Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

National Security Strategy and Policy:
Planning for and Responding to Threats to the U.S. Homeland

October 28-29, 2004
Ronald Reagan Building
and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Ambassador John R. Dinger
Deputy Coordinator for Counter Terrorism
Department of State

Introduction By: Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth

Ambassador John R. Dinger: Thank you. I really want to thank the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis for giving me this chance to speak to this conference on homeland security.

I have three points I want to make very briefly, but before I do that, I want to explain a bit about the office I work in, which is the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department. The Coordinator is Ambassador Cofer Black. He is charged with the overall supervision of all US government counterterrorism activities overseas. Cofer is a career CIA person, a very colorful figure. He was Director of the Counterterrorism Center at the CIA on 9/11, features prominently in most of the literature about that era.

The Coordinator for Counterterrorism ensures that all United States government efforts abroad conform to and advance to our national policies. We do our best to make sure that they make their maximum contribution to keeping America, Americans and our interests from being terrorized.

Much of our effort focuses on building the will and skill of foreign governments and peoples to fight terrorism, largely in their own interests. My particular part of that effort, as one of Cofer Black’s deputies, is to help the Pentagon develop its counterterrorism policies, plans and operations, and then in fact to help implement those. I do need to mention that we generally focus outside of Afghanistan and Iraq.

With that brief preface, what I want to take about five to ten minutes to cover are three things: First, I want to describe the regions where the US government is focusing its global counterterrorism strategy; second, I want to describe the key principle that underpins our counterterrorism approach throughout the world; and third, I want to describe very, very briefly the sort of counterterrorism assistance that America deploys to build the skills of foreign nations.

First, the regions where the US government focuses its counterterrorism strategy. It is obviously extremely difficult and dangerous to try to somehow rank order the regions of the world according to the terrorist threat that they pose to America. It’s also increasingly, tragically, and unfortunately clear that there are few, if any, regions where the threat of terrorism to Americans is absent or even low.

Nevertheless, one can try to use a grisly measure, the number of people or incidents in which terrorists have killed, injured or taken hostages, and of course especially those in which Americans’ interests are attacked. Doing that, a few regions emerge on any scorecard of terrorism. For example, the Middle East is always a focus. I probably don’t need to elaborate much on that.

In East Asia, terrorists kidnapped three Americans in the Philippines in May 2001; two were killed, one was rescued. A US soldier in the Philippines was killed in October 2002. And of rouse, there were the horrific bombings in Bali in October of 2002, and Jakarta in August of 2003.

In Africa, there were the attacks on our American Embassies in Nairobi and Dar Salaam in August 1998; the bombing of the Paradise Hotel in Mombassa in November 2002; and the kidnapping of European tourists in Algeria in 2003.

In Europe, horrific train bombing in Madrid.

In South America, the FARC holds three American hostages as meet, and a few months conducted a grenade attack against a popular restaurant in Bogotá.

And that brings me to my second and probably most important point I want to make today in this venue, and that is the fundamental principle that underpins our counterterrorism efforts everywhere in the world. The State Department recognizes, I think the American government recognizes that the success or failure of our global campaign against terrorism hinges on other nations, other nations being willing and able to fight terrorism. The record on that is very, very clear and compelling.

Since 9/11, there has been tremendous success rounding up terrorists worldwide. The President and the campaign frequently states, and it is commonly accepted, that some 75% of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has been captured or killed, and thousands of lower level operatives have met the same fate.

Outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, local forces have achieved virtually all of that success, albeit sometimes with considerable American assistance behind the scene. That includes the only two specific examples of success in the war on terrorism that the President mentioned in his State of the Union address in January. Those two examples were the capture in 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Hambali in Thailand, the head of Jemaah Islamiyah. Both were captured by local forces, albeit, I’ll say in this venue, reportedly with significant help from the United States.

While making that point, I also need to be clear, the United States will and has the right to use all elements of our national power to fight terrorists, including direct and unilateral US military strikes. The United States must be prepared, and I believe is prepared, to take direct, unilateral and preemptive action against terrorists who pose an imminent threat to our nation.

That having been said, we also need to recognize and acknowledge the clear evidence. Our direct action is not, has not, cannot, and should not be the solution to effectively and successfully fighting terrorism worldwide. The key effort simply must be to boost the capability of local governments, peoples and security forces to oppose and fight terrorism on their own soil, and in their own interest.

