Tracking Terrorism

Today, the State Department released its second, annual Country Report on Terrorism. The 292 page report contains an extensive overview of terrorists and their activities from the U.S. government’s point of view. The report’s raw numbers are striking — 11,000 incidents of terrorism in 2005, resulting in the deaths of 14,500 people, leaving 25,000 others wounded and 35,000 kidnapped. More than 3,400 of the incidents took place in Iraq and close to another 500 occurred in Afghanistan. The sheer quantity of these numbers is due in part to the State Department’s willingness to consider terrorism as encompassing all “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents,” regardless of whether such violence was international in scope or intent.

Moreover, notwithstanding the report’s title, it clearly appreciates that the locus of terrorism does not lie within countries per se. The report contains a whole chapter on terrorist “safe havens” beyond state control – either areas that are physically free from state control (e.g., the Afghanistan and Pakistan border, the Celebes Sea between the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia) or that are virtually free from state control (e.g., terrorists’ use of the internet and global communications to publicize their goals and actions). The report also paints a rosy picture of all the on-going anti-terrorism efforts, including bilateral training initiatives, multilateral U.N. action, financial task forces, public diplomacy, not to mention my own bailiwick, the dozen anti-terrorism treaties. Frankly, I find the optimism of the description of these counter-terrorism efforts a bit discordant with the stark reality of last year’s numbers. So, let’s hope that we see a greater pay-off from such efforts in the years to come, by lowering both the number of incidents attributable to terrorism as well as those who are its victims.