HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

The Kennedy School's Juliette Kayyem (center) makes a point during the panel discussion 'Five Years After 9/11: Understanding a Complex World.' Also on the panel were (from left to right) Professor Joseph S. Nye Jr., moderator; Baroness Kishwer Falkner, Institute of Politics fellow, Fall '06, and member, UK House of Lords ('04- present); Tad Oelstrom, U.S. Air Force lieutenant general (retired) and director of the Kennedy School's National Security Program; and Professor Samantha Power. (Staff photo Jon Chase/Harvard News Office)

Five years after the worst terrorist attacks ever on American soil, most members of a panel at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum suggested Monday evening (Sept. 11) that major strides in securing the nation against future terrorist attacks are being undermined by an aggressive foreign policy that has alienated many in the Muslim world.

Juliette Kayyem, a Kennedy School lecturer in public policy and former member of the National Commission on Terrorism, told the standing-room-only audience that while the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan disrupted al-Qaeda's capacity to target America, the subsequent invasion of Iraq "raised the temperature of the world."

Kayyem said America is safer today than it was on Sept. 11, 2001, but isn't as safe as it could have been under a more nuanced foreign policy.

Baroness Kishwer Falkner, a member of the United Kingdom's House of Lords and a fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics, said her country's intelligence and law enforcement security gains also have been diluted by its actions abroad.

"We are safer, yes, but we're also slightly less safe," said Falkner, a former member of Prime Minister Tony Blair's task force on Muslim extremism.

While he agreed with other members of the panel that America isn't entirely secure from terrorism, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tad Oelstrom said there was little doubt that the country is safer than it was five years ago when the World Trade Center towers crumbled in a dark cloud of smoke and debris. Oelstrom, director of the Kennedy School's National Security Program, said the government understands the threat far better now and subsequently is in an improved position to meet it.

But Samantha Power, Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, differed with the other members of the panel, claiming that the United States is less safe today, more than three years into a military occupation of Iraq that she said has eroded America's legitimacy and competency in the eyes of the world.

Falkner, the British lawmaker, said she can personally vouch for the disaffection stirred up around the world by American foreign policy in the wake of Sept. 11. While she once supported a policy of Atlanticism, emphasizing cooperation between Europe and North America, her views have shifted over the last five years to focus more on European collectivism, Falkner said.

"It's not just alienating potential friends of America. It is alienating existing friends of America," she said.

Kayyem said that the struggle against terrorists has, over the past five years, shifted largely into the intelligence and law enforcement realms. While what she called "zones of active combat" with terrorists persist in Afghanistan, there is no global "war on terror," Kayyem argued.

The notion of an ongoing war on terror has been used, she posited, to justify continuing government powers appropriate only in the midst of a major armed conflict such as World War II.

"What we need to do as citizens, as students, is accept that we will live with a certain amount of risk," she said.

Falkner agreed, saying she expects the United Kingdom to struggle with Islamic extremism for at least a generation.

Power said she remembered thinking on Sept. 11, 2001, that the attacks could push the nation in one of two opposite directions: toward greater empathy with the world or into a destructive cycle of fear and defensiveness. Five years later, she said, it's clear to her America has taken the latter path.

Oelstrom, who argued against immediately pulling American troops out of Iraq, said the country must do a better job of promoting its democratic credentials around the world.

"We need to figure out how to get our message out without forcing it out," the retired general said.

Moderator Joseph Nye Jr., a Kennedy School professor and former assistant secretary of defense for international security in the Clinton administration, rejected the notion that America is in the throes of an epic clash of civilizations with Islamic radicals.

"There's nothing Osama bin Laden and his colleagues would like more than to turn it into a clash of civilizations," Nye said, adding, "We cannot win unless the mainstream realm of Islam wins."