Washington — The United States and its allies have made enormous progress in their battle against the Taliban; the mullahs at the head of Afghanistan's revolutionary regime no longer control the country. They have made some progress against al-Qaida; the training camps and sanctuaries of the terrorist group headed by Osama bin Laden have been destroyed.
Now the bigger question looms: By defeating the Taliban and routing the terrorists, how has the United States done in its war against terrorism?
The answer isn't only in financial networks disrupted, or airline-security measures implemented, or cargo port facilities hardened, or even in law-enforcement measures approved. In all of those areas, some progress has been made. But the United States, in mounting an aggressive battle against the perpetrators of terrorism (in this case followers of a violent, radical strain of Islam) and against the manifestations of terrorism (innocent civilians dead or injured, airliners taken over or bombed from inside), has taken almost no steps to challenge the ideology of terrorism.
Nor have the United States and its allies, justifiably obsessed with foiling the efforts of terrorists, drawn a distinction between the acts of terrorists and the ethos of terrorism or given serious thought to how to stop terrorism from evolving in the first place.
But now, deep inside the State Department, the faint beginnings of a new debate are emerging, a discussion over what causes terrorism, how to prevent those causes from taking root, and how to fight the conditions that lead to terrorism.
Until now, almost nobody inside the State Department or outside it has given this much consideration. The State Department is accustomed to looking at foreign-policy questions in bilateral terms, such as French-American relations, or in geopolitical terms, such as NATO's role in blunting the Warsaw Pact. It is staffed with diplomats, not sociologists.
But quietly, with no fanfare or notice, the State Department is beginning to ask why terrorism springs from nations where economies are closed, where political systems are closed and where opportunities are closed off. Some hushed voices are wondering, moreover, whether the greatest threat to world stability might not be nuclear proliferation but youth unemployment. (What the so-called "Arab street" has to say, for example, might be a lot less important than the fact that there is an "Arab street" and that it is so crowded with the idle and unemployed.)
Until that debate began, the prevailing view was that, to adjust a crude contemporary slogan, terrorism happens. And since September, the conventional wisdom has been this: The 9/11 attacks exposed the nation's vulnerabilities to the world, convinced the angry and the resentful, the irredentist and the irredeemable, that the United States was a fat and easy target, and before long al-Qaida or other terror entrepreneurs will strike the United States.
At home, the nation reacted by trying to foil such attacks, or to respond crisply to limit the damage. But abroad, the United States, as the lone remaining superpower, has hardly begun to think about eradicating not only terrorism but also the causes and ethos of terrorism.
The first half of the effort to prevent terrorist acts grows out of the conclusion that, as the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis put it, "the geographical position and the military power of the United States are no longer sufficient to ensure its security." Most Americans acknowledge that, as William A. Wulf, the president of the National Academy of Engineering, put it at a recent forum, there are "inherent advantages to terrorists" in a confrontation with an open society like the United States, advantages that the nation can best offset with vigilance and technology.
The second half of the effort to fight terrorism, not just terrorists grows out of a recognition that terrorism is a violent expression of political grievance that can be offset with a political response.
This is a conclusion that is familiar in other terror targets around the world. It is still fresh and tentative here, where the State Department is used to thinking that the word "confrontation" is most often modified by "nuclear" or "big-power." Even since Sept. 11, when everything was said to have changed, the administration's political efforts have been in constructing a coalition to fight terrorism rather than in constructing a strategy to prevent it from evolving or tactics to limit its appeal.
One of the road maps to that strategy is a remarkable report from the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded foundation and think tank, ignored when it was produced nearly three years ago but being circulated in Washington again. It is called "How Terrorism Ends," and in its first six words may be the beginning of all wisdom about terrorism: "The nature of the grievance matters."
David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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