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Last month, Trump was looking to hold peace negotiations, but called them off after the Taliban took credit for the car bombing that killed an American servicemember.

One factor in fighting the war on terror, Kolenda said, was that \"we're demanding decisive military victories in situations where decisive military victories are not possible.\"

John Cohen, a former acting Homeland Security undersecretary and current ABC News consultant, similarly said that while the efforts in Afghanistan have worked, the threat and the source of danger to the U.S. has evolved over time.

\"Over the last 18 years the U.S. has dramatically improved its ability to prevent attacks by foreign terrorist groups,\" he said. \"Unfortunately however, those same counter-terrorism capabilities are ill-suited to address the current threat facing the United States.

\"Even worse, notwithstanding the fact that the United States has experienced multiple deadly attacks by individuals inspired by extremist ideologies, little has been done to improve our capacity to prevent such attacks,\" he added.

Cohen said that terrorists \"have studied our security measures and they’ve adapted their operations to circumvent them.\"

\"Terrorist groups have learned that its very difficult to have people sneak into our country, so instead of recruiting people, they are using social media to inspire people,\" Cohen said, noting that in doing so that bypasses \"so many of the techniques we used to detect potential attackers -- because there’s no communication or travel between the attackers and the other members of the group.\"

A 2015 assessment of the current terrorism threat environment by the National Counterterrorism Center acknowledged that 9/11-style catastrophic attacks were less likely because of consistent counterterror pressure.

\"We face a much greater recurring threat from lone offenders and possibly loose networks of individuals,\" Nicholas Rasmussen, the former director of the NCC, said it the assessment. \"Of the eleven attacks in the West since last May, ten were conducted by individual violent extremists.\"

Carlos Fernandez knows a great deal about how terrorists plot, plan and adapt, given that he is the former head of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York.

He said that in spite of any and all efforts made by counter-terrorism officials, they can never control every factor, noting how the terrorists \"get to decide time, place, and location. They get to decide whether they're using encrypted communication technology. They get to decide if they talk to anyone about their attack.\"

Another difficulty comes from prioritization. Cohen said that the Trump administration \"has prioritized the threat posed by those outside of the United States because that supports their immigration agenda. In fact, the primary threat facing the U.S. today comes from individuals who are here.\"

\"PHOTO:
Scott Olson/Getty Images, FILE
PHOTO: U.S. Marine attached to India Battery, 3rd Battalion watches dust and smoke fly as an artillery round is fired onto an enemy position during a firefight near Forward Operating Base (FOB) Zeebrugge, Oct. 9, 2010, near Kajaki, Afghanistan.
>

In the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, former DNI Coats said: \"Homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) are likely to present the most acute Sunni terrorist threat to the United States, and HVE activity almost certainly will have societal effects disproportionate to the casualtiesand damage it causes.\"

But Trump has largely been focused on an external terror threat, evidenced in part by his efforts to enact a travel ban affecting several Muslim countries.

\"In this era of worldwide terrorism and extremist movements bent on harming innocent civilians, we must properly vet those coming into our country,\" Trump said in 2018, after the Supreme Court upheld the policy.

Felbab-Brown echoed Cohen's sentiment, saying that white supremacy has emerged as a growing problem.

In an analysis, the think tank New America said that since 9/11, virtually the same number of people have been killed in the U.S. by jihadists as those who espouse right-wing ideology.

Earlier this year, Michael McGarrity, the head of the FBI's counterterrorism division, said incidents of domestic terrorism were \"on the rise.\"

\"Where the current White House has the least focus is on white supremacism in the U.S., she said. \"And that is of enormous concern because if we think of the number of Americans that have died out of terrorist attacks over the past three years, it is clearly the greatest number of Americans have died as a result of white supremacist attacks,\" she said.

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