- For most of the last 20 years, the conversation about American National Security has been focused on the threats posed by extremists.

with the death of Al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Russia's war in Ukraine and rising tensions with China, today's guest argues that conversation has swung back to great power competition.

He's Javed Ali.

This week on Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music playing) (upbeat music continues) (music fades out) Hello, and welcome to a Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University, and I'm G. Wayne Miller with a Providence Journal.

This week we're joined by Javed Ali, an Associate Professor of Practice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

And he's joining us today from Ann Arbor.

Javed, it's great to see you.

- Jim, always great to be with you, and Wayne nice to be with you as well.

- [Wayne] Nice to meet you.

- So this week we marked the 21st anniversary of the attacks on 9/11.

When you look back on that 21 year period, how do you assess it?

- Yeah, it's been a long and winding road in counter-terrorism, both as a mission in my own insights personally, from what I was observing firsthand in that world, both before 9/11 and then subsequently afterwards to include being in Washington the day of the attacks and driving past the Pentagon about 30 minutes before American 77 hit it.

So where we are now in 2022, all these years later, I think we have crossed an inflection point in national security where counter-terrorism is no, or has, I would argue the past few years has no longer, or is no longer the number one dominant national security priority that just literally draws all of the time and attention and resources and capabilities of the US Government against the terrorist threats, mostly overseas.

So I think that moment for our country has come and gone and probably since the Trump years into 2020, and now here we are a couple years later, that the priorities in the landscape for national security has shifted.

Where counter terrorism's still important, but it is not the singular dominant issue the way it was for so many years after 9/11.

- And we're gonna get into that inflection point and talk a little bit about that in a moment, but I wanna keep us back in that post 9/11 era.

So much of American foreign policy was really redirected.

And I think in the context at the time there wasn't anybody saying, "Hey, we're over correcting here to concentrate on Al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorists", but did we over correct?

Were we too singular in our focus in those two decades?

- Well, I would argue in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we absolutely had to over correct to fix all the gaps and flaws and seams and vulnerabilities that Al Qaeda unfortunately exploited to pull off 9/11.

And if you were to go back and do a survey about what that landscape looked like for the US, it was daunting.

And that's when I joined government in 2002, and then my career started to progress in different departments and agencies.

But I would argue the first five to almost 10 years after 9/11, we were making the right choice with respect to trying to apply as much pressure as we could against Al Qaeda and then later in the decade in the 2000's against its affiliates, who were almost every day thinking about attacking the United States, the west, our interests, and our allies abroad.

And so the threat itself required us to make those choices.

Then we also had to harden the country as well, but retrospectively too, even though we made, I think the right philosophical choice, operationally and tactically, we made a lot of mistakes.

And that is, I think one of the lessons of 9/11 is that even though we were trying to do the right thing, there were times where we didn't do the right thing.

And if the same set of circumstances were to happen again, we should learn from our recent history and not do some of the things that didn't work out well, or got us closer to the line of civil liberties and privacy, both at home and abroad that we shouldn't go over, or morals and ethics.

So there's a lot to unpack in that.

But again, going back to my original point, I do think we made the right decision in that first decade, but there were some missteps along the way.

- So take us back in time in terms of your life, your professional life, what attracted you to national security in the first place, and counter-terrorism in particular?

What was it about the younger you that said, "I want to go there, I am going there"?

- Yeah, I actually gave a podcast.

I podcast to Michigan about this and last year in the run up to the 20 year anniversary and walked through some of those same insights from just my own personal background and how I got into it.

But suffice it to say it was quite an unusual experience for someone from my background as an American Muslim, growing up in Metro Detroit in the seventies and eighties and parents who are very educated and successful as physicians, to then break off into something completely different into this murky world of government service and counter-terrorism and the intelligence community.

I mean, nobody from my community and my background in those days had ever pointed in that direction.

So there was a lot of my own identity that was wrapped up into that.

And then having, because of my parents' heritage, being from India and having been on the ground in India and other parts of the world in the seventies and eighties into the nineties and seeing this very different experience for the people overseas, but also seeing the dark side of that experience, sectarian tension, political violence, terrorism, poverty, things that you just don't see on that scope and scale inside the United States.

And I think that was another factor that, even as a young person, drew me into that world.

The professional pathway didn't happen 'till later in life when I got to DC in the nineties.

But I think the decades before triggered that curiosity in me that was like I said, quite unique at the time I was growing up.

- So I have to ask you, what did your physician parents think when you made this career choice?

