State Department Raises Counterterrorism Office to Bureau Level

The State Department announced today that the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism has been upgraded to bureau level and renamed the Bureau of Counterterrorism (press briefing and fact sheet). Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, who leads the office (now bureau), announced the change and described the bureau's new role:

The mission of the new bureau will be to lead the Department in the U.S. Government’s effort to counter terrorism abroad and to secure the United States against foreign terrorist threats. The bureau will have a number of concrete responsibilities. In coordination with Department leadership, the National Security Staff, and . . . other U.S. Government agencies, it will develop and implement counterterrorism strategies, policies, operations, and programs to disrupt and defeat the networks that support terrorism. The bureau will lead in supporting U.S. counterterrorism diplomacy and seek to strengthen homeland security, counter[] violent extremism, and build the capacity of partner nations to deal effectively with terrorism.

The bureau will also work with the new Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, which was created by executive order in September and is currently housed in the State Department. The creation of the bureau was a component of last year's Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (see p. 45) and fulfills Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's pledge last September to make the office into a bureau. However, it's unclear whether the bureau's day-to-day activities will substantially change, at least in the short term. The counterterrorism office already reported directly to the Secretary and will not have its its budget increased from pre-bureau levels. As Ambassador Benjamin noted in response to a question at the press briefing:

The establishment of the bureau in many ways is a confirmation or ratification of the things that we have been doing increasingly in recent years. So the fundamental tasks remain the same, but what we have now is an infrastructure to continue doing them more effectively and building on those successes in the future.