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The Onion's Layer
The problem with this form of evaluation is that terrorism (unlike, say, oil prices or infant mortality) cannot be measured on the basis of statistics alone. Quantification has little role in evaluating the development, causes or resolution of terrorist attacks. Terrorism is not a movement or an environmental trend but a tactic used for political ends. It is in a broad political and geographical context that its development has to be assessed. Here 2005 yields a somewhat less reassuring picture, in two senses.
First, several developments in 2005 – including the attacks in London on 7 July and 21 July – gave serious cause for concern. Although the casualties were much lower than in Madrid, the pattern of sporadic but lethal Islamist bombings in major western cities that began in 2001 was sustained.
The evidence available suggests that the London bombers were individuals acting without connections to al-Qaida. The indictments issued on 11 April 2006 the Spanish judge Juan de Olmo, following a two-year investigation of the Madrid bombings, suggested the same thing: that the majority of the twenty-nine accused belonged to a local Islamic radical cell inspired but not directed by Osama bin Laden's network. The apparent absence of a major organised terrorist network linking Afghanistan and the middle east to migrant communities in European cities may be a source of some relief, but the larger point is that the very informality of the groups active in Madrid and London shows how flexible and easily repeatable such operations are.
The very fact that no formal command structure, no significant funding and no central training unit were needed indicated that such attacks would probably continue for years to come. Moreover, there exists the possibility that groups with other more formal links to al-Qaida do indeed exist or may be growing.
Second, there were major incidences of terror (by state agencies as well as Islamist groups) in 2005 in countries on the southeast Mediterranean: the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri on 14 February, followed by that of other Lebanese opponents of Syrian rule; the destruction of hotels in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, on 23 July by forces hostile to the Egyptian government's policy on Israel; and the blowing up on 5 November of three hotels in Amman, Jordan, by units linked to the al-Zarqawi forces in Iraq.
The underlying trend in Palestine – despite the relatively quiet period that accompanied the dissipation of the al-Aqsa intifada) – was of continued tension and potential explosion. The victory of Hamas in the February 2006 election, and the restlessness provoked by Israel's construction of a "security wall", suggested that the potential for Palestinian-Israeli violence in the future remained strong.
Above all, however, there was Iraq. As the United States justification for its March 2003 attack on Iraq – related to the Saddam regime's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and its promotion of transnational terrorism – has disintegrated, the counterproductive nature of the enterprise has become increasingly clear. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has, if anything, spurred the nuclear and conventional arms race in the middle east, and attracted a broader mobilisation of support for terrorist and other armed groups across the Muslim world.
The parallels with Afghanistan in the 1980s are evident, even if it is impossible to calculate either the number of young men who have gone to fight in Iraq and who may later go on to fight in other conflicts, or the dimensions of the animosity to the US and the west in general which this war has aroused among Muslims. But it is likely that the war in Iraq will (like Afghanistan, and the Arab-Israeli conflict) be one whose influence and shocks will spread across the region in an uncontrollable manner.
