The recent events in Times Square, over the skies over Detroit, at Ft. Hood, and the placement of a US citizen on a CIA blacklist as a clear and present danger to US security due to his involvement in these three incidents , reveal that the danger of Islamist terrorism in the Homeland is far from disappearing.

Yet nearly nine years after the 9/11 attacks, our counterterrorism agencies were shocked by these incidents and dismayed to discover that three of the four incidents involved US citizens. Furthermore, most high-level counterterrorism officials still feel stymied when asked to explain what radicalization is, how it happens, and how the country could better protect itself from homegrown terrorists.

How can this be?

The understanding of the reasons could well be explained by a report that was recently written by the head of intelligence operations in Afghanistan.

THE FLYNN REPORT:

In January 2010, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, released a policy paper titled: Fixing Intel: A Plan to Make Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan. This document reveals that US intelligence efforts in Afghanistan are largely irrelevant and bluntly states that:

“Eight years after the war in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to overall strategy. Having focused the overwhelming majority of its intelligence gathering efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus Intelligence is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they are trying to persuade.”

This document is not just another “paper”. It outlines the changes that need to occur throughout the intelligence hierarchy and states emphatically that its content is to be regarded as a directive by the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan.

General Flynn’s findings are based on the fact that an insurgency is fundamentally a competition for public support; The insurgents try, through propaganda, subversion and violence, to delegitimize the government in the eyes of the people, thus gaining their support, while the government tries to convince the population that its long-term interest lies in supporting the existing government institutions.

The document acknowledges that attacking the networks of fighters is absolutely mandatory and necessary, but states that “focusing only on armed networks undermines our ability to attack the very heart of the insurgency by understanding and gaining the support of the people, and not succeeds in advancing the war strategy”.

The report emphasizes at length that simply focusing solely on insurgent armed groups “…will not help US and allied forces win in Afghanistan,” and concludes that there must be a simultaneous effort by our intelligence agencies to acquire and provide knowledge about population, economy, government, and other aspects of the dynamic environment…”

THE FLYNN REPORT IS RELEVANT TO ALL US DOMESTIC COUNTER-TERRORISM POLICIES.

General Flynn’s revelations transcend the Afghan battlefield and are also relevant to our domestic counterterrorism policies.

Like their counterparts in Afghanistan, our national intelligence and law enforcement agencies have focused primarily on the threat posed by small armed jihadi groups.

While it is absolutely mandatory and necessary for our counterterrorism forces to identify and neutralize all violent terrorists, the emphasis on going after only armed terrorists or known associates of active terrorist groups like al Qaeda, to the exclusion of all else, negatively impacts our ability to defeat the enemy in the homeland.

The reason is that what we are facing is an international Islamist political insurgency, made up of people who, for the most part, do not commit violent acts but act as a huge international machine responsible for spreading revolutionary ideology that constantly creates new jihadists, activists, and those who support them.

It is this movement and its ideology that radicalizes and indoctrinates Muslims, and it is vital that US counterterrorism understand these groups and this ideology. To date, they have not.

For many radicalized Muslims, the first criminal act they commit is murder during their first jihadist attack. So unless we change our approach to include aggressive investigations of the movement’s organizations and political front elements, people like Adam Gadhan (al Qaeda spokesman Azzam al Amriki), Anwar al Awlaki (9/11 imam ), John Walker Lindh (the US Taliban), Commander Nidal Hassan (Ft. Hood massacre), Faisal Shahzad (Times Square bomber) and other homegrown terrorists will continue to radicalize and be inspired by violence, and we will be alerted to their presence only after they have participated in a violent act.

With the current counter-terrorism mindset and system, we lack the ability to be proactive in uncovering the very people and organizations that create the individuals who form the tip of the iceberg.