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OPINION:
The year 2025 began with a shocking ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on the homeland, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old Army veteran from Houston, drove a truck with an Islamic State flag into a New Year’s Eve crowd on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, killing at least 14 people. Law enforcement officials found weapons and an improvised explosive device inside the truck and rendered inert other
IEDs planted around the French Quarter.
Jabbar launched his preplanned mass-casualty terrorist attack against innocent civilians celebrating the new year. His tactics mirrored past terrorist attacks, such as the 2016 incident in which an ISIS terrorist killed more than 80 people by driving a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. In 2017, another ISIS operative drove his truck with an ISIS flag into a crowd of people, killing eight in Manhattan. Islamic State leaders have long been exhorting their followers to conduct mass-casualty terrorist attacks using trucks, in large part because no prior training is required.
Alarm bells should be ringing in Washington because terrorists now have our citizens in their crosshairs.
Now that they are responsible for designing and implementing an effective counterterrorism strategy, incoming Trump administration national security officials might consider rereading the 9/11 Commission report, which recommended, among other things, the creation of a director of national intelligence, the denial of sanctuaries for terrorist groups, stepping up efforts in the struggle for ideas and building a powerful coalition of allied partners.
That’s still the most effective counterterrorism playbook: “The farther backward you can look,” Winston Churchill once said, “the farther forward you can see.”
Today, the threat landscape appears as ominous as it did when CIA Director George Tenet, shortly before 9/11, warned the “system was blinking red” after al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, bombed two U.S. embassies in 1998 and launched the suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000.
The CIA Directorate of Operations, where I served for decades, produces human intelligence, the foundation for the agency’s all-source analysis on which effective counterterrorism relies. Tulsi Gabbard, nominated to be President Trump’s director of national intelligence, and former Rep. John Ratcliffe, the pick to be CIA director, will be tasked with making sure that the intelligence community is well-positioned with clandestine sources to detect and preempt threats to the homeland.
The roughly 3,000 U.S. troops forward-deployed in Syria and Iraq have an outstanding record of success in eliminating terrorist threats and denying haven to our enemies. But the Trump administration needs to reexamine our counterterrorism strategy for South Asia, where the past is likely to be prologue.
After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, terrorists have exploited ungoverned space to regroup and plot new terrorist attacks — just as al Qaeda did before 9/11. Having launched deadly attacks in Moscow, Istanbul and Iran just in the past year, ISIS has demonstrated a menacing capability to carry out operations far from its base. ISIS and al Qaeda are also expanding their power and influence in the Sahel region of Africa and the Middle East.
We need more and better human intelligence sources to disrupt terrorist finance networks, frustrate terrorist plots and conduct operations against our enemies when necessary.
Our closest allies and partners, especially NATO members, are powerful intelligence force multipliers. Terrorists, after all, operate across international borders, which means that we must actively seek out opportunities to share intelligence with nontraditional partners as well.
The CIA has a long history of overseas intelligence exchanges, even with adversaries like Russia. The Trump team should consider working with any foreign group — including Afghanistan’s Taliban and Syria’s newly powerful Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — to collect intelligence and target our mutual enemies.
While the U.S. military and intelligence community are focused more on the direct task of foiling terrorist plots, the State Department needs to use the country’s considerable global soft power to counter terrorist ideology. ISIS operates not only in geographic domains but also in cyberspace. Stopping ISIS attacks and eliminating their sanctuaries are equivalent to denying terrorists the oxygen they need to exist. But we also need to counter their extremist ideology, which enables the recruitment of lone-wolf terrorist followers such as the New Orleans killer.
The new director of national intelligence must ensure ordinary Americans are forewarned about terrorist tactics and that state, local and federal law enforcement cooperate with the intelligence community.
Preventing a terrorist attack is often like putting together an intricate jigsaw puzzle, except that some pieces are missing and others might be from other puzzles entirely. If you see something, say something. Never hesitate to report anything of concern to your local police or the FBI.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018.
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