Terrorism on the upswing

A new report shows that the number of terror attacks is increasing:

The U.S. government released statistics yesterday documenting a dramatic increase in terrorist attacks last year and a death toll of close to 2,000 people around the globe, a disclosure made a week after the State Department said it would publish its congressionally mandated annual survey of international terrorism without the statistical portrait it has always included.

The numbers were provided instead by the government's new clearinghouse for terrorism-related information, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and included statistics documenting a sharp surge in significant terrorist acts from 175 incidents that killed 625 in 2003 to 651 such attacks that killed 1,907 in 2004.

Officials, meanwhile, are passing off the increase as due to new methods of measuring terrorism being used:

But senior officials said the threefold increase was a result of changes in methodology and urged reporters at a hastily called briefing not to compare this year's terrorism numbers with previous ones. Congressional aides already had disclosed the increase in terrorist incidents to reporters Tuesday after a private briefing.

Although the officials called the data seriously flawed, they said they put it out to avoid criticism that the State Department was trying to avoid admitting setbacks in the fight against terrorism by not publishing the data. "If we didn't put out these numbers today, you'd say we're withholding data. That's why we're putting them out," said Philip D. Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Zelikow was executive director of last year's commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Personally I would expect an increase in terror attacks even without a change in methodology, and I'm not sure what the significance of that increase is. To me it was perfectly predictable that terror attacks would surge iu the years following Sept. 11, 2001 due to the fact that we're engaged in a war on terrorism. War means increased bloodshed. Did we really think that these guys were going to go quietly?

More Americans died in the roughly 8 months of fighting in 1945 than in all of 1942, yet this actually showed how close the U.S. was to its ultimate victory in World War II. So too it is with the war on terror.