undertaking, - Rome was not built in a day and the Department of Homeland Security is not going to be built in a day. In fact, we represent the largest bureau organization in the federal government since the Department of Defense was created in 1947. And many of you may remember that it wasn't until 30 or 40 years after the Department of Defense was created, in 1986, when Goldwater-Nichols was formed, that many people believed the department was totally formed. So we're going to try to do this in much less than four years. I think in five years we have come a great distance but we still have more to go.
Nevertheless, there's one overwhelmingly big factor which I do want to remind everybody about. We have not had a successful terrorist attack against this country since September 11th. I think that's due to a number of causes, but it is something to bear in mind; not as a cause to say it's time to pat ourselves on the back and get on to something else. But it’s an indication that it is possible to prevent attacks; not 100 percent possible to guarantee, but possible for us to reduce the risk provided we continue to apply ourselves intelligently and energetically at the task at hand.
Well, I’ve tried in this period of time of this anniversary period to stand back and look at maybe a high altitude and what we face at the Department of Homeland Security; and maybe more generally what the issue of homeland security is for the United States of America. And in the pursuit of this effort, I decided to give a series of speeches. The first in the series was a speech I gave about a month or two ago that concerned the threats to the United States. What are the odds that in the next five years of threats to the United States; not just what we're facing in the immediate future, but what else we're facing in the near-term and middle-term.
In particular, I wanted to look beyond al Qaeda. Although al Qaeda remains the most imminent and active threat against us as we see today. But if al Qaeda vanished from the scene tomorrow it would not be the end of threats to the United States by all means, and it wouldn't be the end of threats by non-state actors.
The fact is that in the 21st century we face threats from a range of organized groups that do not rise to the level of nation-states One of them, of course, is Hezbollah, which as recent events teach us operates a kind of mini state within a state inside Lebanon. Hezbollah which has tentacles that reach across the globe that has carried out active operations, deadly operations against the American interests in the past, as well as against other interests in other parts of the world. It was described by Richard Armitage at one point as the A-Team of terrorists. In terms of capability, reach, membership, access to powerful weapons, and actually probably is of greater capability than al Qaeda even though it is more disciplined and poses less an immediate threat.
Even in our own pasture if we look at the nature of non-state threats, we cast our sights at South America, we see the FARC which has posted threats to American interests in Colombia and to the stability to Colombia itself, although, again, in recent years we've seen a turning of the tide in that the Colombian government has made some significant steps in reducing the capability of the FARC.
If we look at organized, transnational, criminal groups, we see that the 21st century is a period of time where they have greater capability, greater leverage using 21st century technology and greater transnational reach. The MS-13, for example, which was born in the streets of Los Angeles from ex-patriots who came from El Salvador now has franchise operations across the United States engaged in a range of criminal activities, but also has very deep and substantial roots in El Salvador and other parts of Central America. And even our next door neighbor, Mexico, very close to the United States is currently struggling with the challenge of reducing that threat of organized criminal cartels and drug cartels which actually pose a challenge to the governments of some of the communities along the northern border of Mexico and our own southern border.
So we face a range of threats and a range of threats other than those that come from nation-states. And these threats differ from comparable threats in the past because the technology of the 21st century creates a much greater capability on the part of a small group or a network to cause damage. Frankly what they operate, a nation-state could have done a century ago.
Indeed, if we look at recent statements from al Qaeda itself they make it abundantly clear that as far as their intent is concerned, they would consider justifying, in fact, a religious duty, to acquire weapons of mass destruction which would be used against their enemies no less. That's not to say that they have the capability yet, but it is to say that the restraint, moral restraint, or strength of deterrence which is what we relied upon in the 20th century to deal with weapons of mass destruction. That simply is not the present, should we ever face it again, which I hope we do not, that a group like al Qaeda lays hands on weapons of mass destruction.
Some people would say that by focusing on these non-state threats we're inflating rhetoric or we're fear-mongering to use a word that I've seen in the press in the last six months or so. But I don't think it's fear-mongering to recall what happened on September 11th. Not only did the loss of life and the physical destruction of that day but the written economic impacts which affected the airline industry and many other industries and the economy of this country for months thereafter.
More recently, if you follow the trial currently underway in London where a number of individuals are being tried for the August 2006 plot to blow up an airline whose destined from the United Kingdom to North America, you can envision again what this kind of attack would do. An attack that had been successful would have caused not only hundreds if not thousands of lives, but would have potentially crippled the airline industry and affect the global movement of tourism and trade.
