How Islamic terrorists reduced terrorism in the US
Yesterday I was using the Global Terrorism Database to check some suprisingly low figures on what percentage of terrorist acts are committed by Muslims. (Short answer: Worldwide since 2000, about 80%, rather than 0.4 − 6% as given in various sources.) But I found some odd patterns in the data for the United States. Look at this chart of terrorist acts in the US which meet GTD criteria I-III and are listed as “unambiguous”:
There were over 200 bombings in the US in 1970 alone, by all sorts of political groups (the Puerto Rican Liberation Front, the Jewish Defense League, the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, anti-Castro groups, white supremacists, etc., etc.) There was essentially no religious terrorism; that came in the 80s and 90s. But let’s zoom in on 1978 onward, after the crazy period we inaccurately call “the sixties”. First, a count of Islamic terrorist acts worldwide:
This is incomplete, because the database contains over 400 Islamic terrorist groups, but only let me select 300 groups at a time. (Al Qaeda is one of the groups not included here.) Also, this doesn’t list any acts committed without direct supervision from a recognized terrorist group, nor acts whose perpetrators were not identified (about 77% of the database, estimated from a sample of 100, with the vast majority of those unknowns in Muslim countries). But we can see there’s an increase after 2000.
Now let’s look at terrorist acts of all kinds in the US:
We see a dramatic drop in terrorist acts in the US after 2000. Sampling them, I found that except for less than a handful of white supremacists, there are only 3 types of terrorists still active in the US: Nutcases, animal liberation activists, and Muslims. If we exclude cases of property damage (which has never terrified me), it’s basically just nutcases and Muslims.
Going by body count, it may still be an increase, because even if you exclude 9/11, just a handful of Muslim attacks still accounted for 50% of US fatalities in terrorist attacks from 2000 through 2013. But counting incidents, by 2005 there were about 1⁄3 as many per year as just before 2000. From 2000 to 2013 there were only 6 violent terrorist attacks in the US by non-Islamic terrorist groups that were not directed solely at property damage, resulting in 2 fatalities over those 14 years. Violent non-Islamic organized terrorism in the US has been effectively eliminated.
Some of this reduction is because we’ve massively expanded our counter-terrorism agencies. But if that were the explanation, given that homeland security doesn’t stop all of the Islamic attacks they’re focused on, surely we would see more than 6 attacks by other groups in 14 years.
Much of the reduction might be for non-obvious reasons, like whatever happened around 1980. But I think the most-obvious hypothesis is that Islamic terrorists gave terrorism a bad name. In the sixties, terrorism was almost cool. You could conceivably get laid by blowing up an Army recruiting center. Now, though, there’s such a stigma associated with terrorism that even the Ku Klux Klan doesn’t want to be associated with it. Islamists made terrorism un-American. In doing so, they reduced the total incidence of terrorism in America. Talk about unintended consequences.
On a completely different note, I couldn’t help but notice one other glaring thing in the US data: terrorist acts attributed to “Individual” (a lone terrorist not part of an organization). I checked 200 cases from other countries and did not find one case tagged “Individual”. But half of all attributed cases in the US from 2000-2013 are tagged “Individual”. The lone gunman thing, where someone flips out and shoots up a Navy base, or bombs a government building because of a conspiracy theory, is distinctively American.
Perhaps Americans really are more enterprising than people of other nations. Perhaps other countries can’t do the detective work to attribute acts to individuals. Perhaps their rate of non-lone wolf terrorism is so high that the lone wolf terrorists disappear in the data. Perhaps we’re more accepting of “defending our freedom” as an excuse for shooting people. Perhaps psychotic delusions of being oppressed don’t thrive well in countries that have plenty of highly-visible oppression. But perhaps Americans really do have a staggeringly-higher rate of mental illness than everyone else in the world. (Yes, suspicious study is suspicious, but… it is possible.)
