WHAT TERRORISM EXPERTS CAN LEARN FROM PUBLIC HEALTH EXPERTS
In the early
2000s, two events sowed fear in the United States and around the world: the
9/11 attacks in 2001 and the SARS outbreak of 2002 and 2003. In the years that
followed, the professional communities responsible for responding to these
threats, and informing the public about them, have followed two very different
paths. In the fight against deadly diseases, public health experts have sought
to balance the need for preparedness with their duty to avoid hyperbole, which
can lead to panic. National security experts should adopt this same ethos.
SARS started
in China and spread around the world, leaving hundreds of people dead. The
global public health community mobilized immediately to contain the
epidemic—and to manage perceptions of it. “SARS is a serious problem that needs
to be dealt with seriously. Yet our actions must be based on facts and
experience, not on fears,” Richard Schabas, the chief of staff at York Central
Hospital in Richmond Hill, Canada, wrote in an article for the Canadian Medical
Association Journal in 2003. “The response should not be worse than the
disease.” “We will continue to see new SARS cases, usually at relatively low
levels but with occasional flare-ups,” he continued. “In other words, we should
plan on getting used to living with SARS.”
As infections spread,
polls showed that SARS was a top fear among Americans, surpassing even
terrorism in apparent level of concern. In 2003, the director of the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave regular press briefings
aimed to communicate a “common sense and prudent recommendations from a public
health perspective without causing unnecessary fear and panic or overreaction
in the public.” Public health specialists debated how “to reconcile the tension
between the public’s health and individual rights to privacy, liberty, and
freedom of movement.”
During the
Ebola outbreak in 2014, this pattern repeated: The director of the CDC
reassured Americans the virus was “not going to be a huge risk in the U.S.”
Public health experts debated [ how “to ensure that sound science drives public
health decisions and that civil liberties and individual privacy are not
eroded.” At moments like these, public health professionals are responsible for
addressing low-odds, high-impact threats to public safety—just the sorts of
threats that terrorism experts face. But public health experts at the highest
levels of the profession have long tried to balance preparedness and panic and
routinely reflect on whether that balance has been achieved.
Terrorism
experts, by contrast, have not by and large adhered to similar approach. In the
wake of 9/11, many national security professionals issued assessments claiming
that the world had entered a new era of repeated mass casualty attacks. Fears
of such attacks—especially those carried out by Islamist revolutionaries—rose
dramatically. Many of those fears were not borne out, and the expert community
made comparatively little effort to mitigate public anxiety and took little
professional responsibility for examining the failures of their predictions.
In 2003, at
the same time as the SARS crisis, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller told
Congress that the bureau strongly suspected the presence in the United States
of several hundred extremists linked to al Qaeda. As it turned out, by the Justice
Department’s own accounts, fewer than a dozen people in the United States were
convicted in subsequent years for links with al Qaeda (though such links may
not have been made public in an unknown number of additional cases). Terrorism
makes up a very small portion of the violence in the United States:
approximately one-tenth of 1 percent of the country’s 280,000 murders since
2001. Every incident of terrorism is a tragedy. It is fortunate that such
tragedies have been relatively rare. Terrorist attacks by their very nature
leave deeper scars on society than other forms of violence. But that doesn’t
make them likelier. The U.S. government has not revealed any conspiracies on
the scale of the 9/11 plot, despite assigning thousands of officials to counterterrorism
investigations.
Yet Mueller
never withdrew his threat assessment. In 2006, he turned to the idea of an
evolving terrorist threat driven by “smaller, more loosely-defined individuals
and cells” that “may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al Qaeda, if not
more so.” He repeated this formulation many times through the end of his tenure
at the FBI, and the doctrine of evolving threats was taken up through the
national security profession, along with the implication that current threats
were just as dire as that of 9/11.
In 2011, after
years without significant terrorist plots in the United States, Secretary of
Homeland Security Janet Napolitano warned: “The terrorist threat to the
homeland is, in many ways, at its most heightened state since 9/11.” Jeh
Johnson, her successor, testified in 2016 that the Islamic State’s online
recruitment constituted “a new phase in the global terrorist threat, requiring
a whole new type of response.” In 2017, after the Islamic State had lost most
of its territory and the pace of terrorism had slowed, Elaine Duke, the acting
secretary of homeland security, testified: “Today, the magnitude of the threat
we face from terrorism is equal to, and in many ways exceeds, the 9/11 period.”
These
officials viewed preparedness as their primary mission. But this sole focus
missed other priorities that are standard in the field of public health,
including a commitment to empirical evidence—responses to a threat must be
proportional to the evidence of the threat, rather than fear and speculation,
and these responses must constantly be reviewed and recalibrated as new
evidence emerges.
In recent
years, the number of terrorism plots and attacks—especially those carried out
by Islamist radicals—has declined dramatically, both in the United States and
globally, according to the Global Terrorism Database at the University of
Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to
Terrorism. The U.S. State Department has also reduced its estimate of the size
of foreign terrorist organizations. Yet terrorism professionals have not
updated their policy recommendations. Instead, the notion of evolving threats
has continued to justify the expansion of counterterrorism policies and
security agencies, regardless of the actual scale of terrorism. The Department
of Homeland Security budget, excluding disaster relief, doubled between fiscal
year 2006 and fiscal year 2018.
An evenhanded
approach to national security, drawing professional and ethical lessons from
the field of public health, would include conferences and research exploring
why terrorism never lived up to the threat assessments issued after 9/11 and
how to avoid overreactions in the future. It would ensure that national
security publications, testimony, and public statements avoid hyperbole and
correct the public record when policymakers exaggerate. It would propose
policies and resource allocations that are calibrated to the scale of the
threat, rising when threats rise and shrinking when threats shrink, even if
that means cutting the budgets of the experts’ own organizations.
There will be
more terrorist attacks. Terrorism cannot be eradicated completely, just as
other forms of violence cannot be eradicated completely. After each tragedy,
national security experts have a duty to use their television interviews,
social media accounts, and op-eds—whatever influence they may have—to help
rebuild the public resilience that has been damaged by the doctrine of evolving
threats.
Source: Foreign
Policy – 28 September 2019
By: Charles Kurzman
By: Charles Kurzman
"Bersama
Menentang Ekstremis!"
IKUTI
KAMI 👇
https://facebook.com/alhaqcentremalaysia
https://twitter.com/alhaqcentre
https://instagram.com/alhaqcentre
Comments
Post a Comment