Despite progress against terrorism worldwide, conditions that allow groups like Islamic State and al-Qaida to spread their ideologies persist across the Middle East, and the risks of radicalization for potential domestic terrorists may be increasing, former White House counterterrorism chief Lisa Monaco told CBS News on Wednesday.
"The good news is that the threat as we saw it, post-9/11, of command-and-control, complex, foreign directed attacks is greatly diminished," said Monaco, who served from 2013 to 2017 as Homeland Security and counterterrorism adviser to President Barack Obama.
"The bad news is that the conditions that made it possible for al-Qaida to take root, that made it possible for ISIS to expand and occupy the territory to recruit and radicalize – all of those things still exist.”
Although terrorist attacks worldwide have declined, threats had grown more complex as ISIS lost territory and sought to inspire simpler assaults on Western targets.
Monaco said the U.S. government today is "not equipped" and inadequately focused on domestic terrorist issues in particular, saying “our political divisions, the ability for individuals to radicalize online… those conditions…are getting worse."
She criticized the Trump administration's decision to change the role she once held from one who reports directly to the president to one with less visibility, access and power, saying this reverses the pattern in existence since George W. Bush.
Monaco co-wrote an op-ed in November, after a series of domestic terrorism incidents, calling for the position to be restored to its previous stature
Monaco also said terrorists "recruit based on the theory that there's a clash of civilizations... We feed that narrative when we do things like the travel ban, when we criticize our NATO allies, and when we talk about retreat from multilateral organizations and agreements."
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