America’s National Security Strategy is changing.

Last week the New York Times published an article detailing the Pentagon’s plan to shift focus away from international terrorism, known under the previous administration as the Global War on Terror, towards larger strategic threats to the United States such as destabilized governments and mass refugee crises provoked by climate change. Most in the defense establishment welcome this shift in strategy, but the threat from terrorism still remains.

This time, however, there is a difference. The terror threat comes largely not from foreign nationals but from Americans.

In 2009 almost 70 Americans, including police officers and medical personnel, have been killed by domestic terror attacks. This is a breathtakingly sharp rise from 2008, when only two people lost their lives, both of whom died at the hands of anti-Liberal terrorist Jim D. Adkisson in Tennessee. The first attack in 2009 was in Samson, Alabama, when Michael McLendon went on a cross-county shooting rampage that killed 11 people including himself. The most recent was on June 10, when James von Brunn opened fire inside the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, killing one guard and wounding several others.

While each of these attacks is unique, they can be roughly broken down into a handful of categories. In this piece, we will explore these terrorist archetypes, the ecosystem that produced them, as well as common tactics, both harmful and helpful, used to counter them. The intention is to provide students, analysts and researchers, with a sound and coherent image of the domestic terror threat facing the United States.

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Today’s Comment Is Free has a useful overview piece by Jason Burke which considers the involvement of al-Qaeda in conflict-strewn areas of Pakistan. As always it’s a complicated relationship, with al-Qaeda’s ‘global’ jihadis tapping in to local militancy and vice versa. Among Burke’s findings (apparently sourced from insiders in the Pakistani intelligence community):

• Al-Qaeda may have operational links with Lashkar-e-Taiba (of the November Mumbai attacks) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (of the Sri Lanka cricket attack in March).
• Relationships between al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban are more personal in nature- fighting in the region is less about al-Qaeda-style global jihad and more about the “disintegration of local tribal social hierarchies and values in recent decades, the radicalising effect of Western operations in Afghanistan, generalised mobilisation in much of the Islamic world, collateral damage resulting from US drone strikes and a very local dynamic pitting one valley and one tribe against another.”
• Foreign ‘al-Qaeda’ militants are becoming involved so they can utilise the chaotic situation to regroup and- at least in theory- work to further their own more global aims.

The whole article is worth a read.

Tags: al-Qaeda, Comment is Free, Guardian, Jason Burke, jihad, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Lashkar-e-Taiba, militancy, Mumbai attacks, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taliban, Terrorism