SPEAKING FREELY
Terrorism, by the numbers
By Bhaskar Dasgupta

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

The US State Department is mandated by law to produce a report for Congress on an annual basis. The report should provide details of the past year's terrorist incidents, the idea being that Congress can then analyze and study the impact of terrorism. The theory goes that given this information, one can manage terrorism. Yet the idea has lost support within the State Department, and the



statistical aspect of report has been dropped.

The report had been based on an old management theory that goes back to the "time and motion" studies in the Detroit car industry. The basis of this theory is that you cannot manage what you cannot measure. It definitely makes sense: you need to have information on the number of units you have sold, the performance of the sales people, the cost of all units, the number of units manufactured per hour per shop-floor employee, the number of tickets punched per hour, the number of defects per 1,000 widgets, etc. If you don't know these figures, you cannot improve on them, you cannot identify the problem, you cannot think about resolutions and solutions, and you certainly cannot do any kind of forward planning.

Before you think this is purely capitalism in play and it is only boring old managers in suits who worry about this, I should point out that this theory is applicable to almost every human endeavor. If you look through history, states and countries have come and gone. There are many reasons for a state to be successful. One of the common elements of a successful state is that it has a good bureaucracy with a meticulous and precise statistical and data-collection service. Starting from the Incas, the pharaohs of Egypt, the ancient Chinese civilizations down to the great dynasties of the Abbasids, Guptas and Romans to the Mughals, Ottomans, Japanese, British, French, Germans, etc. A successful dynasty/kingdom had an able bureaucratic structure and lots of data collection.

That said, there is a propensity of bureaucrats to report "good" numbers and try to diminish, delay or delete/ignore "bad" numbers. There are innumerable cases in ancient history to prove this, but we do not even have to go that far back. In our times, we can see this happening. Whether by accident or design, we have seen significant challenges to national statistics in the United Kingdom. Take the recent brouhaha over immigration numbers when Prime Minister Tony Blair was roasted over his inability to give a number of illegal immigrants. He had absolutely no idea or he did not want to tell. In either case, it was amazing. The whole country thinks that illegal immigration is an important issue and here we have the prime minister coming across like a startled fish on the matter. As it turned out, there were "estimates" but in the absence of hard data, one wonders how one can manage this issue.

On the other side of the world, China has significant issues around statistics and data collection. Because of the top-down command structure of the country, resource allocation is also done top-down. When such a thing happens, the lower-level bureaucrats are naturally motivated to report "good" numbers. Once this pyramid builds up, the view from the top is extremely rosy while the view at the bottom is stinky. For people who are interested in understanding a bit more about China without the irrational exuberance shown by many media, I strongly recommend the book The China Dream by Joe Studwell. Be that as it may, because the data are so bad, the command structure is not working and the economy is massively overheating on all cylinders. Just recently we saw that the Chinese economy is galloping away, thereby putting all the attempts of cooling to naught. While it's a problem that very many other countries would love to have, the overriding impression I get is of incompetence on the part of the Chinese economic authorities, who are basing decisions on evidently false statistics.

You might say this will never happen in the United States, with its strong legal structure, checks and balances, computerization, automation, etc etc. But that is not the case at all.

We have been hearing about the "war on terrorism" for a long time now. One of the key public policy elements in combating terrorism is to have a long-term perspective in mind. Terrorism comes and goes in cycles, and these cycles can be anything between 10 and 30 years in duration. On the other hand, we have the actual events, such as the London bombings of July 7 or the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. While it is important to look at the actual event and think this is mainly a one-off event, people also have to think that it's a campaign and hence manage the campaign suitably. For a parliament or the executive, it is therefore very important to have good statistics on the various terrorist events, because that is how one measures the progress and success of this "war on terror". Just because President George W Bush says terrorism is finished does not mean it is finished. He also proclaimed victory in Iraq a year or so ago. Terrorists do not down tools just because somebody said so; they have to have a good reason to do so. For us on the other side, the only way we can judge whether a terrorist campaign has finished is if there is an absence of terrorist events. For that, we need a consistent measure of terrorism.