- Yeah, suffice it to say they were not happy.

(all three laughing) I mean the right way to put it respectfully, but they had sort of pinned their hopes on me, of carrying in the family footsteps and tradition of being a physician.

And as I like to tell my students now and other people, the apple couldn't have fallen farther from tree.

(Jim and Wayne laughing) I didn't have the smarts, the drive, the passion for medicine and science, the way they did.

And when I got to Michigan, my alma mater as an undergrad, and it was also clear that I wasn't going to do well academically on that path.

So I had to make some hard choices myself, even in college about shifting gears and disappointing my parents and trying to prove to myself and to them and others that I could actually do something else other than this pathway that had been laid out for me.

But it was tough for a while to get them to realize that there was this other reality for people from our backgrounds and from our community.

And hopefully over time I managed to convince them.

- Well, it certainly worked out.

And I'm good to hear, glad to hear that.

Getting back to the period after 9/11, is there anything, again, we have hindsight is 20/20, is there anything we, meaning America, could have done or should have done differently, again with 21 years having passed, what's your perspective on that?

- Yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of things we should not have done or at least should have thought through a little more carefully and deliberately and realized the pros and cons of some of these choices before we went ahead and made them.

And I've designed a counter-terrorism class at Michigan that walks through a lot of those policy choices and the impact.

I think one of them are some of those early decisions were made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

And some of these are still in effect.

Now one good example is the 2001 Authorization to use Military Force, which is still the guiding legal principle that allows the US Military and other parts of the US Government to engage in counter terrorism operations overseas.

That piece of seminal legislation, which again is still in effect today was passed by Congress in roughly five to six days, not a lot of advice, or debate and consent about something that would shape the way we engage the world in counter-terrorism for now more than two decades.

Another really controversial piece of legislation if your viewers remember at that time, was the Patriot Act also passed in October 2001, which unlocked a lot of capabilities for FBI and other parts of the intelligence committee to look at threats domestically, there are still some pretty rigid guidelines, but the Patriot Act certainly took down some of those walls that existed before 9/11, and the Patriot Act is also likewise still in effect with some modifications around it over the past 20 years.

Some other decisions that were made in those early days, the decision to use Guantanamo Bay as this detention facility from awful enemy combatants.

The Guantanamo is still a policy conundrum for the United States in 2022, with a much smaller pool of people still there.

I think about 36 or the number might be a little bit more than that, but again, what are we going to do with these, the smaller group of people who are still in US custody, have never seen the light of day from at least a trial perspective.

And then I still think the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003 is one thing that will continue to challenge us on the National Security front, because that was a war of choice.

It was not a war of necessity.

And I had an insight to that in my own career, in my first position.

So that's a brief snapshot of some of the things those early days after 9/11, that maybe we should have thought a little more carefully about making some of these decisions.

And again, the consequences for us as a country.

- Hey Javed you know that's an incredible overview.

And I think we could probably spend an hour talking about each of those things, but I wanna move us up to today.

This summer, the US Military killed the then current leader of Al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

What's your assessment of the of the Al-Qaeda and their affiliate threat to the United States today.

- So Al-Qaeda is a fascinating organization as the terrorism watcher.

I mean, this is a group that has been around formally since the late 1980s.

It was started in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.

He wasn't yet, al-Zawahiri at that point, wasn't yet bin Laden's deputy, but they were personally together and they were close and there were a lot of other jihadists in Afghanistan who would come in the eighties to fight first against a Soviet Union, as that conflict was ending, then a nucleus formed to come together with Al-Qaeda.

So this is a terrorist group that has a lot of staying power, but the Al Qaeda of 2022 is definitely not the Al-Qaeda of 1988.

It's not the Al-Qaeda of September 10th, 2001.

And it's not even the Al-Qaeda of May, 2011 when Osama bin Laden was killed by the United States.

So it's gone through a series of changes.

It is under a tremendous amount of pressure.

The amount of people who are left in that, what I call sort of, the Vanguard pool of people who were with Al-Qaeda in those early days in the late 1980s, that pool is really, really small.

It's not down to zero even with al-Zawahiri's death, but again, it is much, much smaller than it was in years past.

So one of the really interesting questions going forward is what will happen to the Legacy Al-Qaeda organization with the death of al-Zawahiri.

Is it on its last legs?

Will that strike trigger its eventual strategic collapse as a group?

Will it become defunct and go outta business?

