[Infowarrior] - The Only Thing We Have to Fear

[Richard Forno]

Fareed Zakaria
Editor of Newsweek International, columnist
PostGlobal co-moderator Fareed Zakaria is editor of Newsweek  
International, overseeing all Newsweek's editions abroad. He writes a  
regular column for Newsweek, which also appears in Newsweek  
International and often The Washington Post. more »

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/fareed_zakaria/2008/05/the_only_thing_we_have_to_fear.html

The Only Thing We Have to Fear ...

You know that we are living in scary times. Terrorist groups are  
metastasizing all over the globe. Al Qaeda has re-established its  
bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hizbullah, Hamas and other radical  
Islamic groups are gaining strength. You hear this stuff all the time,  
on television and on the campaign trail. Amid the din, it's hard to  
figure out the facts. Well, finally we have a well-researched,  
independent analysis of the data relating to terrorism, released last  
week by Canada's Simon Fraser University. Its findings will surprise  
you.

It explains that there is a reason you're scared. The U.S. government  
agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National  
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from  
2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major,  
government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for  
the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of  
fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006.  
A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism  
(START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004,  
the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets  
have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in  
Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war  
zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed  
are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, "Over the past  
30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola,  
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have,  
like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But  
although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically  
motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups-and thus constituted  
terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START-it was almost never  
described as such." To take just two examples, Mack pointed out that  
in 2004, the Janjaweed militia killed at least 723 civilians in Sudan  
(as documented by independent studies). The MIPT recorded zero deaths  
in Sudan from terrorism that year; START counted only 17. In Congo in  
1999, independent studies identified hundreds killed by militia  
actions. The MIPT notes zero deaths that year from terrorism; and  
START, seven.

Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT  
data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you  
set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the  
past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from  
terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC  
says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because  
of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent  
analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a  
study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al  
Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the  
number of Islam-ist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point  
in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to  
be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism  
operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups.  
But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary  
drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world  
over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds.  
The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view,  
the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007  
showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1  
percent. In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda  
has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in  
August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was  
probably a reaction to the assassination of Bena-zir Bhutto, but it  
points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With  
every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This  
pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world,"  
writes Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important  
because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that  
lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."

The University of Maryland's Center for International Development and  
Conflict Management (I wish academic centers would come up with  
shorter names!) has released another revealing study, documenting a 54  
percent decline in the number of organizations using violence across  
the Middle East and North Africa between 1985 and 2004. The real rise,  
it points out, is in the number of groups employing nonviolent means  
of protest, which increased threefold during the same period.

Why have you not heard about studies like this or the one from Simon  
Fraser, which was done by highly regarded scholars, released at the  
United Nations and widely discussed in many countries around the world- 
from Canada to Australia? Because it does not fit into the narrative  
of fear that we have all accepted far too easily.

Editor's Note: Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International,  
and co-moderator of PostGlobal. His "World View" column and recent  
pieces for Newsweek can be found here.