CTC 20th Anniversary | A Conversation with Mike Smith, Former Assistant Secretary-General and Executive Director of CTED

2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the adoption of Security Council resolution 1373 and the establishment of the Counter-Terrorism Committee. As part of the year of commemoration, CTED experts reflect on their work. 

Mike Smith served as Assistant Secretary-General and Executive Director of CTED from 2007 to 2013. Here are his written responses.  

Where has your career taken you since you were Executive Director of CTED?

Mr. Smith: Since I returned to Australia from New York in July 2013, having formally retired from the UN, l have been lucky to be offered a range of professional opportunities that have kept life interesting, while still allowing plenty of time to enjoy the advantages of living on Sydney Harbour. Some of these opportunities were related to the UN and counter-terrorism, notably ongoing involvement in a multi-year CTED police and prosecutors project in South Asia; a standalone review of the feasibility of a regional police training academy in Sri Lanka for the Global Center on Cooperative Security; and advising the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) on the development of a counter-terrorism strategy for the Caribbean region as a consultant to the CTITF [the former UN Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force]. Others were more related to past work in the human rights field, such as a two year engagement chairing a UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry on human rights abuses in Eritrea; and membership of an expert panel to assess the effectiveness and management of the International Criminal Court.

Since 2014, I have been an Adjunct Fellow at Macquarie University in the Department of Security Studies, where I deliver occasional guest lectures. And in 2015 I was also asked to serve on an advisory committee to the New South Wales Government to review project proposals for community-led initiatives to counter violent extremism.

What were the main priorities and achievements of the CTC and CTED when you were Executive Director?

Mr. Smith: The overriding objectives of the CTC and CTED in my time were to ensure that Security Council resolutions 1373 and 1624 were implemented as effectively as they could be, in as many parts of the world as possible. In order to achieve this we needed to be imaginative and nimble in our approach to promoting good counter-terrorism practice, and we needed constantly to keep the Security Council, through the CTC, apprised of evolutions in the challenge of terrorism and of the best ways of meeting the new challenge.

During that time, we were able to broaden our programme of assessment visits to countries of all stages of development and facing very different levels of terrorist threat and, at the same time, standardize our assessment systems and judgements. This gave our reports much greater credibility and made them more valuable both to the countries assessed and to donors working to address shortcomings identified.

What are you most proud of during your time as Executive Director? // What was the most meaningful engagement for you, personally?

Mr. Smith: Personally, the most meaningful engagements were in the field – particularly in countries that had very limited resources and faced serious threats, such as Mali and Niger in Africa; Cambodia and Timor Leste in South- East Asia; and Pakistan and Bangladesh in South Asia. I always felt a real sense of satisfaction when our visiting teams were able, not just to identify weaknesses in the way those countries were conducting their counter-terrorism, but propose solutions that were implementable in the circumstances pertaining. Even more so when we were able to link a donor into the process to assist in that implementation.

But my greatest source of pride was the way in which CTED was able to develop highly productive working relationships with other international organizations and units, with civil society organizations, and with certain relevant private-sector companies. These relationships enabled us to launch a range of collaborative initiatives in different professional areas that have had a real impact on the ground in many countries. These include in fields such as the prosecution of terrorists; countering the financing of terrorist groups; strengthening border controls; and improving the security of identity documents. 

What would you say have been the greatest changes in the terrorist threat and the response to it since 2013? 

Mr. Smith: I think there have been two big changes in the terrorist threat in recent years: firstly, the extent to which it has broadened from being mostly related to violent Islamist movements, to encompassing a range of right-wing extremists and other apocalyptic groups. It may be, for example, that in Australia these now pose a greater threat to the community than ISIL and Al- Qaida.

The second change is related to evolutions both in the use of technology in the modern world, and particularly the dominance of social media as a form of gathering information and communicating and the parallel reduction in the influence of traditional media – newspapers, TV and radio. Coupled with a rise across the world of what could be termed “political populism”, it has become increasingly difficult for Governments to deliver their messages to citizens and to challenge the messages of extremist groups, which are often very well targeted. 

What are the lessons to be learned from these changes, and how can they inform the way we address terrorism in the future?

Mr. Smith: Actually, in a sense, we always knew how to respond to these sorts of changes in a general way – the answers are embedded in the Global Strategy adopted by the General Assembly in 2006. This is that we have to recognize what the drivers of extremism are in any particular country or region and we have to develop approaches that not only try to ameliorate the conditions – be they youth unemployment; embedded racism; widespread corruption in Government; a lack of educational opportunities, or whatever – but also demonstrate that Governments care about addressing these grievances. This is the first step in winning the hearts and minds of people vulnerable to the call of the extremists.

Secondly, the Global Strategy advocates the need to respect people’s human rights when conducting any sort of counter-terrorism work. In the modern world this is axiomatic: if people feel that their rights are being ridden rough-shod over, not only will they become even more alienated and potentially more violent, but also, families and communities will simply refuse to share information and cooperate with security authorities for fear of punishment. And no long-term counter-terrorism programme can be successful without the cooperation of ordinary citizens. 

The big challenge today is that some populist Governments consider such approaches as “soft” and see political advantage in advocating hard-line, divisive and confrontationist policies. These may work in the short-term but will inevitably fail over the long-term. The UN needs to be out there advocating sensible policies and approaches to try to avert such failures.

2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the adoption of resolution 1373 (2001) and the creation of the CTC. How would you characterize the significance of these two decades and the legacy – to date – of the CTC?

Mr. Smith: Resolution 1373, and the CTC as its overseer, played a pivotal role in building not just a coordinated global response after the attacks of 9/11, but a broad international consensus that there was a need for decisive action and greater cooperation across borders on security issues to address the threat. Over the 20 years since then, CTED, under the direction of the CTC, has developed a range of different tools, many quite innovative, to help in the international effort to prevent and respond to terrorism.

As I mentioned earlier, the Global Strategy adopted by the General Assembly proposed a broader approach to counter-terrorism that, in its advocacy of addressing the conditions conducive to terrorism while undertaking the measures outlined in resolution 1373, and its highlighting of the importance of human rights and humanitarian considerations, has been more influential in the long-term.