- After release of the annual report, "Patterns of
Global Terrorism," in April 2004, the State Department and the Bush
administration took enormous flak for understating attacks and casualties
in 2003. The principal spin put by critics on this gaffe is that the April
numbers were designed to put the best possible face on results of the War
on Terrorism. Supporting that spin were remarks of the State Department
coordinator for counterterrorism, J. Cofer Black, that the low reported
numbers represented a "remarkable achievement." But political
spin from the critics is also obvious, because California Representative
Henry Waxman probably launched the complaints mainly because four attacks
in Istanbul, Turkey that targeted synagogues had been left out.
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- State's revised report increases the number of reported
attacks from 190 to 208, while more than doubling the number of deaths
(from 307 to 625) and the number of wounded (from 1,593 to 3,646). These
numbers are totally abstract unless we understand the data series as well
as understand where terrorism fits in the scheme of violence against humans.
For starters, in 2003 worldwide terrorist attacks killed and wounded fewer
Americans than were killed and wounded by lightening strikes in the United
States. Except for 9/11, that is pretty much the average case for the
past decade.
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- Secretary of State, Colin Powell, tried to put the data
problem in a correct perspective when he said there was no intent to "make
our efforts look better or worse;" rather he cited problems in compiling
the data. In that vein there are numerous and persistent problems with
building this report. As one of the developers of the report in the early
1980s, this writer wrestled with problems of data collection, terrorism
definition, biases of reporting organizations and individuals, design limitations
on report coverage, pressures from regional and policy peers in various
organizations, and sheer lack of data, to name only some of the difficulties.
Most of those problems are neither easily solved nor likely to go away.
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- On its face, data collection sounds easy, but numerous
problems make the global process error prone. To start with, open source
data collection is a people intensive process. Computers are great compiling
tools once they are fed information, but they lack judgment, and terrorism
data do not lend themselves to automated collection. Only experience will
demonstrate source or data set integrity, and over time the integrity of
a reporting organization may change. For example, today would you trust
the Bush team or the Pentagon on weapons, terrorist numbers or casualty
figures for Iraq? Exactly! Knowing when sources have become unreliable
or incomplete requires a human judgment.
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- In the past 25 years the United States has added diplomatic
representations to about 40 new countries that have joined the present
192-member United Nations. That is almost a quarter of the current family
of nations. But the number of US diplomats who observe and report in those
missions is smaller and more thinly spread than it was 20 years ago.
A second problem is that there are no uniform international standards for
gathering and reporting such data. That is partly a problem of methodology"ways
of selecting and compiling information. Chances are pretty good therefore
that data collected from a global hodgepodge of sources will not all mean
the same things, and certainly they will not mean the same things to all
users.
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- An equal if not greater problem is definitions. Who is
a terrorist for purposes of inclusion in "Patterns of Global Terrorism?"
Since 1983 the Department of State has used the following definitions:
The term terrorism means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated
against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents,
usually intended to influence an audience. The term international terrorism
means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country.
The term terrorist group means any group practicing, or that has significant
subgroups that practice, international terrorism.
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- "Significant" international terrorist incidents
are the meat of this report. As defined in the report, a significant international
terrorist incident " is one that results in loss of life or serious
injury to persons, major property damage, and/or is an act or attempted
act" that could result in those outcomes. Of the 208 incidents reported
in 2003, 161, or 77% of all reported incidents"the highest proportion
in some time--were classed as significant. Significant incidents occurred
in 40 countries, but 30% of them were in India alone, and roughly 60% of
them were in five countries: India, Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, and Israel,
in that order.
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- Domestic incidents"those that do not involve either
foreign terrorists or foreign victims--in each country are discussed, but
no data are included, because the report does not require them. However,
according to the report "domestic" incidents may be more numerous
that international ones. Thus problem one in making the cut is to know
for sure which incidents actually meet not only the first requirement,
but also the two international terrorism definitions. That is a fact-finding
problem, and since the criteria must be applied rigorously in the 75 or
so countries where terrorism routinely occurs, there is ample room for
error.
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- The second definition problem centers on the actors who
commit international terrorist attacks. They are defined for the report
as "sub-national groups or clandestine agents". This by nature
excludes acts carried out by the armed forces of any country. It might
include acts by the clandestine agents of countries, but that is not the
apparent intent of the definition, and thus a good clandestine operation"one
in which the foreign hand is invisible--is more likely to be classed as
domestic terrorism. Moreover, even when it is clear that, for example,
Mossad is conducting operations against Palestinians, killing alleged Hamas
members or destroying alleged terrorism-related facilities, those incidents
do not get counted as terrorism. Nor do operations of the Israel Defense
Force against civilian targets in Palestine or of Coalition forces against
civilian targets in Iraq get counted. In short, the presently applied
definitions of international terrorism are a lowest common denominator
that is delimited by the political imperatives of the defining state.