So we do face very real man-made threats. Of course we also face actual threats like hurricanes, earthquakes, and infectious diseases. In the last few months we've seen devastating tornadoes in the United States, including one that literally happened in my own region of the country yesterday. The earthquake in China that killed tens of thousands of people, and the devastating cyclone that has left Myanmar in very dire straits
Of course we can't prevent these threats, but we do have to reduce our vulnerability and our ability to respond to those threats and those topics will be the subject of the additional speeches that I hope to make later this year.
But today's speech is focused on things we can prevent and that is the threat of terrorist attacks aimed at deliberately inflicting loss of life, destruction, economic damage to our country and those that are friendly to the United States. And I want to talk a little bit about the basic philosophy of our strategy and then to step back and look at what are the key elements of a strategy, both in the near term and in the long term to address what I believe is a war against an ideology that treats terrorism as a central weapon that battles to rid out the West and drive us out of the Middle East; how also to transform the Middle East into a very dark vision of the future and one that we saw a glimpse of with the Taliban in Afghanistan and one that would be bad for the region and bad for the world as a whole.
I'm going to talk about some of the tools that we use in order to implement this strategy. But maybe more important I'm going to talk about what we need to do in the long run to challenge the ideology of al Qaeda and similar groups, in much the same way that we challenge the ideology that was the underpinning of the Cold War, the underpinning of our adversaries that ultimately - a challenge that was ultimately successful in the passing of the Cold War with a whimper rather than with a bang.
Now let me begin by making one proposition clear. It is impossible for any government, now matter how large, no matter how capable to protect every person from every threat and in every place in every moment. There simply aren't enough resources or technical capabilities to do that. And even if it were possible to imagine a limitless expenditure of money and effort to try to reduce risk to zero, the world that we would live in under that kind of extreme regime would be in direct contradiction to our way of life and the values we cherish as a society.
So what we can do is not eliminate risk but manage risk. And that means what risks are the greatest; try to reduce them in a way that is cost effective and try to mitigate the consequences of those risks that actually come to fruition.
When I say risks I mainly talk about three elements. One is the threat itself. The second is our vulnerability to the threat; and the final is the consequence if the threat actually comes to pass and we're not able to avert it or protect ourselves against it.
Only by addressing each of three elements of risk can we reduce the overall risk in a way that is cost effective and consistent with our fundamental values. And that's why in the course of these speeches I'm going to treat separately and each of these aspects of risk: The aspect of threat; the aspect of vulnerability; and the aspect of response.
I'd also have to observe that, of course, not only the federal government is involved in reducing risk. It is a challenge that has to be met by every level of government and also by the private sector and by private individuals.
Of course where threats are complex, international, and have consequences of national or regional scope, we rightly expect the federal government to take the lead in addressing those threats and preventing those threats.
But at the other end of the spectrum when the threat comes from a single individual, a home-grown terrorist, or a lone wolf, the federal government is not well positioned, either legally or in terms of its capabilities, to necessarily be the lead in preventing that kind of an attack. And that's where we rely on our state and local officials, and particularly our state and local police and even alert citizens to cue us that there is a threat in the works so that we can work with our partners at the local level to avert or disrupt an attack.
In this sense, when we talk about what I consider the low visibility threats like, for example, the individual who tried to detonate a bomb in a restaurant in Great Britain a couple of weeks ago. That's what in that circumstance we rely very heavily upon what we call a community and policing model. A model in which we try to educate local police about what to look for, what to transmit up the line in terms of suspicious activity report so that when you integrate what might seem to an individual to be an isolated event with a pattern of instances that we collect from other police or even from more significant actual technical means. In many cases what we've seen is that single individual who’s alert and knows to say something when they see something. That is the difference between an attack that is prevented and one that comes to fruition.
A great example of this, by the way, is the effort to bomb London last summer which was averted at least in part because an ambulance driver noticed something suspicious about a vehicle; called the police and that enabled the bomb squad to come and disable the item.
So that is the challenge we face. Managing, not eliminating, risks; determining what is the appropriate level of government to address the risk; whether it's international and global and a federal responsibility, or an isolated and therefore a local responsibility. And then determining what strategy fits with what responsibility and what risks for an optimum result.
