During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama made a number of impassioned calls for the United States to move beyond the psychological scars inflicted by the September 11 attacks and to adopt a more mature and realistic approach to dealing with the threat posed by Al Qaida.
Calling on Americans to reject the "colour-coded politics of fear", he pledged to close Guantanamo Bay, to forbid the use of torture in interrogations, and to rely on the courts both civilian and military to try terrorist suspects. As a candidate, Obama made it clear that he believed it was time to move America's response to terrorism out of the shadows and to engage in a genuine dialogue with the Muslim world.
It is hard to reconcile the sweeping ambition of candidate Obama with the cautious baby-steps taken by the man who holds that office today. Almost two years after taking office, Obama has officially ended the use of torture in the interrogation of terrorist suspects; but on most other counts, he has come up empty-handed.
Guantanamo Bay is not closed; the US is no closer to developing a consistent policy on trying terrorist suspects in a court of law; and the dialogue with the Muslim world has sputtered out after his Cairo speech. Worse still, Obama has preserved some of the most misguided aspects of the Bush administration's approach to Al Qaida while defending the culture of secrecy that permitted its worse abuses like torture and extraordinary rendition to flourish.
Only days ago, the Obama administration defended in court the right of the CIA to conduct extraordinary renditions on terrorist suspects, which permits American officials to kidnap foreign citizens and secretly transfer them to third countries for interrogation. It has promised to insist on "diplomatic assurances" from its partners that torture will not be used, but these are, at best, unenforceable, and at worst, disingenuous. Those alleging mistreatment, the Obama administration has now argued, cannot be allowed to sue in civilian courts for fear of endangering national security.
Also against its campaign promises, the Obama administration has sought to block efforts to restore the rights of habeas corpus to detained suspects in foreign countries, thus entitling the US government to hold these suspects indefinitely in foreign jails or black sites without due process rights. This is in direct contravention to a Supreme Court ruling in 2008, which restored habeas corpus rights to prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay.
Rather than seizing the opportunity to push for new and creative legislation and policies to deal with the legal black holes created by his predecessor, Obama has quietly continued these policies all the while brushing off calls for accountability for Bush administration officials who initiated these misguided practices.
More worryingly, Obama has in some respects proven more willing to use force against terrorist suspects than Bush. He has increased the number of CIA-run drone strikes in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region. These strikes, while effective in targeting militants, have killed an unknown number of civilians.
They have been waged in the shadows, without public acknowledgment and without clear lines of authority or control inside government. By expanding the number and geographic reach of these strikes first deeper into Pakistan, then onto Yemen, the Obama administration may be inadvertently stirring hornet's nests that will generate even more terrorist attacks on the US.
We simply do not know what the potential blowback risks of expanding drone attacks worldwide are. Nor is it clear that the Obama administration has paused to take a measure of that risk. Such a policy may be effective in degrading the leadership structure of Al Qaida's cells, but it may also make the US a whole host of new enemies whose capacity for harm is scarcely understood.
It is hard to understand why this president — so eloquent and so capable of seizing teachable moments for other issues — has remained so muted on terrorism. His absence is especially notable now that, in many respects, public debate is moving backwards.
This gap between candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As I have argued before, he has made some important steps towards acknowledging the limits of America's influence abroad. But he has not managed to make a decisive break from the Bush approach to managing terrorism.
He has succeeded in changing the atmospherics of America's counter-terrorism policy; gone is the rampant fear-mongering of the Bush administration and the full-throated calls for a war on the forces of "radical Islam". But what has emerged in its place is neither a coherent policy nor a new conceptual approach for the problem of terrorism.
Michael Boyle is assistant professor of political science at La Salle University, Philadelphia.
