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"Terrorism is the
unlawful use of force or violence against
persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government,
the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in
furtherance of political or social objectives." --FBI Definition
Modern societies face a
cruel paradox: Fast-paced technological and economic innovations may
deliver unrivalled prosperity, but they also render rich nations
vulnerable to crippling, unanticipated attacks. By relying on intricate
networks and concentrating vital assets in small geographic clusters,
advanced Western nations only amplify the destructive power of
terrorists—and the psychological and financial damage they can inflict.
It's 4 a.m. on a sweltering summer
night in July 2003. Across much of the United States, power plants are
working full tilt to generate electricity for millions of air
conditioners that are keeping a ferocious heat wave at bay. The
electricity grid in California has repeatedly buckled under the strain,
with rotating blackouts from San Diego to Santa Rosa.
In different parts of the state, half
a dozen small groups of men and women gather. Each travels in a rented
minivan to its prearranged destination—for some, a location outside one
of the hundreds of electrical substations dotting the state; for others,
a spot upwind from key, high-voltage transmission lines. The groups
unload their equipment from the vans. Those outside the substations put
together simple mortars made from materials bought at local hardware
stores, while those near the transmission lines use helium to inflate
weather balloons with long silvery tails. At a precisely coordinated
moment, the homemade mortars are fired, sending showers of aluminum
chaff over the substations. The balloons are released and drift into the
transmission lines.
Simultaneously, other groups are doing
the same thing along the Eastern Seaboard and in the South and
Southwest. A national electrical system already under immense strain is
massively short-circuited, causing a cascade of power failures across
the country. Traffic lights shut off. Water and sewage systems are
disabled. Communications systems break down. The financial system and
national economy come screeching to a halt.
Sound far-fetched? Perhaps it would
have before September 11, 2001, but certainly not now. We've realized,
belatedly, that our societies are wide-open targets for terrorists.
We're easy prey because of two key trends: First, the growing
technological capacity of small groups and individuals to destroy things
and people; and, second, the increasing vulnerability of our economic
and technological systems to carefully aimed attacks. While commentators
have devoted considerable ink and airtime to the first of these trends,
they've paid far less attention to the second, and they've virtually
ignored their combined effect. Together, these two trends facilitate a
new and sinister kind of mass violence—a "complex terrorism" that
threatens modern, high-tech societies in the world's most developed
nations.
Our fevered, Hollywood-conditioned
imaginations encourage us to focus on the sensational possibility of
nuclear or biological attacks—attacks that might kill tens of thousands
of people in a single strike. These threats certainly deserve attention,
but not to the neglect of the likelier and ultimately deadlier
disruptions that could result from the clever exploitation by terrorists
of our societies' new and growing complexities.
Weapons of Mass Disruption
The steady increase in the destructive
capacity of small groups and individuals is driven largely by three
technological advances: more powerful weapons, the dramatic progress in
communications and information processing, and more abundant
opportunities to divert non-weapon technologies to destructive ends.
Consider first the advances in weapons
technology. Over the last century, progress in materials engineering,
the chemistry of explosives, and miniaturization of electronics has
brought steady improvement in all key weapons characteristics, including
accuracy, destructive power, range, portability, ruggedness,
ease-of-use, and affordability. Improvements in light weapons are
particularly relevant to trends in terrorism and violence by small
groups, where the devices of choice include rocket-propelled grenade
launchers, machine guns, light mortars, land mines, and cheap assault
rifles such as the famed AK-47. The effects of improvements in these
weapons are particularly noticeable in developing countries. A few
decades ago, a small band of terrorists or insurgents attacking a rural
village might have used bolt-action rifles, which take precious time to
reload. Today, cheap assault rifles multiply the possible casualties
resulting from such an attack. As technological change makes it easier
to kill, societies are more likely to become locked into perpetual
cycles of attack and counterattack that render any normal trajectory of
political and economic development impossible.
Meanwhile, new communications
technologies—from satellite phones to the Internet—allow violent groups
to marshal resources and coordinate activities around the planet.
Transnational terrorist organizations can use the Internet to share
information on weapons and recruiting tactics, arrange surreptitious
fund transfers across borders, and plan attacks. These new technologies
can also dramatically enhance the reach and power of age-old procedures.
