Terrorism is alive and well. In fact, it is thriving.
Across the world, CNN reports, al Qaeda is not on the run,
as our president said. It is expanding its ability to carry out operations.
Benghazi was part of it, but not the only part.
According to CNN:
As
terrorism increasingly becomes a tactic of warfare, the number of attacks and
fatalities soared to a record high in 2012, according to a new report obtained
exclusively by CNN.
More
than 8,500 terrorist attacks killed nearly 15,500 people last year as violence
tore through Africa, Asia and the Middle East, according to the National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
That’s
a 69% rise in attacks and an 89% jump in fatalities from 2011, said START, one
of the world’s leading terrorism-trackers.
Six of
the seven most deadly groups are affiliated with al Qaeda, according to START,
and most of the violence was committed in Muslim-majority countries.
The
previous record for attacks was set in 2011 with more than 5,000 incidents; for
fatalities the previous high was 2007 with more than 12,800 deaths.
Funded by the Department of Homeland Security, the study was
performed at the University of Maryland.
Among its observations:
Gone
are the days when terrorist groups like the Irish Republican Army or Italy’s
Red Brigade would try to keep casualties low by issuing warnings, LaFree said.
“If
you’re a terrorist group now and you want to get your message out,” he said,
“the more people you kill, the more ‘successful’ you’ll be.”
Sectarian
attacks - such as the pitched battles between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq,
Syria and Pakistan - tend to be disproportionately deadly, said Martha
Crenshaw, an expert at Stanford University and a START board member.
“Sadly,
it seems to be increasingly acceptable in certain belief systems to kill as
many members of the other religious community as possible,” she said. “Moral
restraints seem to be eroding.”
Surely, it would be unfair to pin this all on the Obama administration.
There is little the administration can do to combat the terrorism in Nigeria,
for example.
On the other hand, the administration has pursued a
policy of disengagement in Iraq and a policy of pending disengagement in
Afghanistan. These two countries are suffering an extraordinary number of
terrorist attacks.
The administration’s actions before, during and after the
attack on our Benghazi compound two years ago could not have served to deter al
Qaeda. In fact, as Lara Logan reported (see last post) al Qaeda is alive and
well in Libya today.
Of course, the administration is defensive:
Rhonda
Shore, a spokesperson for the State Department's Bureau of Counterterrorism,
said she hadn't seen START's latest numbers and couldn't comment on the report.
But she offered a staunch defense of the Obama administration’s approach to al
Qaeda.
“We
have made great progress in our efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat the
larger al Qaeda organization in recent years,” she said.
“However,”
she said, al Qaeda and its affiliates “continue to present a serious threat to
the United States and its interests, and we must remain vigilant as we consider
the range of tools and actions available to disrupt this threat.”
In the START report shows great progress, I’d hate to see
what failure would look like.
" “We have made great progress in our efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat the larger al Qaeda organization in recent years,” she said. "
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