The Obama administration’s proposed 2010 State Department budget included $90 million “to launch a new multi-year effort to help address the wide array of threats posed by terrorist organizations.”
In a statement before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on May 13, 2009, Jacob J. Lew, deputy secretary of State Management and Resources, said, “the Shared Security Partnership will allow the United States to forge strategic partnerships with allies to confront common global extremist threats, building on previous law enforcement and counter-terrorist efforts to create a regional and global information-sharing and coordination infrastructure.”
On Dec. 9, 2009, the U.S. Department of State’s Counterterrorism Office issued a statement on the Obama administration’s international counterterrorism policy in which it discussed the successes of the 25-year-old Antiterrorism Assistance Program, and said it is “just one of many programs — on the civilian and the military sides of the house — that is increasing the ability of others to ensure their own security. With this kind of work, we are making real the president’s vision of shared security partnerships as an essential part of U.S. foreign policy. This is both good counterterrorism and good statecraft. We are addressing the state insufficiencies that terrorism lives on, and we are helping invest our partners more effectively in confronting the threat — rather than looking thousands of miles away for help or simply looking away altogether.”
This is a multiyear project, but Obama has at least set it in motion. And so we move it to In the Works.