I'm with AL in my annoyance that they're doing away with the Patterns of Global Terrorism, though I really think that the methodology issue that caused this controversy underscores some of the problems inherent to the nature of the report up until this point as far as the methodology used to calculate the number of terrorist attacks is.
For instance, here is the 2002 version of the report and look in at the Eurasia section, you'll find a cursory mention of Chechen terrorism, but only two specific attacks, the Memorial Parade bombing in Kaspiisk and the Moscow theater seige, are mentioned. The Appendix of Significant Terrorist Incidents lists a third, the detonation of an IED outside a Moscow McDonald's, so if you're a State Department analyst crunching the numbers you add 3 terrorist attacks into the year's total.
So that means that events like this for 2002 get left out:
- The January 18 bombing of a Russian troop transport that killed 7 and injured 3 in Makhachkala, Dagestan.
- The January 27 in-flight detonation of a bomb aboard a helicopter carrying Russian Interior Ministry General Mikhail Rudchenko, his deputy General Davydov, and 9 other Russian servicemen over northern Chechnya.
- The April 28 bombing of an outdoor market in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia that killed 5 and injured dozens more.
Note that Dagestan isn't Chechnya, so you can't classify that as an outgrowth of the fighting there unless you acknowledge that the erstwhile rebels have goals that go beyond Chechnya. Planting a bomb aboard a chopper to kill a high-ranking Russian official might be viewed as an Act of Legitimate Armed Resistance™, but I tend to think we'd take a different view of it if somebody did the same to Negroponte or Black or Abizaid over in Iraq. Anybody care to think of a reason why the good people who happened to be shopping in Vladikavkaz on April 28, 2002 deserved to die?
I should mention, as I have before, that I don't support Russia's draconian policies in Chechnya. That isn't the point - the fact that the Russians are brutal doesn't mean that the Chechens and their foreign backers like Zarqawi's buddy Abu Hafs al-Urduni aren't equally nasty characters.
There's a lot more I could list, but there's 3 more that weren't deemed worthy for whatever reason of inclusion into the 2002 report. Failure to tally this stuff (and I hope the problem is just in the State Department) lead to an inability to detect "spikes" in local (as seems to be the case in Kashmir) or global al-Qaeda activity such as what we saw in the fall of 2002 which I more or less regard as the group's "counter-attack" for what we did to them in Operation Enduring Freedom - bin Laden more or less said as much in his November 2002 audiotape.
My guess is that the latest GSPC massacre at a fake roadblock over in Algeria would have been overlooked by the State analysts - if the 2002 and 2003 Patterns are anything to judge by, bin Laden's Algerian acolytes are quite free to murder as they seem fit as long as they steer clear of Western tourists or Saudi princes. I'm being harsh, I know, but my point is that one of the reasons that you write the Patterns of Global Terrorism is to, well, track the patterns of global terrorism.
Might I suggest a possible solution for this situation be to go back to the beginning of 2001 and use the new methodology to all the major theaters of jihad - Kashmir, Chechnya, Mindanao, Iraq, et al. so that we can better assess actual trends here, such as the apparent spike in the number of attacks in Kashmir (or is it in fact a spike? We didn't use the same methodology last year, so how are we supposed to know?) in 2004. Let the politicos and the professional hacks moan about the delay, I'd be more interested in seeing revised and more accurate editions of Patterns than I would quick ones. And I don't think that I'm the only one here who feels that way.
Thanks, DD and AL, it always astonishes me when this administration flouts its own responsibilities, and it's reassuring to see some one who generally supports their ideology calling them to task to uphold their own leadership role nonestly.
The examples you cited point out the flaws in your argument, I'm afraid.
The problem is that you do not differentiate between insurgencies and terrorism, or between acts against military targets and acts against civilian targets.
To put the attack on the troop transport and the plane carrying troops and security officials (unlike in the US, the Interior "Ministry" is a security agency, not a land management agency) in the category of "terrorism" reduces the term to meaninglessness.
(your third example does sound like a terrorist attack.)
The other important point that needs to be made is that there is a qualitative difference between "global/international terrorism" and "local terrorism." If the US "war on terror" is to have any meaning, it really has to focus on acts of terrorism that have an "international" dimension.