If I stand back and look at the strategy of what we want to employ against al Qaeda and dealing with international terrorists, complex international threats, I would have to begin with a proposition that the first response has to be a response not here in the homeland but overseas. When we take the offensive against terrorist groups in other parts of the world; when we eliminate the leadership and the capability where it's brewing in some other quarters than closer to where we are in the United States, then we are taking the best possible step we can to eliminate the threat and nip it in the bud. That's why the key element of our prevention strategy has been and must continue to be the use of military force and intelligence capabilities to disrupt terrorists' safe havens overseas and to deny terrorists safe harbor in countries that provide active or passive support to terrorist activity.
By keeping the pressure on terrorists, what we do is ensure that they are spending more time worrying about whether they're going to live through the night than they are planning what they're going to do in order to disrupt our nights. And by the terrorist central in places like Afghanistan and Iraq we hope to change the conditions on the ground which are breeding terrorists and terrorist recruits for the future, as well as denying the terrorists the locations where they can train, where they can set up experimental laboratories, and where they can plan and launch attacks like the one we experienced on September 11th.
But that's only the first line of defense and the proper way to defend this country is to have multiple lines or multiple layers of defense as part of our near term strategy. And so as we start to move more to the homeland from its safe haven overseeing them, we have to consider what are the critical tools in the 21st century to build an environment that will allow international terrorists to operate more readily, more freely, and with greater impact than was the case 100 years ago.
And the answer is the global environment has three critical enablers for anybody who wants to commit a terrorist attack. These happen to be very much the same enablers that are critical to legitimate business activity and legitimate world trade.
Those enablers are the ability to communicate in a global way; the ability to move money to finance global activity; and finally, the ability to move around the world, to travel. Communications, finance, and travel are the key enablers for all global activity and are regrettably that means key enablers for terrorists when they leave their safe havens to copy cat attacks in other parts of the world including our own country.
And that's why as part of the next layer of our defense strategy we need to look at those enablers and see how we can deny those enablers to the terrorists while making sure they continue to be available to the innocent people who are the vast majority of folks who participate in global travel, tourism, and trade.
So what do we do with respect to these enablers. Well, with respect to communications what we do is we use our capability to listen and to determine what communications are taking place between and among terrorists. In many ways, the ability to turn communications from an enabler to terrorism to a method of detecting terrorists is equivalent of transforming communications into radar in the 21st century.
A hundred years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago if someone was coming into bomb ones homeland the way you detected the bombers coming in was either through observation or once radar was invented by using radar. Well, there is no radar and there really isn’t a foolproof method of observing terrorists coming into the United States because they come in with some sort of disguise. So the ability to use their communication to detect an attack when it is being planned or launched is a critical element in how far we've gotten in the 21st Century.
The second thing we've done is to try to use terrorists financing, again, against the terrorist. We've used it to track relationships which allowed us to uncover networks and that's flipping what is in the neighborhood of the terrorist into something that actually disrupts or degrades terrorism. But the final element of the puzzle and the one which frankly was least developed prior to September 11th is targeting terrorist travel. That's the one area where 9/11 never told us when we're very far short dealing with the challenges we faced when bin Laden launched an attack against New York and against Washington, D.C.
A terrorist greatest point of vulnerability when he is coming in to carry out a mission in the United States or elsewhere is that point where if he crosses the border or otherwise interacts with a law enforcement official or a border guard. At that moment a terrorist stands there face to face with someone who is usually armed and has the capability to stop him and if not arrest him. The terrorist has to engage, answer questions, convincing the official they should be allowed to pass, and that is the moment when they are most exposed. If we can seize that moment we are putting into place the final element or the final layer of what prevents international terrorists from coming into the country so that they can carry out an attack inside our own borders.
The issue of terrorist travel is very much a priority for my department because a great deal of what our responsibility and authority is focused on is managing who comes in the United States from outside. It is controlling the borders. Now this challenge is complicated by the fact that every year more than 410 million people cross our Nation's borders. 91 million arrive by air and 110 million private automobiles through our land borders either from Mexico or Canada. The vast majority of these people are coming in for completely benign reasons. Our challenge is to take a moment or two, and no more than a moment or two, to separate out the few who are dangerous from the many who are not so that we can allow the flow of traffic be unimpeded for the innocent and yet make sure that the guilty and the dangerous do not slip through the net.
