U.S. intelligence must declare ideological war on Islamist extremism, its likely new chief has declared.
The nominee for director of national intelligence, retired Vice Adm. Michael McConnell, told the Senate last week that the danger of a major Al Qaida attack in the United States remains high and that waging ideological war against Islamist extremism will be a top priority.
McConnell said current security rules are hampering efforts to hire people with specialized skills needed for countering Islamist extremists.
“Not many years ago, the intelligence community focused almost exclusively on foreign threats outside our borders,” he said. “What is new is the need to focus on these threats inside our borders. We must be effective in collecting and processing information to protect Americans from terrorism and to do so consistent with our Constitution, our laws and our values to respect the rights and privacy of our citizens.”
“We live today with security rules that literally were established in World War II and served us well in World War II and the Cold War,” McConnell told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The rules prevent intelligence agencies from using first generation Americans with native language skills from serving in certain sensitive posts in the intelligence community.
“My view is we're going to have to look at that very hard to reform it to do what you're talking about, to get inside, understand, and perhaps influence the ideological battle,” McConnell said. “It’s the ideological battle that's the bigger problem.”
Meanwhile a new study by the Rand Corp. also focused attention on the need for an ideological confrontation.
"To defeat the global jihadist movement, the United States should move beyond the boundaries of conventional counter-terrorism and seek to undermine support for Islamic terrorism within Muslim nations," Rand said in a two-volume report, "Beyond Al Qaida."
"Conventional counter-terrorism alone is not enough to defeat Al Qaida and other Islamic terrorist groups."
As Rand sees it, the war against Al Qaida must be no less than the Cold War. This means a total war against Al Qaida, particularly ways to undermine the Islamic movement. The United States must spend much of its resources discrediting Islamic groups, severing their links and help secular Arab and other regimes ready to cooperate.
"A successful campaign against Islamic terrorism requires: attacking the ideological underpinnings of global jihadism; severing ideological and other links between terrorist groups; and strengthening the capabilities of front-line states to counter local jihadist threats," Rand said. "If the ideology is countered and discredited, Al Qaida and its universe will wither and die."
The key is for the Bush administration to regard Al Qaida as a totalitarian group that borrows heavily from communism and Nazism. And that means that the U.S. intelligence community has to learn to manipulate the Internet, the main vehicle for jihadist groups for recruitment and fund-raising.
Indeed, a report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, N.Y. says training no longer takes place in Al Qaida camps, but rather in chat rooms and online forums.