Exactly. Much of the reduction is for the same reasons you no longer hear much about cults, or about hijacking planes to Cuba (or about anarchists car-bombing Wall Street or trying to shoot the Queen, for that matter), or about communism. There seems to be something about the shift from a traditional partially-industrialized society to a post-industrial one which triggers this sort of great social upheaval, which manifests in part as new religious movements (labeled cults) and violent action (terrorism or guerrilla), which eventually get discredited and cease to be alternatives. In Japan, you had the ‘rush hour of the gods’ with many syncretic Buddhist groups and the Red Army (to name the most infamous one) with a last gasp in Aum Shinrikyo; in America, you had those but also Weathermen etc; in South Korea with its later development the process is still ongoing, with the cults take on a Protestant Christian form—the recently deceased cult leader associated with the Sewol Ferry disaster an interesting example—and the violence tends to be associated with North Korea (various assassinations or attempts come to mind).
If this is correct then we should expect a reduction in Islamic terrorism but I’m not sure what the expected timeline for such a reduction would be.
On some time-scale, yes. But saying when is a bit of a sucker’s game. To use the American example: are we still in the ’60s or have we passed into the ‘70s yet or maybe even ’80s?
I’d be more confident in predicting that both cults and violence are on a long-term secular decline in South Korea, which seems to be over the hump.
That’s a little difficult to say. I think you could probably use per capita GDP to try to pin down when one would expect ‘the troubles’ to begin, and extrapolate from there. (This would probably yield predictions like: East Asia to continue to quiet down; Middle East and nearby Islamic regions to remain stable in violence; Africa to increase in cults and movements like Boko Haram even as larger-scale violence and disorder decreases.)
I know you didn’t make the graphs, but …
I don’t like line graphs. They’re a kind of smoothing, but almost never the right choice. The first two graphs are smooth enough that it hardly matters what you do, but I redid the third as a scatterplot plus a loess curve.
Here’s the loess superimposed on the line graph, if you want to compare them. I got the data here, linked from here
A find your hypothesis interesting but let’s discuss a few different possible causal mechanisms than your primary suggestion (and it is possible that this drop is some combination of causes):
1) You bring up the possibility that the threat of Islamic terrorism has lead to a substantial increase in security levels, so more terrorist incidents are stopped or never get off the ground. If this is the primary cause then I’d expect most of the drop off to occur after the first bombing of the WTC in the 1990s, and a heavy post-9/11 drop-off but your graph shows a drop-off staring before then but then shows the most clear cut drop-off in the mid 1990s, so this may be part of the effect. The fact that the drop-off rate doesn’t get massively faster after 9/11 possibly undermines this. I think your point is also a valid one which suggests this isn’t what is happening or at least is only a small factor of what is going.
2) The American political scene may in some ways simply be more civilized than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. True in many ways things at the congressional level feel more partisan, but it may be that the groups which felt like they had no options other than violence don’t feel that way as much because they have politicians who represent their interests. Both the far-right and the far-left have more elected politicians than they did in the 1960s, as do many racial minorities. In that context, it looks like one has avenues that are not violence for getting voices heard.
3) Part of the decrease may be due to the same effects (whatever they are, such as higher abortion rates, lower lead levels, better education) that have reduced violence levels in general. As violent crime has gone down, so has the type of violent crime we generally put in a separate category.
4) (Related to point 2) The internet gives people a feeling like they can get their voices heard with a feeling of (possibly illusionary) productivity, whether it is organizing boycotts or letter writing campaigns or simply venting to like-minded people.
Responding separately to your point about lone-wolf cases, part of the issue here may be classification. Many lone-wolves have ideologies or the like which they claim are motivating them, even if they have their own unique spin. It may be that we’re choosing to classify them as such rather than seeing them as part of their claimed ideologies. Also, it may be that lone-wolves are easier to be in the US since guns are more available whereas in many countries (especially in Europe and Japan) the lack of easily available firearms means that people need to cooperate in larger groups to get weapons.
Do we? I see a sawtooth-decline starting in 1995⁄6, with 2000⁄1 not deviating from the trend.
It’s hard to say, but I’m seeing a decline in both the peaks and valleys a little after 2000, with a big drop around 2003.