In the course of the last several years, particularly during the course of the last three and a half years, we developed three major tools which we applied to increase the level of security with respect to travelers and with respect to those across our borders while not disrupting the flow of the vast majority of other travelers.
The first of these is secure documentation. Perhaps the 9/11 commission put it best when stated for terrorist travel documents are like weapons. Travel documents allow people to establish an identity across a border and in a world in which we rely to some degree on watch lists to identify people who are dangerous, if someone can impersonate an innocent person, they are able to slip by the first net, or the first level of our defense is the border and that's why this is critical that where we require identification to be shared, which will validate ones identity and to allow the mission that the identification has to be accurate, valid and reliable.
Now I understand that some people disagree about whether we should require identification in some circumstances. They ask, well, why do we require identification to get on the airplane. Of course the answer to that is September 11th. Maybe some people wonder why we require identification to cross the border, but every civilized country has the capability of doing so does demand that anybody who seeks to enter identify themselves and establish who they are.
Once you accept, however, that there is a need for identification, I do not believe there is any serious argument to be made that the identification to be presented should be insecure or easily counterfeited or easily forged. And that's why we require identification. We have taken some important steps to ensure that the travel document or the other identification presented is valid, is reliable and is accurate.
For example, prior to a couple years ago, you could cross our land border using literally hundreds of different kinds of identification. Baptismal certificates, not only driver's licenses but library cards. Literally, a host of documents that are practically everything short of your teacher's note could be presented at the border and would be a basis to allow someone admission into the United States.
It must be clear that that was a very unreliable way to make sure that bad people didn't get into the United States of America; and so over a period of time we've moved to secure documentation for our main ports of entry. Earlier this year we eliminated the practice of allowing people to simply declare that they're American citizens without providing proof.
Next year the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative will come into full force. This will require that anybody coming across our borders, including American citizens or Canadians or those who report to be U.S. or Canadianas, present either a passport or a pass card which is similar document; about a wallet sized card, or a driver's license which has been constructed in a way that we can identify the international traveler. We call that enhanced driver's license.
What this will do is ensure that our border inspectors will be able to determine readily whether a person is who they say they are. And we are trying to move this impasse to secure identification within the country as well under the Real ID Act, for example, which was an implementation of the key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, and there is a requirement that driver’s licenses are going to be presented for purposes of boarding a plane or getting into a federal building. There are going to have to be certain basic standards for liability, making sure that the person who gets the license has established their identity, making sure that the license can’t easily be forged or phonied up because it has security features, and making sure that the people who actually maintain the DMV databases have been through background checks so they don’t invade the privacy of the people who are getting driver’s licenses. Real IDs engender some conflicts, and of course this will raise issues about who pays for these kinds of things
But I want to take you back to this first principle, the notion that if you are going to ask for someone to identify themselves, it would make sense that the identification be reliable. What would be the value of asking people to present identification when they get on an airplane if they presented identification that you can acquire in your college dormitory, the way kids acquire identification so they can drink. I mean it is simply not that hard to forge a license
We saw it in 9/11. Some of you may not remember that Timothy McVeigh had a forged driver’s license, I think it was from South Dakota, in order to rent a truck that he used to detonate the bomb with respect to the federal building in Oklahoma City. So I would suggest that if we are serious about requiring identification, if we agree that it is important to make sure that the next Mohammad Atta or the next Timothy McVeigh doesn’t get on an airplane, that we ought to be prepared over a period of time to put into effect those standards that allow us to be confident that the documentation presented is in fact accurate and valid
Second major tool that we are dealing with is the issue of advanced prevention. Sometimes we don’t know they are going to be terrorists when they come into the country, but we do know that they -- if we connect them up with someone who is a terrorist, this might be a person we want to get a closer look at, and that is why we are increasingly collecting a little bit of commercial information in advance to have international travelers that want to come to the United States, or to have an individual’s passport number, date of issuance, telephone number, contact number, travel agency from which you bought the ticket.