I may be wrong, but is the Zarqawi mentioned in this article one Achmed, (or Ahmed, or whatever)an Algerian, at present in New Zealand going through due process to gain residency at an approximate cost to the NZ taxpayer so far of $7m? He arrived on a plane from Malaysia(?) without documentation. I am not sure of my Shakespeare here, but which Henry said 'First we kill all the lawyers.'?
lukasiak:
Dagestan is not an area of active insurgency, though there people in neighboring Chechnya who would very much like it to be such, which is why I classified the bombing of the troop carrier as a terrorist attack. McVeigh blew up a government building, but we still consider that terrorism, for example. Valid point on the chopper going down, but I still think that the North Ossetia market bombing qualifies as a terrorist attack. Even if one of those examples holds up though, there is still the entirely valid point that none of them were factored into the Patterns reporting on the subject for 2002.
In so far as it factors into policy-making, yes, but Patterns isn't supposed to recommend any specific policy options, it's just supposed to serve the definitive guide to terrorist attacks for that particular year.
Jude:
I believe you are thinking of Ahmed Zaoui, not Zarqawi.
re: Dagestan vs Chechnya....
if Russia "respected the autonomy" of Chechnya, you'd have a good point. But since the whole insurgency is a battle for Chechnyan idependence against Russia, I don't see how Russian troops in a neighboring province can't be considered a "military" target within the context of an insurgency. (not to mention the fact that its not unlikely that Russian troops destined for or returning from Chechnya come through Dagestan...)
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on the larger point of whether or not "Patterns" should have been discontinued as such, I think that the advantages of such a comprehensive report are outweighed by the damage that cumulative numbers that have no appropriate context can cause. Note that you had to explain why the massive increase in reported terrorist acts did not indicate an increase in RELEVANT (to the average american) terrorist activity. In a society whose press thrives on soundbites, it become far too easy for me to point the report and say "we are losing the war on terror" than it is for you to explain why the massive increase in reported terrorist attacks actually represents progress.
p.lukasiak:
Russia's current rationale for intervention in Chechnya is based around the fact that Khattab and Co. decided to invade Dagestan back in 1999. Moreover, Basayev (Khattab's boss) and others have been quite clear that they don't regard their fight as ending with any kind of guaranteed autonomy or independence with respect to Chechnya.
bq. on the larger point of whether or not "Patterns" should have been discontinued as such, I think that the advantages of such a comprehensive report are outweighed by the damage that cumulative numbers that have no appropriate context can cause. Note that you had to explain why the massive increase in reported terrorist acts did not indicate an increase in RELEVANT (to the average american) terrorist activity. In a society whose press thrives on soundbites, it become far too easy for me to point the report and say "we are losing the war on terror" than it is for you to explain why the massive increase in reported terrorist attacks actually represents progress.
I agree that Patterns should be continued, but I think that the whole point of the enterprise becomes questionable if you're going to start switching methodologies every so often. For instance, is this spike in Kashmir in fact a spike? If it was 600 attacks last year under the same methodology, the answer would be no, but as it now stands we don't have an answer to that question. If you can't use Patterns to determine the patterns of global terrorism, then what is the point of the publication?
The January 27 in-flight detonation of a bomb aboard a helicopter carrying Russian Interior Ministry General Mikhail Rudchenko ...
Who has determined for certain that it was a bomb? There are three different accounts of what happened: a mid-air explosion, that it exploded after crash landing, and that it exploded after being hit by ground fire. The last one is highly likely, as the helicopter was an old Mi8 "Hip" and the rebels have shot down lots of them.
I was just doing a quick Googling of information on the crash (full disclosure: I wrote the piece up at like 2-3 in the morning), since I remembered it from the time, and the accounts I saw quoted an official as saying they thought there was a bomb aboard. None of the other stuff I saw contradicted that (I did see one piece saying they'd ruled out a crash), so that was the explanation I ran with.
Thanks, Glen.
I found a report on world terrorism on BBC that answers to some of the present question:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4457705.stm
"Iraq is by far the most dangerous country to do business - but global terrorism is also making the rest of the world riskier, a new survey says.
Danger has risen in 31 nations, many of them in western Europe, insurance broker Aon says in a new risk map."
Mr. Lukasiak,
As I see it the count of narrowly defined "terrorist incidents" is not very useful. Much more useful would be a count of "killings by terrorists." It might be useful to categorize the killings within that total count, but the purpose of the count is to know:
1. How active are terrorists? This is primary.
2. Who are terrorists targeting?
3. How effective are terrorists at killing?
4. How efficient (in terms of money and manpower) are terrorists at killing?
The old Patterns counts a combination of #1 and #2. While vaguely interesting, it doesn't track the truly important data of how much terrorist activity there is.
Lorenzo