Your analysis is surprisingly Americo-centric. The 1970s saw very serious terrorism (far worse than America) in the UK, Germany and Italy, all of which are now very peaceful countries. Did 9/11 also make terrorism un-Italian?
Secondly, your timing is all wrong. The fall in terrorism worldwide long predates the rise of specifically Islamic terrorism.
Thirdly, Islamic terrorism is the intellectual and organisational descendant of secular Arab terrorism and is received in much the same way. The only innovation is the suicide bomber. Yet in the period that you claim terrorism was ‘cool,’ there was no shortage of horrific atrocities committed by) Arab terrorists—often in co-ordination with Western groups, such as the RAF. Do you think those were seen as ‘cool’? Abu Nidal was the bin Laden of his day, and got much the same popular portrayal. In fact, the keffiyeh-clad Arab terrorist as staple villain in action movies hasn’t changed one jot in forty years, just that then he would be a member of PFLP or Fatah, and now al Qaeda.
It is not surprisingly Americo-centric for a post titled “How Islamic terrorists reduced terrorism in the US”. I acknowledged that there was a bigger (numeric) fall in terrorism in the US in the 70s. The fall in the US after 2000, though, is probably as big or bigger when expressed as a percent drop rather than as an absolute drop. Equal efforts at reducing a variable results in drops that are similar by percentage more than by absolute number. (That means the effort to go from 100 cases per year to 10 is more similar to the effort to go from 10 to 1 than to the effort needed to go from 900 to 800.)
There has been no fall in terrorism worldwide; just the opposite. It was at its lowest point in 1971-1975, and is over 10 times as high now (as measured by GTD incidents). For Europe at a whole, it was at its lowest in 1970, then was high from 1976 to 1997. For “(USSR & the Newly Independent States (NIS))”, there was no terrorism until 1989 (imagine that!), then a steady rise until 2010. The fall I pointed out for the US after 2000 also happens in a graph for Western Europe, which I would expect, but not for the world as a whole.
There is a sudden dramatic fall in Central America bottoming out in 1998, to just a few incidents per year. This might be due to a similar thing happening with the drug wars there, or might just be bad data.
Maybe, the total number of incidents rises just because with the spread of the Internet and other communications technologies, it’s easier to get information about terrorists attacks. For example, there definitely were terrorist attacks in USSR before 1989(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorism_in_the_Soviet_Union), but they aren’t mentioned in GTD.
If you see the same phenomenon all over the developed world, then it is very likely to have roughly the same causes throughout that class of countries. It is parochial in the extreme to explain that phenomenon in one country solely in terms of causes specific to that country, rather than to causes that could have affected all the countries in the relevant class. Otherwise you are essentially arguing for some staggering co-incidence.
For example, if we are asking why did crime fall in New York in the 1990s, and all your explanations are specific to New York, you are missing key factors. Crime fell across America, and across the developed world. Explanations specific to New York can only explain the difference between New York and the rest of America, and explanations specific to America can only explain the difference between the US and the rest of the developed world, and so on.
So yes, you are being Americo-centric.
I think you should have checked the database, which you obviously didn’t, before writing two long replies.
You see the decline after 2000 in the US and in Europe, which are the regions affected by Muslim terrorism (outside of Muslim countries, where this dynamic would not apply). You don’t see it in Japan, Russia, India, China, or in Muslim countries. You don’t see it in the world overall. This is entirely consistent with my hypothesis; your hypothesis that it is coincidence is the one that requires coincidence.
And, yes, when I write a post that says it’s about America, it’s going to be Americo-centric. I live in America. It’s okay for me to talk about America.
Your replies bear little or no resemblance to what I’ve written. I never made a hypothesis of ‘coincidence,’ I never said you shouldn’t talk about America, and overall I have to conclude that either I am writing unclearly, or you are misrepresenting me.
In either case, I am disinclined to continue such a conversation.
I wonder how much of this general pattern then is attributable to the end of the cold war? Both the Germany and Italy examples are due primarily to Marxist groups. And the USSR did support non-Marxist terrorist groups in the West on occasion as well. So the winding down of the Cold War may have meant both a loss in funding and a loss of ideological motivation.
