| Chapter 1: | The Challenge of Global Terrorism |
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The Problem
The relationship between the use of preemptive force, as a strategy of government, and subsequent terrorist activity, especially transnational terrorist activity, is a matter of considerable importance in the context of the current and ongoing military effort known as the Global War on Terrorism or, more briefly, the GWOT.14 From the Cold War through the 1990s, U.S. security policy was based largely on strategies of containment and deterrence. Although force in the form of preemptive military strikes was used after attacks on U.S. interests in the 1990s, such strikes were only used episodically and were not at the center of U.S. security policy. Moreover, they were conducted largely as tactics within the larger strategy of containment and deterrence.15 In this environment, transnational terrorism, as a form of calculated politically motivated violence mounted by substate actors on U.S. or other foreign targets, was a relatively low-level security concern.
This situation changed with the September 11, 2001, attacks by al Qaeda on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. In the aftermath of September 11, transnational terrorism moved to the center of U.S. foreign policy, and in a departure from the strategy of deterrence, the Bush administration began to articulate a new strategy of preemptive force in reference to the threat of what it called “global terrorism” or “terrorism of global reach.” A basic assumption behind this shift in strategy was the notion that terrorist operatives and resources needed to be taken out, preemptively, before they could mount attacks.16
Within days of September 11, President Bush declared a “Global War on Terrorism” and called on the world’s countries to join him. Within a month of 9/11, he led a coalition of troops to Afghanistan with the express intention of hunting down al Qaeda operatives, taking out their training camps, and toppling the Taliban regime that supported them.