AN HONEST ACCOUNTING OF THE SCOPE OF TERRORISM

Larry Johnson of the Counterterrorism Blog reports that the methodology to count terrorist acts used by the new National Counterterrorism Center – where they actually count terrorist acts instead of ignoring some and counting others – has the Department of State squirming. Not wanting to take the political hit on ending the decades old, bipartisan, practice of undercounting terror, State may simply not publish an unclassified copy of its Patterns of Global Terrorism this year. The data reflects poorly upon Pakistan in particular:

“This move has been prompted by the Department’s discovery that the new methodology used by the recently formed National Counter Terrorism Center has produced statistics that shows an enormous jump in the number of international terrorist attacks. For example, in 2003 there were about 172 significant attacks. The numbers for 2004 have jumped to at least 655. At least 300 of those incidents occurred in India in the Kashmir region. “

While the average American is more likely to be hit by lightning than killed by an al Qaida terrorist, we have done ourselves no favors by pretending that some of our friends and allies are not enablers of terror. Like the Detente years where you were scolded by sophisticated elites if you brought up the fact that the Soviets were torturing dissidents in mental hospitals, our cowardly pretense has aggravated the problem by emboldening our enemies and demoralizing our real friends in the Muslim world.