Countering al-Qaeda’s Ideology: Re-assessing U.S. Policy Ten Years After 9/11

Created as part of the 2011 Jackson School for International Studies SIS 495: Task Force. The Honorable Adam Smith, Task Force Advisor; David Kilcullen, Evaluator; Sam Combs and Annie van Hees, Coordinators.The U.S. has made sweeping changes to its national defense strategic goals and objectives since 9/11. In response to the rise in prominence of al-Qaeda and it‘s extremist ideology, the U.S. established the Department of Homeland Security, created the Office of Director of National Intelligence, and adopted new legal definitions for detention and interrogation policy. The U.S. has expanded intelligence-gathering and information-sharing mechanisms and learned to fight an enemy that wears no official uniform, that has no borders, and that represents no sovereign state. During the same period the U.S. government launched military contingency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, deploying hundreds of thousands of troops