I don't think that will happen, but again, it could, it's really hard to predict how these things will unfold, but even if that occurs with the Legacy Al-Qaeda which again, battered and bruised, perhaps in a pretty precarious state, if not in you know, final stages.

There are still five to six groups around the world that either have Al-Qaeda in their name or have sworn their allegiance to Al Qaeda.

And that is where the energy of Al Qaeda as a global sort of brand still is.

And there are groups in different parts of Africa.

There's a group still in Afghanistan, Pakistan, that's different from the Core Al Qaeda, or the Legacy Al Qaeda.

There's pretty strong Al-Qaeda presence in Syria.

And then there's still a pretty enduring Al-Qaeda presence in Yemen.

So this is a group that even if the core group continues to get whittled down, the affiliates are going to potentially continue to pick up the slack from the core organization.

- So in the immediate aftermath of the search of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence, there were reports of increased threats against FBI agents, the FBI and other law enforcement.

How do you assess that now?

How real are these threats and what can law enforcement do?

I mean, on a personal level, I'm just thinking if I were one of the FBI, and some of the individual agents have actually been threatened, what do we do about that?

- And Javed, I might just direct this a little bit broader to the whole issue of domestic terrorism.

- Yeah, and I'll try to connect those two pieces, Wayne and Jim.

So first as a former FBI employee, I served in the FBI from 2007 to 2018.

Even though throughout that stretch, I was on detail to other government organizations, but they paid me every two weeks, (Wayne and Jim laughing) so I was employee for that stretch of time, but there's really no other way to put it, And I've said this in other commentary, and I wrote an op-ed that got published a couple days ago on this.

It's outrageous.

The FBI should not have its personnel, whether agents, analysts like myself, other staff, feel like their personal security is now at risk for just doing their job.

Now on the one hand, the FBI as an organization should be held accountable when it makes mistakes.

And we have seen unfortunate examples in the past several years of FBI employees not operating the way they should and making mistakes with unfortunate results.

And when that happens, the FBI should be held accountable, where those people should be held accountable.

And Director Ray has said that himself, when these things happen, but at no time, should the FBI feel like it's under siege or under threat for just doing its job, like executing the search.

Now almost a couple weeks ago at former President Trump's residence.

And in terms of threats against FBI personnel to include last week, someone tried to attack the FBI Field Office in Cincinnati, which I still don't understand why someone would choose to do that, because of the risk to themselves.

And that person got killed in a shootout with law enforcement.

We haven't seen this kind of directed anger at the FBI, I would argue since the days in the aftermath of the standoffs at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco in 1993, where that anger inside the US from people who had grievances, who are already probably anti-government and now was reviewing the FBI as sort of a legitimate target to attack.

I think we haven't seen something like that for since almost 30 years.

And now it's sort of bringing back a lot of those memories and in terms of what people should do on the law enforcement side, or the FBI side, their antenna is up and their radar is up as it should be.

It is a crime to threaten Federal Officers using US Mail or other conveyances.

So people need to know that there are potentially consequences for issuing these threats.

Clearly, if you try to attack an FBI Agent or a facility, there are also consequences.

These are highly trained law enforcement officers who have guns on them.

So I mean, people need to realize that if you're going to be so bold as to issue a threat or try to conduct an attack, it is probably not going to lead to a good outcome for you as an individual.

And that attacker in Cincinnati last week died.

And then this week, somebody issued a very specific indirect threat against FBI personnel in Pittsburgh, and he was arrested within 24 hours.

So it's unfortunate that this kind of anger is getting drawn up again or being generated again, but again, there are consequences for people who choose to go over the line.

So hopefully cooler heads will prevail and this atmosphere gets better.

But right now things are pretty tense.

- Javed, you earlier mentioned an inflection point for American National Security Policy, where our focus has shifted from the counter-terrorism mission to really, again, reengage with great power competition and great power conflict, potentially with the likes of Russia and China.

What does that mean from a National Security perspective?

What does it mean for US Policy?

And if we can, you know in the next seven minutes that we've got here, what does it mean for you US citizens?

Start with whichever piece that you'd like.

- Yeah, that's a great question.

And this is something that the National Security Community has been struggling with, in the 2010's, so once we got after, or out of that first heavy counter-terrorism focus decade from 2001 to 2011, then the world was starting to change under our feet.

And in hindsight, I think it's fair to say that we were all sort of slow to realize that.

And Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, other challenges, started to rise to the fore.