I realize it is quite difficult to define terrorism. But as we also said, what matters is whether there is a domestic legal definition, and the US has it. So measuring terrorist events is not a problem for the US. For what it is worth, the law is reasonably clear, asking the secretary of state to produce a report to Congress on international incidents of terrorism that affect Americans in some shape or form with details, on a yearly basis.

So far so good, and for well over a decade (since 1988), the process worked reasonably well. Reports were produced and presumably Congress, the executive, the military, intelligence agencies and other interested parties were busy using the report for their own planning, analysis, forecasting and execution purposes. I know for a fact that this data set was used by academics and researchers to understand and analyze terrorism. But September 11 changed the equation, and suddenly three major issues popped up with the compilation of this report after that date.

The first issue was that it concentrated on international terrorism only, so strictly speaking, September 11 and the associated terrorist incidents on US soil would not show up. It was perhaps optimistic and a bit foolish to expect terrorism to be solely international and not ever invade domestic territory, but there you have it. But if you include domestic terrorism, then the problem of distinguishing between ordinary crimes and terrorism comes up. (This can be reasonably resolved by knowing the relevant law under which the perpetrator has been charged - whether terrorism-related law or criminal law.) The other problem is that if you suddenly include domestic terror attacks (Oklahoma bombing, Jose Padilla (the US citizen facing terror charges), etc), then the number of terrorist incidents will dramatically increase. Going by the propensity of sound-bite media coverage, one can just imagine the tabloid press going berserk over a 600% increase in terrorism. One way to fix this would be to go back and fix every previous year's figures, but that would be a logistical nightmare.

The second issue was that it is very difficult to disentangle terrorist actions from wartime actions such as in Iraq. A Sunni suicide bomber looking for raisins in the afterlife goes and blows up a Humvee killing two marines, three children and one vegetable seller in a Shi'ite-dominated suburb of Baghdad. The methodological and political issues are tremendous. Do you classify it as a terrorist event? If that is the case, then the number of incidents balloons and throws the US president's claim that the Americans are winning the "war on terror" into the trash. If the statisticians do not include this as a terrorist event and take it as a continuation of the war - consider it as a resistance event or mopping-up postwar event - then they are not winning the Iraq war at all. In either case, the choices are unpalatable. As it turns out, this is the major factor behind dropping the statistical report.

The third and final problem is that the methodology of looking at international terrorism solely from the perspective of US is limited (do we include the London bombings if no Americans were killed or injured?). Just because you have a US-centric view does not mean the terrorists are going to be very polite toward every other nationality and only attack US targets and nationals. Al-Qaeda is against many countries and people and to combat it properly, you have to include every event. This rather myopic view is why the US isn't taking a closer look at Pakistan.

The situation is not dire. There are other outlets where one can find terrorism-related data, such as www.tkb.org, but it was simply the entire situation around the US secretary of state trying to explain why the US State Department is no longer publishing these data that brought this on. If nothing else, the loss of confidence is worrying. The strength of our societies is that we are open - open with our strengths and open with our faults. If there is a jump in the statistics, then by all means let us point that out. That is what is the truth and trying to hide important data like this is certainly not helpful. If the methodology was faulty, then fix that rather than stopping publication of the data.

Perhaps the US secretary of state did not realize how important this report was around the world, and thought that stopping its production would not be noticed. By stopping the publication of this report, the overriding impression that one got was a combination of (1) hiding negative news; (2) political impressions over the data took precedence over actually fighting the "war on terror"; (3) incompetence (can't even produce a list of terrorist events?); and finally (4) bureaucratic confusion.

But all is not lost yet: the State Department should bring this report back post haste. At the same time, I have not seen anything that the UK political establishment is doing like this. Are you listening, Mr Blair?

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta works in the financial sector in London. He has extensive international experience and is working on his second doctorate in terrorism and international relations, at Kings College London.

(Copyright 2006 Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta.)

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.