The Foreign Service Journal, March 2017

26 MARCH 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Terrorism: One Aspect of Wider Security Challenges For much of the past two decades, global security has been defined in the context of terrorism. We in DS know terrorism. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security was created in 1985 to more comprehensively address terrorism in the wake of the Beirut bombings in the early 1980s. In our country’s history, there have been numerous acts of terrorismdirected against State Department personnel, including the murder of Ambassador John GordonMein in Guatemala City in 1968; the bombing of U.S. Embassy Beirut in 1983; the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and, more recently, the attacks that led to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three brave colleagues in Benghazi in 2012 and Anne Smedinghoff in Kabul in 2013. In September 2015, DS dedicated a memorial wall that publicly honors 144 individuals who lost their lives in the line of duty while protecting U.S. dip- lomats—the majority of them international partners killed in terrorist attacks. But we cannot attribute the security threats we will continue to face simply to terrorism. Instead, terrorism and militant groups are better understood as extreme responses to a collision of long-term social and eco- nomic trends. Yes, terrorism is and will remain an issue. It will focus our diplomatic and military attention at the tactical level, as we work with international partners to fight groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. They will be defeated. Their fighters almost certainly will be driven from battlefields in Iraq and, ultimately, from Syria. But they won’t be defeated by a mas- sive, unilateral U.S. military invasion. They’ll be defeated through diplomacy, through painstaking bilateral and multinational commitments and counter-commitments. It will be incremental, complex and, in the end, successful. Historically, every time collective powers smash armies fielded by non-state actors—e.g., the Taliban, Hamas, ISIL—that apparent battlefield victory doesn’t end the problem. It also cer- tainly doesn’t end the grievances that ignited the confrontation in the first place. By definition, non-state actors cannot sign cease- fire agreements and postwar treaties. They do not control a state or society, so they cannot turn the government and security of a state’s population over to a victorious power. Instead, their fight- ers disperse. Well-trained, well-organized fighters who were once more or less consolidated in one place now scatter into commu- nities and safe havens where they cannot be tracked. Their griev- ances fester and become more hardened in defeat. They turn to asymmetric warfare, a battlefield on which traditional militaries have a mixed track record. So terrorism is one aspect of a wider set of challenges that we as a nation face. And in all likelihood we will still be facing these challenges five, 10, 15, 20 years from today, even as the chal- lenges continue to evolve and new, unforeseen risks present themselves. At the same time, our nation traditionally favors diplomatic engagement ahead of military intervention. That means send- ing more diplomats directly into high-risk situations, asking new officers and seasoned vet- erans alike to live and work on the front lines of diplomacy, in situations where institutional structures have collapsed, and societies and communities are in turmoil. This makes our embassies and missions more essential than ever. At the same time, diplomacy has evolved into much more than formal office calls. We are sharing intelligence where appro- priate, training police, conducting humanitarian work and foster- ing good governance to chip away at corruption. But we are doing all of this in countries with higher levels of instability where, a decade or two ago, we might not have engaged at all. Today, too, diplomacy and international engagement involve much more than the Department of State. There are the capacity-building ele- ments of the Department of Defense. There is the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the intelligence community, the Commerce Department, the Federal Aviation Administration, the development community and numerous others. A good example is the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In the distant past, U.S. embassies in hot spots may have hun- kered down or sent home nonessential personnel. Instead, we reinforced our embassies in West Africa and provided a secure base of operations for an interagency, international response. In Monrovia in the summer of 2014, an influx of personnel meant If we want to continue protecting our citizens by having a positive influence in a dangerous world, we need to find ways to maintain a meaningful presence in increasingly unstable situations.