This information turns out in a remarkable number of cases to allow us to link someone whose name is unknown to us as a terrorist with someone who actually is a terrorist or has been connected to terrorist plots. And by the way, I give you a concrete example of how we use this. When we put together the diagram of individuals who were involved in the 9/11 plot, once we knew the names of the nine hijackers, it was telephone contact information and monetary transmission information that allowed us to draw that network. It allowed us to do things like say here is a traveler who appears to be an innocent traveler but whose telephone number that they are using as a contact number is identical to the number of somebody financing terrorists. That is the kind of information that tells you this is a person you are to pull aside and ask some questions. So again, if you supply rapid information obtained in advance is the second string in our bow of defending our borders against dangerous people getting in
The final element of this is biometric scanning. In many ways this is the use of 21st century technology and the most effective way to determine the unknown terrorists. We currently collect two fingerprints from every foreigner who comes into the United States, other than Canadians, and we are now moving rapidly from a two print system to a ten print system. The collection takes literally a matter of seconds, but what we are able to do, when we use fingerprints, is not only to compare the individual against our databases to make sure they haven’t previously entered under a false and/or different name, but also to run their fingerprints against latent fingerprints. Latent fingerprints are a residue which a person’s fingers leave on a surface, which can be collected and stored. That is why, those of you who watch crime scene television shows, you know what latent prints are
We now collect latent fingerprints from battlefields, safe houses, and training camps in other parts of the world. The ability to compare the latent fingerprints of somebody who is trying to get into the United States -- I’m sorry, the actual fingerprints of someone who is trying to get into the United States against latent prints picked up in training camps and safe houses enables us to identify the previously unidentified terrorist who has been in a training camp or has been in a safe house building a bomb. And that is, in my mind, the ultimate ability to detect the unidentified terrorist and keep them out of the United States
Does it work? Well, I can tell you an instance in which an individual, some months ago, applied for a visa and gave us ten prints. We discovered that one of the fingerprints matched a fingerprint on a document that had been discovered in an apartment which was the location where at least one of the -- part of the planning where one of the London bombing plots took place. I think it allows us the reason to ask more deeply about who this person was. It turned out there was an innocent explanation for why the fingerprint was on the piece of paper, but I will submit to you that is exactly the kind of information you want to have, the intelligence community had, that border enforcement officials have, so that they can separate out people who deserve a closer look from the vast majority of travelers who should be allowed to pass unhindered
That I think in a nutshell reflects the layered element, the layer of defense that we are taking from the safe haven all the way to our own borders to set numerous trip wires designed to make it very difficult, although perhaps not impossible, for an international terrorist to launch from a safe haven somewhere else in the world and enter the United States to carry out a terrorist act.
Of course I can’t conclude discussion of our border security without talking about those elements of the border that are between the ports of entry and the issue that arises when people smuggle or sneak across the land border between the ports of entry or the maritime border between the ports of entry. Here of course our strategy is different, because people seeking to cross aren’t identifying themselves, they’re trying to come across covertly or secretly. And the ability to detect them and to apprehend them and turn them where they came is a major job all the time, but that is going to have to await another speech
I talked a lot about our near term strategy with respect to preventing dangerous people from entering the country through ports of entry. I want to step back to look at what I think is a long term strategic imperative if we are ultimately to turn this challenge of dealing with the ideology of terror around and make this a more peaceful world
Like with any ideology, an ideology animates our (inaudible) of other simpler groups, which is an ideology by an Islamist extremist has to be addressed at its roots. The best way to prevent future attacks against the United States, against all countries in the world, is to dry up the pool of individuals who are being recruited to become suicide bombers or other operatives by Al Qaeda and like-minded groups.