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- The incidents annually reported in Patterns of Global
Terrorism, therefore, may be accurate for the cases cited, but the picture
painted will always be less than the sum of the visible parts. More is
going on than is ever counted, and less is always said than needs to be
said. The picture that exists for purposes of assessing worldwide politically
motivated violence is inevitably incomplete.
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- Carefully fenced in the reporting practices of every
government are the operations of their armed forces. The definition used
in Patterns excludes such operations. But how can one legitimately exclude
such acts as those of the Khartoum government that are directly and indirectly
carried out by agents to exterminate the non-Muslim and black peoples now
scrambling to cross into Chad? Just how, or should, one count Russian attacks
in Chechen? How can one exclude the targeted assassinations of the Israelis
against Palestinians or the willful Israeli destruction of townships such
as Jenin or Rafah? The issues become matters of legitimacy and propriety,
and the ground beneath a range of official actions becomes very slippery.
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- This very slipperiness in the eyes of the beholder has
caused the Bush and earlier US administrations to seek immunity from prosecution
in the world court. Whereas, in earlier years, the US was concerned that
charges against US forces could be capricious and/or politically motivated,
the risk now is that operations against civilians in Fallujah and elsewhere
in Iraq, as well as torture at Abu Ghraib, provide real and convincing
evidence of misconduct. A simple truth about terrorism data, therefore,
is that they may be clear in the eye of the beholder, but they can be something
else indeed in the calculus of the politician. How to keep as far from
this problem as possible is a challenge for the compilers of terrorism
data.
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- The comment that used to send this writer up the wall,
first as an official and later as a speaker and writer, was: "One
man's terrorist is another man, s freedom fighter". Unfortunately,
that is a flippant version of a real problem. If the data collector government
is sponsoring groups such as the Contras in Nicaragua, or UNITA in Angola,
or the precursors of al Qaida in Afghanistan, how do the activities of
those groups get handled in the statistics? Tricky, especially when the
head of one such group was invited to meetings with White House senior
staff. Nor has it been easy at any time in recent history to shut off private
US funding sources for the IRA, even though the IRA and its offshoots are
treated in Patterns as terrorist groups. It is sufficient for our purpose
here to say that the terrorist/freedom fighter perception casts shadows
over terrorism data for several countries that make accurate data collection
difficult, while making the presentation of such data to say the least
politically sensitive.
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- References to al Qaida complicate the matter even further.
The current gut reflex is to say that any act of terrorism anywhere is
al Qaida related. Proof neither regularly nor automatically follows this
charge. Because the US has designated al Qaida as terrorism enemy number
one, maybe the unique enemy, the suggestion that al Qaida members, agents,
affiliates, or sympathizers carried out an attack tends to shut off inquiry.
Recent attacks in Saudi Arabia have been blamed on and claimed by people
who say they are al Qaida, either foreign or domestic, but the situation
is not necessarily so clear-cut, because Saudi Arabia has dissidents who
have grievances that have nothing to do with al Qaida. First blame on the
Bali bombings in Indonesia was laid on al Qaida, but the culprits were
indigenous Islamic militants with purely local grievances against the government,
maybe with some help/inspiration from al Qaida agents. This is a data management
problem, because it matters who did these things, and blaming al Qaida
for somebody else's work is little better than refusing to include incidents
because they were carried out by governments or were politically sensitive.
In such cases, responsible governments are off the hook, but the terrorism
goes on.
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- Major problems with the meaning of the terrorism data
concern the magnitudes. The Bush administration declared War on Terrorism
based on a single incident, but how does terrorism compare with numerous
scourges of civilization? Since the US-led invasion of Iraq, US and Coalition
deaths in Iraq have exceeded 1,000, and US wounded have exceeded 5,000.
This does not count Iraqi casualties that exceed 14,000. US deaths due
to vehicle accidents in 2003 exceeded 42,000. Over 17,000 of those deaths
were alcohol related. Suicides numbered upward of 30,000, and there were
over 16,000 homicides in the United States in 2003. Deaths and injuries
from foul weather in Haiti this year have greatly exceeded the 2003 global
terrorism numbers, or even the 9/11 numbers. Far more people were killed
and injured in earthquakes in both Iran and Turkey during 2003 that died
or were wounded in terrorist incidents.
