Has the War on Terror made the American people more safe Research Paper

Has the War on Terror made the American people more safe - Research Paper Example The paper tells that the arguments for and against the ‘War on Terror’ has generally made the American citizens safer because 1. Apart from certain legitimacy doubts, the US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are credited with moving the hostilities into enemy’s territory. 2. The drone attacks used by CIA and the US military, targeting terrorist leaders, groups and safe havens, have made terrorists more anxious about their safety, rather than plotting acts of terror. 3. The elimination of key al-Qaida leaders, most notably Osama bin Laden, has allowed the US an opportunity to â€Å"disrupt, dismantle, and ultimately defeat al-Qaida†. 4. The efforts to prevent terrorists from entering the United States and operating freely inside the US borders, as well as the massive investments in aerospace control, aviation security, and screening, and maritime and border security, considerably minimized the risk of terrorist actions. 5. Community engagement agai nst Islamist-inspired radicalization and recruitment, along with information sharing among the law enforcement organizations, deprive terrorists of their financial support and raw recruits. The ‘War on Terror’ has failed to make Americans safer because 1. Many homeland security measures have been designed to deal with large threats, whereas considerably destructive terrorist acts can be perpetrated by a small group or even a single individual. 2. The terrorist targets’ selection is quite often a random process, rather than a product of grand planning, which makes efforts to determine terrorists’ intent a bit problematic. 3. Protection measures have their negative effects, including direct costs, negative economic impact, inconvenience, fear and reduction of liberties. The reasoning behind the arguments for and against There are many speculations about the real impact the US military campaigns, most notably in Afghanistan, had on terrorist networks such as al-Qaida and its affiliates and adherents, and their capabilities to target the territory of the United States. The opponents of the Bush administration’s aggressive policy aimed at disrupting and degrading al-Qaida and its affiliates argue that the use of US military overseas did very little, if anything, to protect the American people at home. Their reasoning is broadly based on the assumptions that violence, more often than not, produces violence, and that pursuing terrorists is not the armed forces’ job. To a degree or another, such reasoning may have its merits because the civil casualties alongside the civilian property and infrastructure destruction caused by the American army strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as by the CIA’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan, could be hardly justified.