Take the ancient hawala system of moving money between countries,
widely used in Middle Eastern and Asian societies. The system, which
relies on brokers linked together by clan-based networks of trust, has
become faster and more effective through the use of the Internet.
Information-processing technologies
have also boosted the power of terrorists by allowing them to hide or
encrypt their messages. The power of a modern laptop computer today is
comparable to the computational power available in the entire U.S.
Defense Department in the mid-1960s. Terrorists can use this power to
run widely available state-of-the-art encryption software. Sometimes
less advanced computer technologies are just as effective. For instance,
individuals can use a method called steganography ("hidden writing") to
embed messages into digital photographs or music clips. Posted on
publicly available Web sites, the photos or clips are downloaded by
collaborators as necessary. (This technique was reportedly used by
recently arrested terrorists when they planned to blow up the U.S.
Embassy in Paris.) At latest count, 140 easy-to-use steganography tools
were available on the Internet. Many other off-the-shelf
technologies—such as "spread-spectrum" radios that randomly switch their
broadcasting and receiving signals—allow terrorists to obscure their
messages and make themselves invisible.
The Web also provides access to
critical information. The September 11 terrorists could have found there
all the details they needed about the floor plans and design
characteristics of the World Trade Center and about how demolition
experts use progressive collapse to destroy large buildings. The Web
also makes available sets of instructions—or "technical
ingenuity"—needed to combine readily available materials in destructive
ways. Practically anything an extremist wants to know about kidnapping,
bomb making, and assassination is now available online. One somewhat
facetious example: It's possible to convert everyday materials into
potentially destructive devices like the "potato cannon." With a barrel
and combustion chamber fashioned from common plastic pipe, and with
propane as an explosive propellant, a well-made cannon can hurl a homely
spud hundreds of meters—or throw chaff onto electrical substations. A
quick search of the Web reveals dozens of sites giving instructions on
how to make one.
Finally, modern, high-tech societies
are filled with supercharged devices packed with energy, combustibles,
and poisons, giving terrorists ample opportunities to divert such
non-weapon technologies to destructive ends. To cause horrendous damage,
all terrorists must do is figure out how to release this power and let
it run wild or, as they did on September 11, take control of this power
and retarget it. Indeed, the assaults on New York City and the Pentagon
were not low-tech affairs, as is often argued. True, the terrorists used
simple box cutters to hijack the planes, but the box cutters were no
more than the "keys" that allowed the terrorists to convert a high-tech
means of transport into a high-tech weapon of mass destruction. Once the
hijackers had used these keys to access and turn on their weapon, they
were able to deliver a kiloton of explosive power into the World Trade
Center with deadly accuracy.
High-Tech Hubris
The vulnerability of advanced nations
stems not only from the greater destructive capacities of terrorists,
but also from the increased vulnerability of the West's economic and
technological systems. This additional vulnerability is the product of
two key social and technological developments: first, the growing
complexity and interconnectedness of our modern societies; and second,
the increasing geographic concentration of wealth, human capital,
knowledge, and communication links.
Consider the first of these
developments. All human societies encompass a multitude of economic and
technological systems. We can think of these systems as networks—that
is, as sets of nodes and links among those nodes. The U.S. economy
consists of numerous nodes, including corporations, factories, and urban
centers; it also consists of links among these nodes, such as highways,
rail lines, electrical grids, and fiber-optic cables. As societies
modernize and become richer, their networks become more complex and
interconnected. The number of nodes increases, as does the density of
links among the nodes and the speed at which materials, energy, and
information are pushed along these links. Moreover, the nodes themselves
become more complex as the people who create, operate, and manage them
strive for better performance. (For instance, a manufacturing company
might improve efficiency by adopting more intricate inventory-control
methods.)
Complex and interconnected networks
sometimes have features that make their behavior unstable and
unpredictable. In particular, they can have feedback loops that produce
vicious cycles. A good example is a stock market crash, in which selling
drives down prices, which begets more selling. Networks can also be
tightly coupled, which means that links among the nodes are short,
therefore making it more likely that problems with one node will spread
to others. When drivers tailgate at high speeds on freeways, they create
a tightly coupled system: A mistake by one driver, or a sudden shock
coming from outside the system, such as a deer running across the road,
can cause a chain reaction of cars piling onto each other. We've seen
such knock-on effects in the U.S. electrical, telephone, and air traffic
systems, when a failure in one part of the network has sometimes
produced a cascade of failures across the country. Finally, in part
because of feedbacks and tight coupling, networks often exhibit
nonlinear behavior, meaning that a small shock or perturbation to the
network produces a disproportionately large disruption.
