Are We Safe Yet?
A Foreign Affairs Roundtable
Article Summary and Author Biography
In this special feature, James Fallows, Fawaz Gerges, Paul R. Pillar, and Jessica Stern respond to John Mueller's article "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?" from the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs and assess the state of the "war on terror" five years after 9/11.
This article appears in the Foreign Affairs eBook, "The U.S. vs. al Qaeda: A History of the War on Terror." Now available for purchase.
Snapshot
The Taliban and al Qaeda may not pose enough of a threat to the United States to make a long war in Afghanistan worth the costs.
Paul R. Pillar is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is a retired intelligence officer who served as deputy chief of the counterterrorist center at the CIA and as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.
Fawaz A. Gerges is the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global.
Jessica Stern is Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill.
James Fallows is National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. His most recent book is Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq.
John Mueller is professor of political science at Ohio State University and the author most recently of The Remnants of War. His next book, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, will be published by Free Press in November.
