Concessions to the population centers from which terrorists drew proved important in fighting terrorism in the past. It will be far harder to accomplish these today. European governments did not make direct concessions to left-wing groups, but pro-union policies and political parties that favored social freedoms that impressionable youth embraced often took the wind out of the radical Left’s sails. Spain granted considerable autonomy to the Basque region, and the British government showered development spending on Northern Ireland while drafting a political deal that ensured Catholic rights. In the Middle East, however, the radical constituencies do not want political reform and are likely to exploit any relaxation of police states to expand their operations.

Key adversaries today also have a different focus than did those even a few years back. Although the Islamic State seeks to kill Americans and Europeans, its primary focus is on the Middle East. It seeks to defend its self-proclaimed caliphate and expand it. The group’s regional enemies—Hezbollah, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and so on—consume much of its energy. It has enough capacity to attack Europe and inspire attacks on the United States, but the bulk of its efforts are local. In contrast, Al Qaeda devoted far more attention to striking the United States—what Bin Laden called “the head of the snake”—and its allies in the West. Today, what’s left of Al Qaeda is also more regional. Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (Al Qaeda’s Syrian and most important affiliate, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra), recently announced it was severing ties with Al Qaeda and would not attack the United States in the hopes of working more closely with, and eventually uniting, other Syrian opposition groups.

Yet even though Al Qaeda and the Islamic State’s priorities are more local than global, their operations are vast. In the past, few groups could sustain a truly transnational presence. In contrast, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have local allies—what the Islamic State would call “provinces”—throughout the Muslim world. Operations by these groups draw attention to the group’s struggle and enable it to expand its war. Al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate, for example, almost succeeded in downing a U.S. passenger plane in 2009, while the Islamic State’s province in the Sinai downed a Russian plane in 2015, killing 224 people.

Technological changes have made such vast operations more feasible. Anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan struggled to produce a magazine that glorified their cause, and it took years for word of their struggle to spread. A decade later, Al Qaeda would command operatives around the world from Afghanistan while issuing videos to the world’s media. The Islamic State put all this on steroids, issuing a vast stream of propaganda in at least twenty languages from Syria and exploiting social media to recruit and direct its operatives. The United Nations estimates that thirty thousand foreign fighters have gone to Iraq and Syria—more than all jihads in the past combined. Older groups also embrace information technology: Hezbollah even operates a television station. Terrorist groups can communicate—and thus direct recruits, proselytize and fundraise—far more easily and cost effectively than their predecessors. Such technology has also enabled the Islamic State to aggressively employ so-called “lone wolves”—individuals not directly under its command, but inspired by its message—to strike at the United States and Europe.

By far the biggest change is the linkage between terrorist groups and the control of territory. Hamas controls Gaza, Hezbollah has de facto sovereignty over much of Lebanon, Al Qaeda affiliates like al-Shabaab in Somalia rule over parts of their country and, of course, the Islamic State at its peak in 2014 ruled lands roughly the size of Great Britain. Locals have regularly welcomed these groups even though they abhor their ideology. After years of civil war and anarchy, locals often embrace any form of law and order, no matter how extreme.

Such a shift is part of why these groups often have a more local and regional focus: having to run a government, enforce law and order, and provide services, even on a limited scale, is a drain on resources and time. In addition, groups often want to expand these havens while many are often under attack, requiring large military forces to defend them and claim more territory. Defeating such terrorist groups is difficult because they have more supporters and engage in a wide range of activities beyond just terrorism. Hezbollah is not just five guys in an underground cell seeking to construct a bomb: it also runs hospitals, schools and government ministries.