Terrorists and other malicious
individuals can magnify their own disruptive power by exploiting these
features of complex and interconnected networks. Consider the archetypal
lone, nerdy high-school kid hacking away at his computer in his parents'
basement who can create a computer virus that produces chaos in global
communications and data systems. But there's much more to worry about
than just the proliferation of computer viruses. A special investigative
commission set up in 1997 by then U.S. President Bill Clinton reported
that "growing complexity and interdependence, especially in the energy
and communications infrastructures, create an increased possibility that
a rather minor and routine disturbance can cascade into a regional
outage." The commission continued: "We are convinced that our
vulnerabilities are increasing steadily, that the means to exploit those
weaknesses are readily available and that the costs [of launching an
attack] continue to drop."
Terrorists must be clever to exploit
these weaknesses. They must attack the right nodes in the right
networks. If they don't, the damage will remain isolated and the overall
network will be resilient. Much depends upon the network's level of
redundancy—that is, on the degree to which the damaged node's functions
can be offloaded to undamaged nodes. As terrorists come to recognize the
importance of redundancy, their ability to disable complex networks will
improve. Langdon Winner, a theorist of politics and technology, provides
the first rule of modern terrorism: "Find the critical but nonredundant
parts of the system and sabotage … them according to your purposes."
Winner concludes that "the science of complexity awaits a Machiavelli or
Clausewitz to make the full range of possibilities clear."
The range of possible terrorist
attacks has expanded due to a second source of organizational
vulnerability in modern economies—the rising concentration of high-value
assets in geographically small locations. Advanced societies concentrate
valuable things and people in order to achieve economies of scale.
Companies in capital-intensive industries can usually reduce the
per-unit cost of their goods by building larger production facilities.
Moreover, placing expensive equipment and highly skilled people in a
single location provides easier access, more efficiencies, and synergies
that constitute an important source of wealth. That is why we build
places like the World Trade Center.
In so doing, however, we also create
extraordinarily attractive targets for terrorists, who realize they can
cause a huge amount of damage in a single strike. On September 11, a
building complex that took seven years to construct collapsed in 90
minutes, obliterating 10 million square feet of office space and
exacting at least $30 billion in direct costs. A major telephone
switching office was destroyed, another heavily damaged, and important
cellular antennas on top of the towers were lost. Key transit lines
through southern Manhattan were buried under rubble. Ironically, even a
secret office of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was destroyed in
the attack, temporarily disrupting normal intelligence operations.
Yet despite the horrific damage to the
area's infrastructure and New York City's economy, the attack did not
cause catastrophic failures in U.S. financial, economic, or
communications networks. As it turned out, the World Trade Center was
not a critical, nonredundant node. At least it wasn't critical in the
way most people (including, probably, the terrorists) would have
thought. Many of the financial firms in the destroyed buildings had made
contingency plans for disaster by setting up alternate facilities for
data, information, and computer equipment in remote locations. Though
the NASDAQ headquarters was demolished, for instance, the exchange's
data centers in Connecticut and Maryland remained linked to trading
companies through two separate connections that passed through 20
switching centers. NASDAQ officials later claimed that their system was
so robust that they could have restarted trading only a few hours after
the attack. Some World Trade Center firms had made advanced arrangements
with companies specializing in providing emergency relocation facilities
in New Jersey and elsewhere. Because of all this proactive planning—and
the network redundancy it produced—the September 11 attacks caused
remarkably little direct disruption to the U.S. financial system
(despite the unprecedented closure of the stock market for several
days).
But when we look back years from now,
we may recognize that the attacks had a critical effect on another kind
of network that we've created among ourselves: a tightly coupled, very
unstable, and highly nonlinear psychological network. We're all nodes in
this particular network, and the links among us consist of Internet
connections, satellite signals, fiber-optic cables, talk radio, and
24-hour television news. In the minutes following the attack, coverage
of the story flashed across this network. People then stayed in front of
their televisions for hours on end; they viewed and reviewed the awful
video clips on the CNN Web site; they plugged phone lines checking on
friends and relatives; and they sent each other millions upon millions
of e-mail messages—so many, in fact, that the Internet was noticeably
slower for days afterwards.