We have to recognize the reality that two major factors are driving the world to terrorism in the 21st century. The first is the continued presence of poverty, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, and failures of the political and economic systems in some parts of the world. But the second is the emergence of an alternative narrative which is being offered to those who are in one way or another disgruntled with their circumstance. That is the ideology of a violent Islamist extremism that is propagated by bin Laden and by others of a similar mind as an alternative explanation of the way the world ought to work and as an effort to lure people who are otherwise dissatisfied or disgruntled down a path which all too often has ended with a suicide bombing and a lot of death
We have to fight not only the extremists themselves, but the ideology of extremism which fuels the recruiting of further extremists. That means we have to stand firmly against the visionary ideas which actually would serve only to perpetuate poverty, degradation, and hopelessness by turning the clock back centuries to some misplaced vision of a wonderful world of the 12th century that wasn’t as good as is now being portrayed, it certainly is not a rosy prospect for the future
And at the same time we have to offer alternative ideals of liberty, rule of law, and dignity, which have brought more progress to more people over the past few centuries than all the previous centuries combined. And that is part of our long term strategy. We have to not only continue using hard power to strike at the enemy, where we can defend ourselves so the enemy doesn’t come in, but we also have to use soft power to leverage all the tools in our arsenal, including diplomacy, cultural exchange, international partnership, and foreign aid
These may seem like strange things for a Homeland Security Secretary to be talking about, but if you look at the total picture, it actually makes some sense. At bottom what we are trying to do is to allow the development of a counter narrative, a different explanation about the world as it is and as it should be, to attract those potential recruits who are being lured by Al Qaeda and similar groups. What we are trying to do is come up with something that will influence those who are hearing the siren call of extremist religious leaders and turn them in a direction that would be more consistent with true religious beliefs and also more consistent with a positive vision for the world to be
How do we do this? Well, it is what they call the battle for hearts and minds. First we need to remind people what the world would actually look like if bin Laden and his cohorts achieve their aims. That is not hard to do. Just re-run old news clips about the action under the Taliban. Women are oppressed, degraded, brutal punishments. That is a world to which bin Laden aspires
Second, we need to emphasize and we need to work with the Islamic media to emphasize that Al Qaeda does not reflect true Islam or mainstream Islam. It reflects an effort to hijack the language of Islam in a direction and ideology which frankly, in many respects, has some of its roots in some of the fascist ideas that were first propagated around the world including in parts of the Middle East in the 1930s
Third, we need to highlight that many cases of victims of Al Qaeda and similar ideologically motivated organizations are in fact Muslims themselves. It is Muslims, Muslim children who died in a school bus in North Africa a few months ago when Al Qaeda in Maghreb tried to blow up a Supreme Court building and succeeded in incinerating a bus full of youngsters going to school. It was Muslims who perished a couple of years ago when a wedding party in a hotel was blown up under the orders of Zarqawi, who was then the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. And what he succeeded in doing was killing those who were there simply to celebrate a Muslim wedding between a groom and a bride
In the end the battle for hearts and minds of course can’t be waged just by government, it has to be waged by the communities that are involved themselves, by those who are closest to individuals who are being recruited for this kind of extreme activity. And the good news is we are beginning to see some cracks in the edifice. If you read some of the statements made by bin Laden’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the last few months. You are going to find that Al Qaeda is becoming increasingly defensive
In a town hall meeting that Zawahiri held online a couple of months ago, one question that was asked Zawahiri, “Who is it who is killing with your Excellency’s blessing innocents in Baghdad, Iraq, or Algeria. Do you consider the killing of one of your children to be jihad? Why have you to this day not carried any strike in Israel? Or is it easier to kill Muslims in the markets?” Another question that asked Zawahiri, “Don’t you agree with me that the frequency in your appearances on satellite channels confirms that you are no more than a cyber phenomenon who loves to show off and be famous?” Now mind you, these aren’t Americans online, these are Muslims online, participating in a town hall meeting that Zawahiri called at pushing back. And what is Zawahiri’s response? “Leave my attention alone because only Allah knows.”