Terrorism’s success often depends on the reaction of the government it is fighting and the foreign audience it seeks to influence. And here too the situation has changed, this time much for the worse. Since 9/11, keeping the U.S. homeland safe from mass-casualty terrorism is an understandable priority by which every president should be judged. But this concern has expanded to defining success as stopping all attacks on all Americans everywhere. The killing of three Americans at the Boston Marathon in 2013 shut down the city. After the attack, the House Committee on Homeland Security understandably launched an investigation, but, in a letter to the administration, the Republican committee leadership immediately claimed the failure to prevent the attack raised “serious questions about the efficacy of the federal counter-terrorism efforts.” One minor and amateurish attack, apparently, means failure. Even preventing limited strikes in dangerous areas like the 2012 attack in Benghazi that killed Amb. J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans are political footballs. In contrast, Ronald Reagan suffered no major political penalty—and people rightly see him as tough on terrorism—despite Hezbollah attacks on U.S. Marines and diplomats in Lebanon that killed hundreds as well as the deaths of 270 people from Libya’s downing of Pam Am 103 in 1988. Americans are in no mood to accept that small attacks are difficult to prevent, that diplomats should be stationed in dangerous areas and that low levels of terrorism at home are a sign of success, not failure.

 

THE NEW administration’s counterterrorism policies must preserve the best of the Obama administration’s efforts while meeting the evolving challenge. Building on the post-9/11 efforts of the Bush administration, the Obama administration has developed a combination of global intelligence gathering, security-service disruption and targeted strikes (often by drones) that has hit terrorist groups, especially Al Qaeda, hard. In areas where governments are strong, the United States works with partner security services to monitor, detain, arrest and jail suspected terrorists. In places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, drone strikes on terrorist leaders eliminate hard-to-replace bomb makers and logisticians, and force those who survive into hiding. Together, such efforts make it far harder for hunted groups to engage in a global terrorism campaign: their members are often arrested worldwide, training becomes more difficult and exercising command exposes them to drone strikes. Indeed, part of the reason that Al Qaeda and now the Islamic State turn to lone wolves is because it has proven difficult to use more organized terrorists to strike the United States.

In addition to continuing this campaign, the United States must exploit technological change as well as recognize the technological realities it cannot change. Although the United States can and should push technology companies to hinder egregious terrorist recruitment and operations, protecting the right of free speech and the proliferation of communications technologies remains a boon for groups that cannot be avoided. Terrorists will use the technology of their times, as it grows more advanced, so will they; on the other hand, the United States can take advantage of terrorists’ social-media output and otherwise use their digital footprints to track them. Such efforts are vital for identifying and stopping lone wolves, whose only indication of an impending attack might be a tweet or Facebook post that brings them to the attention of security services.

The biggest challenge for fighting terrorism today, however, concerns the control of territory. In areas where civil wars rage, the United States will have to step up and improve training programs for allied militaries and substate groups. America needs more competent good guys—or at least less-bad guys—to support in the Middle East and other danger zones. Such forces are necessary to push back the Islamic State and other groups on the ground and, even more difficult, to hold the territory as these groups respond with renewed attacks and guerrilla operations.

Addressing territorial control in the long term requires a fundamental shift from the Obama era. The Obama administration aggressively hunted terrorists throughout the Greater Middle East and Africa, yet remained hesitant to become bogged down in the swamp of Middle East politics. The result was an aggressive campaign to kill and arrest terrorists that was often divorced from the environment that allows them to breed and expand: civil war. Ending civil wars must feature centrally in future counterterrorism policy.

Such a recommendation is easier in spirit than in practice. Military training programs in Syria and Iraq have often failed disastrously. After months or even years of training, U.S.-aided groups have fled in the face of the enemy. When the Islamic State took Mosul in June 2014, some thirty thousand well-armed Iraqi forces fled the city in the face of one thousand Islamic State fighters, leaving massive amounts of equipment behind, including Abrams tanks as well as small arms and ammunition. The Islamic State’s expansion occurred, in part, because Iraqi military forces were primarily Shia and had little interest in defending local Sunnis, many of whom viewed them with hostility. In Sunni areas such as Mosul, residents often regarded the army as a puppet of Iran. The Iraqi officers did not command the respect of their troops and lacked professionalism. When they fled the battlefield, their troops quickly followed.