I don’t think this applies to the German or Italian Examples, but the IRA was largely funded by Irish Americans, and 9/11 made funding a terrorist group seem at lot less like a fun expression of ethnic solidarity.
That may have been a factor in the failure of the IRA splinter groups to get off the ground, but Irish terrorism was already coming to a halt. The IRA called its final ceasefire in July 1997 and signed up to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
As I understand it, the reduction in terrorism in Ireland was essentially complete by the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
The NSA/FBI might be doing a great job of stopping coordinated terrorist attacks and infiltrating and deterring groups that might launch attacks on America. Plus, I get the sense that a significantly higher percentage of U.S. than European Muslims are willing to cooperate with the police to stop terrorism.
You’re graphs are too low resolution to read.
As for individual actors in other nations, what about Anders Behring Breivik? You might find this list helpful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_%28terrorism%29
The graphs look large and clear to me. They’re about 570 pixels wide. Are you using a cell phone? I’m using Chrome.
Now that I think about it, even if other countries had a similar base rate of lone-wolf terrorists, I might not see any in 200 samples, because many of them have much higher rates of terrorism than ours (in some cases, a hundred times higher). Also, those with high rates probably can’t do the detective work to attribute attacks to “Individual” rather than “Unknown”.
Latest Firefox, and they’re still unreadably blury...
I use Firefox, and the graphs aren’t blurry at all.
The graphs are nice and clear on Chrome.
Doing a side-by-side comparison, they are a tiny bit blurrier in Firefox, which is bizarre, since they’re JPEGs. But they’re still large and clear on my screen. I can’t make them any bigger; that’s the size the GTD website produces them in.
Is this what you’re seeing?
http://imgur.com/94RsYDV
I think you’re behind some kind of image-fucking (i.e. recompressing) proxy server. Are you tethering on a cellphone network by any chance? (Or on an airplane?)
If that’s it, Phil could solve the problem by using https. That would requiring switching servers to, say, imgur.
The crappy resolution is due to the image host (postimage.org), which is downsizing some images served to some IPs (verified this through a few private VPNs).
I use Firefox on a mac and they look nothing like that on my machine.
http://imgur.com/7l9Xwua
Breivik..?
He was not in the 200 cases I checked, which is not surprising, since there were 48,108 cases. Breivik is an anecdote. A sample of 200 is data.
A conspiratorial explanation: perhaps the data has been manipulated to downplay terrorist coordination in America. There would be a couple reasons to do that, depending on the audience. For ordinary citizens, a collection of nutcases might be less scary than a dark underworld of coordinated cells. For terrorists and wannabe terrorists, a collection of uncool loners might less glamorous (as you’ve suggested too) than a Team of Subversive Evildoers.
But this doesn’t explain why the same manipulation hasn’t been done for other countries.
It looks to me (admittedly mostly from the outside; I don’t live in the US, though I travel there sometimes) much more as if the government has played up the risk of terrorism by organizations like al Qaida than as if it’s trying to make it seem less threatening. (It seems like there’s less of this under the present government than its predecessor, which cynically would make sense because there’s some evidence that people’s votes tend to shift “rightward” when they are afraid for their lives.)
Yes, you’re right, they do seem to play this up. That’s strong evidence against the conspiratorial explanation I mentioned.
Yes, I think this is true. But I seem to remember (but cannot cite) that people also “rally around the flag” and support the leader more—even if the leader is not “right.”
Moreover, the present government still has some additional political incentive to play up the risk of terrorism, especially if the administration can blame it on the previous one. “Al-Qaeda is really scary—man, our predecessors sure did let their guard down.”
As someone also inside the US, I also get this impression.
If you stratified the data on terrorist ideology by sect, would Wahhabism by the underlying confounder, rather than Islam?
