An undeserved benefactor of 9/11 and all that has followed has been the "terrorism industry" – the group of experts from universities, government and policy institutes who combine entirely legitimate and necessary comment and analysis of events with the far more dubious claim of specialist understanding derived from the study of terrorism itself.
The flaw in this claim is that those who advance it too often focus on terror as an entity or a movement in itself, usually in abstraction from the historical, political or social context of the violent events under scrutiny. Further, they tend to have little or no regard for the fact that if the use of terror for political purposes is the subject of analysis, then it must on any explanatory or moral grounds also include the use of terror by states.
This paucity of analytic structure (and imagination) is evident in recent evaluations of the condition of terrorism in 2005-06, the fifth year indeed of George W Bush's much-vaunted "war on terror". These evaluations are found both in responses to the second anniversary of the Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004, and in reports seeking to quantify the incidence of terror in the past year, particularly in Europe and the middle east.
2005 was in part a misleading year as far as the incidence of terrorism in these regions was concerned. The most immediately relevant statistical evidence – of the kind used by the United States government or the Rand corporation – indicates a certain decline in violent actions by Islamist or other terrorist groups on the northwest side of the Mediterranean, on the Balkan and Turkish northeast sides, and in Palestine, Egypt and north Africa to the south.
Indeed, the year witnessed some potentially positive developments: the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; a sustained reduction in suicide-bombings and other attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians (Hamas has not carried out a single operation for more than a year); cautious progress in ex-Yugoslavia; and a process (albeit problematic) of post-conflict consolidation in Algeria.
Moreover, the flashpoint Spanish-Moroccan arena was quiescent in 2005, a far cry from May 2003 (when Islamists killed dozens of people in the Casablanca bombings) and "11-M" (when a cell of largely Moroccan origin killed 191 people in Madrid). This pattern of reduced terrorist activity in the Mediterranean region is compatible with an apparent worldwide trend of (with the major exception of Iraq) a significantly decline in terrorist actions.