I submit to you that this is a glimmer of hope, in fact more than a glimmer, a sunrise of hope as members of the community in which bin Laden hopes to fan his ideology and to build his ideology begin to push back as they begin to see the real consequences of where this ideology leads
There are other elements in soft power, though, that we can as Americans contribute to this struggle between ideologies. First, it is important that we continue to be a welcoming country for people around the world so that we can show ourselves in our everyday best light and the values in which we cherish. That is why encouraging travel, encouraging trade to the United States is an important weapon and an important element of soft power as we proceed to try to win this battle for hearts and minds. That is why I am working with Secretary Rice, not with Rice in person, but with Secretary Rice to try to make traveling to the U.S. more welcoming while, of course, not sacrificing security. That is why tomorrow right here in Houston I am going to announce some additional programs through our modern ports initiative and global entering which were designed to make travel for the vast majority of innocent visitors easier, more convenient, and more friendly
A third thing we need to do besides supporting the Muslims community’s push back on bin Laden and cultural exchange is promoting causes that expand our trade with our friends and neighbors. Nations that trade with the United States and people that trade with the United States are more likely to be friends rather than enemies, and they are also more likely to do economic value of trade and economic benefits of trade which work to counteract some of those economic forces which sometimes promote terrorism
That is why, for example, the proposed Colombian free trade agreement is so important as part of this process of pushing back against those who are hostile to the United States, particularly those who are hostile for example in South America like FARC or like the leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. By supporting free trade, by supporting more robust relationships, we not only reward our friends, which is always important in foreign policy, but we also enhance the prosperity of our country and of Colombia and provide Colombia with a very powerful argument in favor of freedom, democracy, and the values which we cherish against the dark values propagated by the FARC and by Hugo Chavez
Even close to home, the president of Mexico is talking, engaged in an unprecedented fight against the power of the organized drug cartel which in some ways pose a threat to governments of some of the communities in northern Mexico and which are uncomfortably close to the be honest, to our own borders. Here again, the ability to work in partnership with another country is a critical element of both hard and soft power
There is currently pending before Congress an initiative called Merida Initiative, a package of financial aid and assistance that President Calderon and President Bush both believe would be a visible and concrete contribution to the partnership that both countries are undertaking to strike at these organized criminal groups. This initiative will support the effort that President Calderon has undertaken to strike at these gangs by providing hardware, training, and technical assistance. That is something which is a benefit to Mexico, it is something which is a benefit to us, and it is part of a joint strategy, a partnership on both sides of the border designed to strike at this kind of organized criminality which has become a very real transnational threat
And that is why it is important that as we move forward to try to get this initiative in place and provide this assistance, we treat the Mexicans with respect. We recognize that micromanaging the conditions under which they operate is not a respectful way to deal with partners, that quibbling about the sums of money that are necessary is not the way to devote the resources that our partners ought to have to work with us on a challenge of mutual interest. And that’s one of the reasons why I believe that, again, our long term interest, our long term strategy has to be to build reputation and the reality of supporting our friends in your own struggles for freedom of security by providing partnership on an equal basis, on a friendly basis, and on a sensible basis
Finally, of course, there is foreign aid. Now that is traditionally kind of an afterthought on the issue of security and again perhaps not something you would expect your Homeland Security Secretary to talk about. But when you look at what the terrorists have done overseas to promote their ideology, it is notable how much of what Hezbollah and Hamas do is provide social services work for some of the people in the communities in which they operate, and that builds them a considerable of good will. It gives them a foundation from which they can nurture their training and their planning, better their missiles and their other weapons, and operate with security, they built a network of friends to support them
I suggest to you that when we provide this kind of assistance, when we not only talk the talk of freedom and rule of law and what democracy is about, but we walk the walk, we actually counteract that message. When we responded to the tsunami in southeast Asia in 2004 that killed more than 225 thousand people, when we responded with $350 million in funding, we demonstrated an America that had much more appeal than some of the public imaging that people in that region had seen, and this resulted in a dramatic increase in a number of Indonesians, for example, holding a favorable opinion of the United States, even more than doubled between 2004 and 2005 as a direct consequence of that kind of assistance
At the same time, when we give money as the President has to fight against malaria or to fight against HIV/AIDS, what we are doing is planting seeds of goodwill which will make the territory in parts of Africa and parts of Asia much more resistant to the nefarious types of schools that al Qaeda and similar ideological groups are trying to plant on their own
So in the end the struggle for hearts and minds and the ideological battle requires that we use all of the tools and all of the capabilities of government, hard and soft, tough and compassionate, and a concerted effort to make sure that we are presenting to the world the ideals that we cherish and that we are trying to defend
It is a long speech but there are a lot of challenges that we have to cover. I believe that we proceed in a deliberate way along all of these fronts, we are not going to eliminate the threats we face in the next year or the next five years, but we will be sound in ports that over time, at some point in the future, will lead to a triumph to the ideals of civilization that will be every bit as dramatic as what happened when the Soviet Union fell a couple of decades ago
There are other elements of the strategy in protecting and reducing our vulnerabilities and responding. Those I will charitably leave for another day and another venue. But I would say to you that, particularly those who are students coming out of school, we’re posed at the beginning of a new century, there are a lot of different ways to serve homeland security. Some of them will involve the traditional carrying a gun and exercising hard power, but there will also be important roles for those who want to carry out soft power
So there will be many opportunities for those who want to carry out the mission. What is important is that we do not lose our dedication to the mission, we do not lose faith in our ideals, and we do not lose our determination to prevail. Thank you very much.
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This page was last reviewed/modified on June 5, 2008.