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- The terrorism numbers are by no means in the same class
as the foregoing causes of death and injury. As noted above, worldwide
terrorism casualties during 2003 were 625 dead and 3,645 wounded. American
casualties in 2003 totaled 52, including 35 dead and 17 wounded. The numbers
were down by 10 from 2002 when deaths numbered 27 and injuries numbered
35. Less than 6% of the worldwide terrorism deaths in 2003 were Americans,
and less than .05% of the wounded were Americans. In short, total US deaths
and injuries due to terrorism in 2002-2003 were fewer than those caused
by lightening strikes in the United States (according to the National Weather
Service, an annual average of 93 deaths and 300 injuries).
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- These numbers pose some rude questions: Just how much
of our national attention should be devoted to terrorism? What share of
our national resources should be spent on defenses against terrorism?
How much of our law enforcement budget should be spent on it? What part
of our military budget should be sunk into it? How many of our intelligence
resources should we use on it? What part of our diplomatic energy should
be devoted to it? The final questions are (a) just what difference will
it make in our national safety if we remain preoccupied with this problem,
and (b) Just how realistic is the pattern of fear that the Bush team uses
to keep us on the side of the War on Terrorism?
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- The terrorism numbers themselves shed a peculiar light
on those questions. The truth is most of the world's terrorism is not directed
against the United States. Nor has it ever been. It is also clear that
other human behavior patterns are more deadly to life and limb than terrorism.
None of the 2003 attacks occurred in the United States, and 9/11 aside
it has been the pattern for some time that few international terrorist
attacks occur in the United States. To be sure, as demonstrated by 9/11,
a determined and successful attacker can wreak great havoc. But even the
limited facts that are now available show (1) that the focus and attention
of Washington leadership were more at fault than our diplomatic and intelligence
networks that compile terrorism data, and (2) that the most powerful military
capability on earth did not deter the attackers. Actually our military
budget went up sharply in 2003, but the number of significant incidents
increased sharply as well.
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- What do these experiences tell us? The asymmetric nature
of the terrorism weapon is such that military power alone will never deal
with it. The random pattern of terrorism is such that some of it will
inevitably slip through our defenses. Our current approach to terrorism,
the War on Terrorism, therefore is impractical, expensive, and unlikely
to succeed. Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) figure in the terrorism
statistics only in a backhanded way. It is obvious that possession of
WMDs is not a deterrent to terrorist attacks, because 64 incidents, representing
40% of the significant attacks during 2003, occurred in nuclear powers
(India, Pakistan, Israel, France, and Britain). India alone experienced
48 attacks. Difficulties with obtaining WMD materials and problems of safe
use, as well as the very provocative nature of their use offer significant
deterrence to their use, but rumors persist of at least al Qaida efforts
to obtain such a weapon. The apprehension raised by the possibility of
such an attack is so great that the mere threat may constitute an attack.
It certainly raises the prospect that target countries or groups could
be intimidated by such a threat, even though the threatening group may
have neither intent nor capability to deliver.
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- What can we do? The numbers tell us that our present
posture is at best extreme and at worst irrelevant to the risks that beset
us. Available data tell us that we should not fear terrorism more than
other, more common causes of death and dismemberment. Rather, we should
fit the risks of terrorism more effectively into our preparations for the
range of crises generated by acts of man and acts of God. We should work
diligently to assure that our society is properly equipped to deal with
the whole spectrum of likely emergencies. We should equip our emergency
response systems and our emergency responders with the tools and training
they need to manage the consequences of those potential emergencies. Most
of the tools needed to respond to the effects of a terrorist incident are
the same as or similar to those needed in other emergencies.
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- On the international front, our main energies"political,
economic, diplomatic, and intelligence"should be devoted to reducing
the causes of terrorism. Terrorism numbers should be primarily a tool for
focusing those energies. The numbers should tell us which countries need
that energy most. Encouraging and assisting those governments to deal constructively
with grievances will reduce terrorism risks. Our military capabilities
should be used to maintain global stability conditions, only as a last
resort to chase terrorists. We can do the most good over time by assuring
that fewer people have reason to resort to terrorism to get our attention,
or the attention of their own governments.
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- The writer is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer
of the US Department of State. He will welcome comment at wecanstopit@charter.net
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