Constitutional Law

New Study Challenges Administration's "War on Terrorism"

A new study tags the Bush administration’s strategy to defeat terrorism as inadequate. The study by the Rand Corporation, “How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al-Qaeda,” argues that the administration strategy has failed to seriously harm al-Qaeda’s efforts to wage terrorist strikes because it has relied too heavily on the military instead of local police and intelligence efforts. Rand, a nonprofit research organization, stated in a press release about the study that Al Qaeda “has been involved in more terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, than it was during its prior history and the group’s attacks since then have spanned an increasingly broader range of targets in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.”

Seth Jones, the study’s lead author, said the United States cannot effectively stop terrorism “without understanding how terrorist groups end. In most cases, military force isn’t the best instrument.”

Most terrorist movements dissolve, the study argues, because of political action or through police and intelligence services either capturing or killing the movements' primary leaders.

The report was prepared by the RAND National Defense Research Institute, which is a federally funded research and development center that does work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the unified command and other defense agencies.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on July 30, 2008 (boomark / email).