Along these links, from TV and radio
stations to their audiences, and especially from person to person
through the Internet, flowed raw emotion: grief, anger, horror,
disbelief, fear, and hatred. It was as if we'd all been wired into one
immense, convulsing, and reverberating neural network. Indeed, the
biggest impact of the September 11 attacks wasn't the direct disruption
of financial, economic, communications, or transportation
networks—physical stuff, all. Rather, by working through the network
we've created within and among our heads, the attacks had their biggest
impact on our collective psychology and our subjective feelings of
security and safety. This network acts like a huge megaphone, vastly
amplifying the emotional impact of terrorism.
To maximize this impact, the
perpetrators of complex terrorism will carry out their attacks in
audacious, unexpected, and even bizarre manners—using methods that are,
ideally, unimaginably cruel. By so doing, they will create the
impression that anything is possible, which further magnifies fear. From
this perspective, the World Trade Center represented an ideal target,
because the Twin Towers were an icon of the magnificence and boldness of
American capitalism. When they collapsed like a house of cards, in about
15 seconds each, it suggested that American capitalism was a house of
cards, too. How could anything so solid and powerful and so much a part
of American identity vanish so quickly? And the use of passenger
airplanes made matters worse by exploiting our worst fears of flying.
Unfortunately, this emotional response
has had huge, real-world consequences. Scared, insecure, grief-stricken
people aren't ebullient consumers. They behave cautiously and save more.
Consumer demand drops, corporate investment falls, and economic growth
slows. In the end, via the multiplier effect of our technology-amplified
emotional response, the September 11 terrorists may have achieved an
economic impact far greater than they ever dreamed possible. The total
cost of lost economic growth and decreased equity value around the world
could exceed a trillion dollars. Since the cost of carrying out the
attack itself was probably only a few hundred thousand dollars, we're
looking at an economic multiplier of over a millionfold.
The Weakest Links
Complex terrorism operates like
jujitsu—it redirects the energies of our intricate societies against us.
Once the basic logic of complex terrorism is understood (and the events
of September 11 prove that terrorists are beginning to understand it),
we can quickly identify dozens of relatively simple ways to bring
modern, high-tech societies to their knees.
How would a Clausewitz of terrorism
proceed? He would pinpoint the critical complex networks upon which
modern societies depend. They include networks for producing and
distributing energy, information, water, and food; the highways,
railways, and airports that make up our transportation grid; and our
healthcare system. Of these, the vulnerability of the food system is
particularly alarming. However, terrorism experts have paid the most
attention to the energy and information networks, mainly because they so
clearly underpin the vitality of modern economies.
The energy system—which comprises
everything from the national network of gas pipelines to the electricity
grid—is replete with high-value nodes like oil refineries, tank farms,
and electrical substations. At times of peak energy demand, this network
(and in particular, the electricity grid) is very tightly coupled. The
loss of one link in the grid means that the electricity it carries must
be offloaded to other links. If other links are already operating near
capacity, the additional load can cause them to fail, too, thus
displacing their energy to yet other links. We saw this kind of
breakdown in August 1996, when the failure of the Big Eddy transmission
line in northern Oregon caused overloading on a string of transmission
lines down the West Coast of the United States, triggering blackouts
that affected 4 million people in nine states.
Substations are clear targets because
they represent key nodes linked to many other parts of the electrical
network. Substations and high-voltage transmission lines are also "soft"
targets, since they can be fairly easily disabled or destroyed. Tens of
thousands of miles of transmission lines are strung across North
America, often in locations so remote that the lines are almost
impossible to protect, but they are nonetheless accessible by four-wheel
drive. Transmission towers can be brought down with well-placed
explosive charges. Imagine a carefully planned sequence of attacks on
these lines, with emergency crews and investigators dashing from one
remote attack site to another, constantly off-balance and unable to
regain control. Detailed maps of locations of substations and
transmission lines for much of North America are easily available on the
Web. Not even all the police and military personnel in the United States
would suffice to provide even rudimentary protection to this immense
network.
The energy system also provides countless opportunities for turning
supposedly benign technology to destructive ends. For instance, large
gas pipelines, many of which run near or even through urban areas, have
huge explosive potential; attacks on them could have the twin effect of
producing great local damage and wider disruptions in energy supply. And
the radioactive waste pools associated with most nuclear reactors are
perhaps the most lethal targets in the national energy-supply system. If
the waste in these facilities were dispersed into the environment, the
results could be catastrophic. Fortunately, such attacks would be
technically difficult.
