Shortly after the recent terrorist attack in New York City, Governor Cuomo referred to its perpetrator as a “lone wolf,” a term frequently invoked after such incidents. Frederick W. Kagan finds the phrase “profoundly misleading,” not least because police have already been searching for an accomplice:
[One] impetus behind this now almost-instinctive denial of foreign terror connections comes from the Obama administration’s intensive efforts to sustain the notion that it had defeated al-Qaeda long after it had become apparent to careful analysts that this was not the case. This effort spawned the popular “lone-wolf” thesis. . . .
This matters because Americans must change the way they understand the terrorist threat at home. There will be an increasing number of people radicalized within the U.S., conducting attacks that are not directly ordered or controlled from overseas.
Eliminating terrorist safe havens in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sahel [region of Africa] will not end the problem of domestic terrorism. But allowing them to continue to flourish will unquestionably make it much worse. Safe havens give groups places to develop and transmit the messages that radicalize people in the West, as well as to perfect and propagate methods of carrying out attacks. They are, above all, evidence to those who seek it that these groups and their ideas can win.
The anti-terror strategy we’ve been following for a decade—and which the current administration is largely continuing—is failing and must be replaced. Rather than dismissing the most recent attack as yet another “self-radicalized lone wolf,” and thereby separating it from the global Salafist-jihadist problem, let’s take it as a call to reevaluate our overall approach to the problem and find more successful ways to ensure the security of the American people.
Read more on AEI: http://www.aei.org/publication/kagan-on-nyc-terror-attack/