And Jim, as you know, it's really hard for the US National Security Enterprise to change its orientation quickly and we're not as agile perhaps as we should be.

But by the mid 2010's, it was clear that those great power competition threats were now getting even more intense and counter-terrorism was still a really strong issue with the rise of ISIS.

But since then, I would think those lines have crossed.

And one really interesting way to signal that change was the Trump administration's National Security Strategy, which I think that was the first National Security Strategy in the post 9/11 era that signaled that, that era of counter-terrorism is winding down, or won't be as intense as it was previously.

And the era of great power competition is now rising in prominence.

And that was probably the right time to capture that in a document like the National Security Strategy.

Ironically, the Biden administration now almost a year and a half into its tenure has not issued its own National Security Strategy.

I thought it would've been out within the first year, but it's still not.

But I suspect whenever that document does come out, it'll continue that narrative that the Trump administration started that great power competition is the thing that is the most important National Security priority.

And we're seeing that through the lens of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all the tension with China over Taiwan or what the Chinese are trying to do against the United States even here domestically, COVID has been another game changer from a National Security perspective, climate change.

So there are all these other National Security issues that are competing with counter-terrorism and when the Biden document finally comes out, I think it'll be fascinating to see how far down the list counter-terrorism has fallen.

Hopefully it's still in the top five or the top 10.

We don't know because the document's not out, but I have to assume it's not going to be the number one threat the way it was for so many years after 9/11 in these other National Security Strategy documents.

- I'd like to return for a moment to the domestic scene.

These recent threats against law enforcement are one piece of the pie, as it were.

There are domestic terrorist individuals, organizations who threaten many other institutions, many other individuals, I'm thinking of black people who are targeted.

And we've seen obviously a long and very tragic history in that regard.

Can you give us an overview, putting aside again, law enforcement, which we already talked about, what else is going on here, A and B what is the government doing?

What are counter-terrorism agencies doing?

- So the United States has had a long history of domestic terrorism, even depending on your historical perspective, you can take it back to the 1860s with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan back then to the more modern era of the 1960s to where we are now.

And I've tried to look at both of those historical perspectives, but in the past, we've had competing waves of different types of domestic terrorist threats, both from the far left and the far right.

They're not monolithic.

And there are different sort of individual threats within these broader categories of far left and far right.

But I would argue where we are now in the United States, perhaps where we've been for the last 10 or 15 years, the domestic terrorism threat in the United States has been much more captured by a larger far right threat.

And within that far right, there are different strands.

There's a white supremacist neo-Nazi strand.

We saw the most recent tragic example of that.

The attack in Buffalo with the gunman who was a self avowed neo-Nazi, white supremacist.

So we know that threat is enduring here, and it's been enduring for quite some period of time.

We have an anti-government slash militia threat that came to light here in Michigan.

And if your viewers remember in the fall of 2020 with this audacious plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a lot of anti-government folks and militia folks were also present on January 6th to include individuals associated with groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys.

However you want to characterize them.

There are other odd types of far right extremism we've seen here, conspiracy theorists, like QAnon, this ideological movement known as the Boogaloo, which we've actually seen people mobilized to commit violent attacks or attempt violent attacks on behalf of this Boogaloo movement, which has anti-government and libertarian and strong pro second amendment ideas or philosophies baked into it.

So the diversity of the far right threat here in the United States is pretty significant.

And again, I would argue this phenomena has been pretty acute for the last 10 or 15 years.

And unfortunately, I think it's going to continue to stay high here, and that's why the Biden administration is trying to tackle domestic terrorism in a way that no other administration has done in the post 9/11 era.

And another way to signal that, last summer in June of 2021, the Biden administration released the country's first ever National Strategy on Domestic Terrorism.

So no other presidency in the post 9/11 era had done that.

Bush, Obama, and into Trump.

And I give the Biden administration a lot of credit for trying to tackle this head on.

And if you look at that strategy, it lays out these four pillars that the Biden administration is trying to drive some change and some new programs and initiatives.

So it's still early in the execution of that strategy, but at least there's a more strategic approach to this topic.

And hopefully it'll help eventually reduce the threat.

It's never gonna go down to zero, but it shouldn't be as high as it is right now.

But I would give the Biden administration high marks for getting that strategy out and then trying to put some of these operational pieces into place.

- That's where we need to leave it.

Javed, thank you so much for sharing that with us and for all that you do.

He's Javed Ali with the Gerald R. Ford, School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time.

For more Story in the Public Square.

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