Even beyond energy networks,
opportunities to release the destructive power of benign technologies
abound. Chemical plants are especially tempting targets, because they
are packed with toxins and flammable, even explosive, materials.
Security at such facilities is often lax: An April 1999 study of
chemical plants in Nevada and West Virginia by the U.S. Agency for Toxic
Substances and Disease Registry concluded that security ranged from
"fair to very poor" and that oversights were linked to "complacency and
lack of awareness of the threat." And every day, trains carrying tens of
thousands of tons of toxic material course along transport corridors
throughout the United States. All a terrorist needs is inside knowledge
that a chemical-laden train is traveling through an urban area at a
specific time, and a well-placed object (like a piece of rail) on the
track could cause a wreck, a chemical release, and a mass evacuation. A
derailment of such a train at a nonredundant link in the transport
system-such as an important tunnel or bridge—could be particularly
potent. (In fact, when the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan began on
October 7, 2001, the U.S. railroad industry declared a three-day
moratorium on transporting dangerous chemicals.) Recent accidents in
Switzerland and Baltimore, Maryland, make clear that rail and highway
tunnels are vulnerable because they are choke points for transportation
networks and because it's extraordinarily hard to extinguish explosions
and fires inside them.
Modern communications networks also
are susceptible to terrorist attacks. Although the Internet was
originally designed to keep working even if large chunks of the network
were lost (as might happen in a nuclear war, for instance), today's
Internet displays some striking vulnerabilities. One of the most
significant is the system of computers—called "routers" and "root
servers"—that directs traffic around the Net. Routers represent critical
nodes in the network and depend on each other for details on where to
send packets of information. A software error in one router, or its
malicious reprogramming by a hacker, can lead to errors throughout the
Internet. Hackers could also exploit new peer-to-peer software (such as
the information-transfer tool Gnutella) to distribute throughout the
Internet millions of "sleeper" viruses programmed to attack specific
machines or the network itself at a predetermined date.
The U.S. government is aware of many
of these threats and of the specific vulnerability of complex networks,
especially information networks. President George W. Bush has appointed
Richard Clarke, a career civil servant and senior advisor to the
National Security Council on counterterrorism, as his cyberspace
security czar, reporting both to Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge
and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. In addition, the U.S.
Senate recently considered new legislation (the Critical Infrastructure
Information Security Act) addressing a major obstacle to improved
security of critical networks: the understandable reluctance of firms to
share proprietary information about networks they have built or manage.
The act would enable the sharing of sensitive infrastructure information
between the federal government and private sector and within the private
sector itself. In his opening remarks to introduce the act on September
25, 2001, Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah clearly recognized that we
face a new kind of threat. "The American economy is a highly
interdependent system of systems, with physical and cyber components,"
he declared. "Security in a networked world must be a shared
responsibility."
Preparing for the Unknown
Shortly following the September 11
attacks, the U.S. Army enlisted the help of some of Hollywood's top
action screenwriters and directors—including the writers of Die Hard
and McGyver—to conjure up possible scenarios for future terrorist
attacks. Yet no one can possibly imagine in advance all the novel
opportunities for terrorism provided by our technological and economic
systems. We've made these critical systems so complex that they are
replete with vulnerabilities that are very hard to anticipate, because
we don't even know how to ask the right questions. We can think of these
possibilities as "exploitable unknown unknowns." Terrorists can make
connections between components of complex systems—such as between
passenger airliners and skyscrapers—that few, if any, people have
anticipated. Complex terrorism is particularly effective if its goal is
not a specific strategic or political end, but simply the creation of
widespread fear, panic, and economic disruption. This more general
objective grants terrorists much more latitude in their choice of
targets. More likely than not, the next major attack will come in a form
as unexpected as we witnessed on September 11.