Islam explicitly advocates for violent Jihad. Countries like Australia should deal with terrorism as a policing and arts/culture issue, than a military problem. In fact, having no military might be in our best interest. There are a number of nations in the world with no militaries, some in particular unstable and criminal parts of the world, like Costa Rica, which don’t have any military issues, as far as I know. In fact, it would seem that the best defence is no defence, assuming the stable implementation of military law, which is probably predicated on policing nations like the USA intervening elsewhere. Logic summarised here. I don’t expect much from politicians anyway. Everyone from healthcare administrators don’t act in evidence based ways to the military don’t respect the truth, it seems that it takes the somewhat autistic utilitarianism of Lesswrongers for that kind of pedantism.
We really should consider the possibility of having to stomp on Islam as an existential risk, or at least stopping immigration from Muslims’ weak and dysfunctional countries until Muslims can show good citizen behavior, if ever. .
If you engage in Long Game thinking, you should also have to consider the need for prophylaxis against the emergence of new nuisance religions in the coming centuries. I think randomness has fooled us into thinking that undesirable things from the Before-Times will never come back because we have “progressed beyond that,”, when I wouldn’t assume anything of the sort.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LongGame
I don’t know if it’s an existential risk, but if technology keeps enabling fewer and fewer people to kill more and more people for less and less money (hint: it will), and Islamic countries continue to produce as many people who want to kill us as they do now, then at some point, perhaps 50 years from now, “we” will have to kill everyone in every country where radical Islam has a hold. (That’s about 400 million people at present.) That would radicalize much of the rest of the world against us.
I don’t know what the right response is, but it probably isn’t continuing to insist that people have the right to preach hatred and violence as long as it’s out of a sufficiently old book. I suspect, though, that America is more ready to sacrifice 400 million foreigners on the altar of religious liberty than to change that.
Do you see any clear linear increase in bodies per attacker in that database?
I don’t know about the data in that database but there’s other evidence for a similar conclusion. See e.g. this paper which argues that the ratio of dollars of damage done to dollars of cost has been going up. (Disclaimer: one of the authors is my twin.) They cite another paper which I have not read in citation 64 which argues that over the last 70 years smaller and smaller groups have been killing more people.
I wonder if that would be considered evidence for a much broader (and scarier) claim—that the modern society is becoming increasingly fragile and brittle.
Or simply that societal wealth is growing. If each person is worth their lifetime output, then in societies with higher output per person, even with fixed terrorist effectiveness and cost of terrorism*, the monetary cost will increase. But this has no relevance to any sort of x-risk claim, because society is also wealthier and better able to absorb the damage without x-risk-level collapse.
* there’s not really much reason to expect terrorism costs to increase over time. Guns are cheap.
And as James points out, technology does not necessarily have to be a one-way ratchet.
That’s certainly true, but the interesting question remains—is that all there is to it?
Also note that I am not talking about x-risk: if the contemporary Western society turns out to be too specialized to survive a change in the environment (a very common scenario in evolution), that doesn’t mean the humans die out—all it means is that this particular form of society didn’t work out well.
This is a very interesting and important question. Is there a general trend for how robustness scales with complexity? For evolved species, there will probably be an answer that depends on their population size and reproductive strategy. For constructed things like civilizations, the answer will probably be different. Gotta run but I’ll edit this comment later.
I think the general answer is the useless one: “it depends”, but for the particular case of the contemporary high-tech society I get a feeling (a “prior” in local lingo) that the robustness is negatively correlated with complexity.
A notable recent example: the 2008 financial crisis.
In general, economic crashes after World War II have been small compared to many in the 19th century. For example it is sometimes estimated that the panic of 1819 had an unemployment rate around 20% at the height. Serious economic catastrophes have also been not as common.
I should have been more clear—my point isn’t its severity, but rather what was seen as the greatest danger to be avoided at all costs. That greatest danger was the domino collapse of the entire global financial system and it is precisely that which led the US Fed to adopt rather unconventional methods in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.
What was widely seen (correctly or not is a different and complicated issue) as the major issue was the possibility of all the big world’s banks freezing up in a chain of defaults or maybe-defaults as all of them are interlinked and hold each other’s debt. That didn’t exist as a problem in the XIX century.
