An American Lion

As much as it may pain someone who has supported the war on terror to admit it, the “law enforcement” model espoused by the likes of John Kerry seems to be the better way to combat terrorism:

Federal authorities unsealed terrorism-related charges against eight men Monday, accusing them of recruiting at least 20 young Somali Americans from Minnesota to join an extremist Islamist insurgency in Somalia.

The newly named suspects make up one of the largest alleged terrorist networks in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, analysts said. Assistant Attorney General David S. Kris said the government continues to investigate the alleged recruitment, and sources indicated that FBI and grand jury inquiries are active in San Diego, Boston and Columbus, Ohio, into the disappearance abroad of dozens of Muslim Americans since 2007.

The charges cap a year-long FBI investigation into the departures, most of them among men of Somali descent in their teens and 20s, to join al-Shabab, an extremist group with ties to al-Qaeda.

Al-Shabab opposes Somalia’s weak but internationally supported government and seeks instead a fundamentalist Islamic state under sharia law. It has attacked Ethiopian and African Union troops, targeted neighboring countries, pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and used al-Qaeda operatives to train American recruits, U.S. officials said. The State Department listed al-Shabab as a terrorist group last year.

Contrast this with maintaining a large military footprint overseas. We can’t go invade and occupy Somalia in order to deal with this problem, but what we can do is stop the recruiting that’s happening in this country.

Perhaps a hybrid method of fighting terrorism—using military forces to attack al-Shabab overseas while beefing up the resources of the FBI (although, to be fair, the FBI is long overdue for better leadership), would make more sense than feeding more U.S. troops into Afghanistan. We cannot continue to increase our overseas military footprint—but we can become more surgical and more law-enforcement oriented in our approach. We can borrow what works from the Europeans and we can reform our intelligence services once again—doing away with the unnecessary “Director of National Intelligence” position and using those resources to more fully staff the FBI and the CIA. We must have cooperation between the two, and since they won’t do it on their own, we must find a way to convince hidebound bureaucrats who husband their information to distribute it and share it and reap the rewards of fusing it with other sources. The goal is not to protect individual kingdoms; the goal is to protect the United States.