I want to just for a second move beyond building the skill of governments to fight terrorism and mention that it’s also essential to build the will of both foreign governments and peoples to fight terrorism. There has rightfully been increased talk recently about, on the one hand, eliminating eroding public support for terrorism, and, on the other hand, rebuilding public support for America around the world. Building the will of foreign governments and of foreign peoples to support America on important issues is a legacy mission of the Department of State. I strongly advocate that we pursue that effort on two tracks.

Track one is making an effort to reduce or remove support for terrorism amongst foreign peoples. Track two is slightly different; that is an effort to rebuild goodwill toward America. To my mind, track one needs to encourage foreign peoples to reject terrorism through what I call a “just say no to terrorism” campaign. It is clear to me that local governments and local institutions must be the messengers, must take those messages to their people, not the United States.

Separately, on track two, America needs to deploy our public and private resources to boost or rebuild goodwill toward America and lift our standing in world public opinion. That includes some government initiatives, such as the Millennium Challenge Account Initiative, but maybe even more importantly private efforts, perhaps by prominent and popular Americans to try to regain the ground that we’ve lost.

Given the brutal record of terrorist violence around the world, I want to go to the third topic and briefly describe some of the assistance tools that we deploy to build a capacity of foreign nations. First, I have to stress that there is no nation in the world where terrorism is not a top priority in our bilateral relationship. That having been said, we have no choice but to prioritize our counterterrorism efforts and assistance. We focus our assistance based on the past record I just described, and our best judgment about where assistance is needed and where it makes the most sense.

That leads us to focus more on some countries and regions than on others, but among the tools we have are counterterrorism training of local law enforcement forces, that’s something State does. We provide state-of-the-art computer name check capability to some countries to help them better control movement across borders. We offer financial systems assessment teams to advise and assistance nations to block terrorists’ financial transactions. Pentagon uses joint combined exchange training exercises with partner militaries.

And one important point I want to make is that our experience shows that when it comes to pursuing real life terrorists, often the most effective catalyst for boosting critically important cooperation, coordination and information sharing among countries in a region is just that, on-the-job training, pursuing real life terrorists, not seminars or training sessions or bringing people to regional centers for training. I believe that is, and is likely to continue to be the case with our cooperation with our neighbors in Canada and Mexico.

So I want to finish my remarks by just repeating the three main points I wanted to make: First, the record shows tragically but clearly that America has to pay attention to terrorism in every region of the world, near and far. Second, America recognizes that success or the failure of our campaign against terrorism depends on building the will and skill of foreign nations to fight terrorism, largely in their own interest. Third, America deploys a host of counterterrorism assistance tools to build that capacity.

That’s what I wanted to say in my opening remarks. I certainly look forward to the other presentations and to hearing your views.

Questions and Answers

JOE MILLIGAN: Thank you, sir. My name is Joe Milligan from the Navy International Programs Office. I had a couple questions, if I can try and squeeze them in. First, for the panel, are there any moves under way to develop and put in place a bilateral or multilateral strategy to address counterterrorism in the area of homeland security?

Also, for Ambassador Dinger, I'm curious as to what the level of State Department funding applied to international cooperation and counterterrorism is, and is there any move to increase or in fact to leverage DoD infrastructure?

AMBASSADOR DINGER: I must admit I deal with the Pentagon daily. As I said, one of my key roles is helping the Pentagon shape its strategy and role in fighting terrorism, and the issue of there is no strategy comes up all the time. I do believe this is a conflict of culture more than anything else where DoD does have, shall we call it, a robust planning system, JOPES, to which people in the Pentagon are extraordinary comfortable and when something doesn't appear in that sort of format, there’s a sense that there is no strategy. There is a very, very clear strategy, which I hope I outlined, that our main effort across the board in the United States government must be building the will and skill of foreign governments and peoples to fight terrorism, and we have a lot of tools to do that. It often does not, in fact generally does not look like the sort of strategies that DoD is most comfortable with. I'm not sure we will ever bridge that perception gap.

n terms of funding, I do not have numbers at my fingertip; however, I can tell you, I believe that the-- I mentioned terrorism training to law enforcement, and I believe that the pending request is for $100 million worldwide for what’s called antiterrorism assistance training, ATA.