What should we do to lessen the risk
of complex terrorism, beyond the conventional counterterrorism
strategies already being implemented by the United States and other
nations? First, we must acknowledge our own limitations. Little can be
done, for instance, about terrorists' inexorably rising capacity for
violence. This trend results from deep technological forces that can't
be stopped without producing major disruptions elsewhere in our
economies and societies. However, we can take steps to reduce the
vulnerabilities related to our complex economies and technologies. We
can do so by loosening the couplings in our economic and technological
networks, building into these networks various buffering capacities,
introducing "circuit breakers" that interrupt dangerous feedbacks, and
dispersing high-value assets so that they are less concentrated and thus
less inviting targets.
These prescriptions will mean
different things for different networks. In the energy sector, loosening
coupling might mean greater use of decentralized, local energy
production and alternative energy sources (like small-scale solar power)
that make individual users more independent of the electricity grid.
Similarly, in food production, loosening coupling could entail increased
autonomy of local and regional food-production networks so that when one
network is attacked the damage doesn't cascade into others. In many
industries, increasing buffering would involve moving away from
just-in-time production processes. Firms would need to increase
inventories of feedstocks and parts so production can continue even when
the supply of these essential inputs is interrupted. Clearly this policy
would reduce economic efficiency, but the extra security of more stable
and resilient production networks could far outweigh this cost.
Circuit breakers would prove
particularly useful in situations where crowd behavior and panic can get
out of control. They have already been implemented on the New York Stock
Exchange: Trading halts if the market plunges more than a certain
percentage in a particular period of time. In the case of terrorism, one
of the factors heightening public anxiety is the incessant barrage of
sensational reporting and commentary by 24-hour news TV. As is true for
the stock exchange, there might be a role for an independent,
industry-based monitoring body here, a body that could intervene with
broadcasters at critical moments, or at least provide vital counsel, to
manage the flow and content of information. In an emergency, for
instance, all broadcasters might present exactly the same information
(vetted by the monitoring body and stated deliberately and calmly) so
that competition among broadcasters doesn't encourage sensationalized
treatment. If the monitoring body were under the strict authority of the
broadcasters themselves, the broadcasters would—collectively—retain
complete control over the content of the message, and the procedure
would not involve government encroachment on freedom of speech.
If terrorist attacks continue,
economic forces alone will likely encourage the dispersal of high-value
assets. Insurance costs could become unsupportable for businesses and
industries located in vulnerable zones. In 20 to 30 years, we may be
astonished at the folly of housing so much value in the exquisitely
fragile buildings of the World Trade Center. Again, dispersal may entail
substantial economic costs, because we'll lose economies of scale and
opportunities for synergy.
Yet we have to recognize that we face
new circumstances. Past policies are inadequate. The advantage in this
war has shifted toward terrorists. Our increased vulnerability—and our
newfound recognition of that vulnerability—makes us more risk-averse,
while terrorists have become more powerful and more tolerant of risk.
(The September 11 attackers, for instance, had an extremely high
tolerance for risk, because they were ready and willing to die.) As a
result, terrorists have significant leverage to hurt us. Their capacity
to exploit this leverage depends on their ability to understand the
complex systems that we depend on so critically. Our capacity to defend
ourselves depends on that same understanding.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is associate
professor of political science and director of the Centre for the Study
of Peace and Conflict at the University of Toronto. He is the author of,
most recently, The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of
the Future? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
The breeding grounds of
militant Islamic terrorism span a host of different environments from
the Afghan battlefields of the 80s to places much closer to home.
Richard Engel charts the careers of some of bin Laden's converts and
co-conspirators offering an insight into al Qaeda's inner workings.
THE ALGERIAN
CONNECTION
Islamic radicals from Algeria are now key players
in the international terrorism network. As a result, Washington will
seek closer ties with Algiers, especially in the realm of intelligence
cooperation.
The Risks and Benefits of War in Afghanistan
Ahmed Rashid
The looming US attack against Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan's Taliban
may radically reshape the geopolitical balance in Central and South
Asia. Instead of merely dealing with the threat of terrorism, the
magnitude of the US response could cause the region to unravel. The
risks are huge, but so are the potential benefits. The outcome
will depend more on Washington's political strategy than its firepower.
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav092401.shtml
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THE INTERNATIONAL POLICY
INSTITUTE FOR COUNTERRORISM
The
International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) was
established in 1996 at the academic Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya
(IDC) in Israel.
ICT is unique in that it focuses solely on the subject of
counter-terrorism. All of its efforts and resources are dedicated to
approaching the issue of terrorism globally - that is, as a strategic
problem that faces not only Israel but other countries as well.
