Taking a noticeably darker tone than President Obama, CIA Director John O. Brennan warned Monday that the Paris terrorist attacks were not “a one-off event” and that intelligence officials anticipate the Islamic State has other sophisticated plots “in the pipeline.”
While Mr. Brennan said authorities are still trying to confirm the extent to which the Islamic State’s Syria- and Iraq-based leadership played a role in Friday’s deadly coordinated attacks, his remarks on the extremist group as a whole were notably tougher in tone and more alarmist than almost simultaneous comments President Obama was making at an international summit he was attending in Turkey.
Not only has the Islamic State — also known as ISIS or ISIL — succeeded in “setting up franchises” in South Asia, Africa and Mideast nations beyond Syria and Iraq, Mr. Brennan said the jihadist group “has developed an external operations agenda that it is now implementing with lethal effect.”
“I certainly would not consider [Paris] a one-off event. It is clear to me that ISIL has an external agenda that they are determined to carry out these types of attacks,” the CIA director said.
“This is not something that was done in a matter of days. This is something that was deliberately and carefully planned over the course, I think of several months — in terms of making sure that they had the operatives, the weapons, the explosives with the suicide belts — and so I would anticipate that this is not the only operation that ISIL has in the pipeline.”
At the same time, Mr. Brennan told a Center for Strategic and International Studies audience the analysts are still awaiting “confirmation of culpability” for the Paris attacks, although he asserted the incident bore the “hallmarks of terrorism carried out by [Islamic State], an organization of murderous sociopaths that carries out its criminal and morally depraved actions under bogus religious pretense.”
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In some ways his remarks aligned with comments that President Obama made Monday in Turkey, where he is meeting with other world leaders at the G-20 Summit.
Overall, however, the CIA director’s assessment of the threat posed by the extremists was notably more intense and grave than what Mr. Obama had to say.
While the president described ISIL as “the face of evil” and asserted that his goal remains to “degrade and ultimately destroy this barbaric terrorist organization,” he was also quick to defend current international efforts to contain the group, claiming that “both in Iraq and Syria, ISIL controls less territory than it did before.”
“Of course, the attacks in Paris remind us that it will not be enough to defeat ISIL in Syria and Iraq alone,” Mr. Obama said.
But he offered few details on what new steps might be taken in the international fight against the extremists, and rejected the idea that the U.S. had to change its basic strategy in light of the Paris attacks.
“We have always understood this would be a long-term campaign,” Mr. Obama told reporters in Turkey. “There will be setbacks and there will be successes. The terrible events in Paris were obviously a terrible and sickening setback.”
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“Even as we grieve with our French friends, however, we can’t lose sight that there has been progress being made,” he added.
Mr. Obama also rejected calls for deploying a large number of Western military forces to fight ISIL on the ground.
“Let’s assume that we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria, what happens when there’s a terrorist attack generated from Yemen? Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya perhaps? Or if there’s a terrorist network that’s operating anywhere else in North Africa or in Southeast Asia?” he said in response to a reporter’s question. “A strategy has to be one that can be sustained.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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