Domino effects of banks was definitely a thing in the 19th and even 18th century. Moreover, even if it did happen to the extent that the worst case situations envisioned, it isn’t clear it would have been worse than 1819. And even if total unemployment did get worse, it is likely that the overall standard of living would still remain far better than any time in the 19th century. Larger events can occur but the ratchet is still slowly moving in the same direction.
Nationally. But not globally.
Nothing is clear since we’re dealing with counterfactuals, but why do you believe so?
Well, I never saw an estimate for a worst case scenario with an unemployment rate as high that in 1819, but now that I state my reasoning explicitly, that sounds pretty weak.
What was the unemployment rate in 1819? A brief look at the web gave me nothing.
There have been a bunch of papers on this, I’ll have to track them down, but if memory serves me the low estimate is around 15% and the high is around 22 or 23%. Unfortunately, precise economic pre-1920s is generally hard to come by.
Given that right now the unemployment in Spain is about 25%, that doesn’t sound too horrible.
That’s a good point. I suppose one could argue that Spain is a relatively small part of Europe as a whole, but that seems like a pretty weak argument. I think I’m going to have to update on this general position to substantially reduce my confidence that the economic situation has been becoming more stable. Thanks.
Great Depression.
Hey guys, defection has gotten really easy… screw cooperation, let’s start defecting all over the place!
If defection becomes cheaper, then you would expect more defections. All else being equal.
In the very long-run there’s going to be a problem that if the trends keep continuing it will be possible for single crazy people to do nearly indefinite levels of damage. That’s a problem whether the individuals are motivated by religion, ideology, or are just wacko. Charlie Stross in one set of novels imagined a world where there’s a real problem that every crazy person can build their own nuclear weapon, but I don’t think he took it to its logical conclusion. The solution here may be simply to spread out so much to other planets that isolated incidents cannot do enough damage.
No. In 50 years it will probably be possible for the U.S. to have total drone surveillance of a country. We could assign everyone their own drone that monitors their behavior and alerts us if they do something we don’t like. And even if this proves not to be the case, rather than resort to genocide couldn’t we just cut off electricity to dangerous areas?
Your solution appears to require first conquering the entire world. Also, drones can’t tell what’s happening inside a building, or what’s in the packages or trucks going in and out of a building. Unless you mean micro-drones too small to detect, which is possible.
General point taken: It is very difficult to talk about what would be necessary 50 years from now.
Much of the world would likely support total drone surveillance of certain countries. Also, in fifty years we could probably put recording devices in peoples’ brains that tell us everything they say and hear, and combine this with AI to immediately identify any terrorist threats.
If we’re talking about brain implants and advanced AI, the the singularity would occur by the time we reach this level of development. The problem is: what if superweapons occur before superintelligence?
Like, say, in 1945?
I don’t think what I described would require a super-intelligence.
No, but the scenario you’re describing reminds me very much of the post on the definition of existential threat. In particular,
Networking loads of brains together is one of the more eclectic proposals on how to create a super-intelligence.
The simpler proposal of panopticon surveillance plus AI to interpret the data might be doable without AGI however.
Doesn’t the US have some sort of “fourth amendment” which prevents surveillance of its own citizens (who might become terrorists)? And, unlike spying on internet usage, people are going to be really aware of drones buzzing them.
No, it does not. The Fourth Amendment prevents “unreasonable searches and seizures”—there is no explicit right to privacy in the US Constitution. The Supreme Court managed to find one, though (via a “penumbra of rights”), for a specific politicized purpose, but hasn’t been willing to take it seriously otherwise.
There are a few current court cases against the NSA surveillance in the US, but none got anywhere so far.
Yes, but, as they say “the constitution isn’t a suicide pact” and if the only way to stop mass terrorist attacks in the U.S. is by trashing the fourth amendment, the fourth amendment will get trashed.
Unfortunately, if this is the case people will probably only realise it after the first serious mass terrorist attacks.
I place a high probability on the NSA already doing things that pre-9/11 would have been considered gross violations of the fourth amendment.
As in, like, 99%? :-D That seems to be a “well, duh” observation.