 My name is Brian Fishman. I am a counter-terrorism research fellow here at the New America Foundation. I'm very happy to welcome all of you to this event today. We are really happy to welcome folks from the Institute for Economics and Peace and the Start Center at the University of Maryland and to celebrate and discuss the Global Terrorism Index, which authored by Michelle Breslauer and other folks at the Institute for Economics and Peace and based on the Global Terrorism Database, which is a data set of 104,000-plus events maintained and curated by the folks at the Start Center at the University of Maryland. I'm going to do my best just to get out of the way and moderate a little bit and let the folks that are here to speak speak. The one thing that I do want to mention just as a proviso ahead of time is that I also have an affiliation with a company called Palantir Technologies. In that role, I have a philanthropic relationship with the Start Center at the University of Maryland, so in the interest of full disclosure, I want to put that on the table. But I also want to talk a little bit about why it's important that we're here to talk about terrorism from the perspective of hard data, because that just does not happen very often. In our conversations and public discourse about terrorism as we think about policy choices and we analyzed not only the past decade, since 9-11, but times before that, it is very easy to avoid that kind of fact-based discourse. And why is it important to talk about facts? It's important to talk about facts when we think about terrorism, because terrorism is fundamentally about myth-making. It's fundamentally about organizations that are generally weak, trying to portray themselves and create outsize impact and portray themselves usually as stronger than they are. So it's very important, and it is an act of defiance, I would argue, to do analytical, fact-based, sober analysis about terrorism. This is strategic communications to just tell the truth about terrorist actors, because terrorists by definition are trying to tell untruths through their actions. And so with that, I will introduce the speakers. And I think it is really something to be celebrated, and we have folks that are trying to do sober-reasoned analysis of this kind of work. Michelle Breslauer will speak first, then Gary LeFri, the director of the Start Center at the University of Maryland, and then Bill Braniff, who is the executive director up there at Start. And so they will go try to keep track of the time when they're done with the presentations. We will have a Q&A session that I will moderate. So I'll see you again in a little bit. Thank you. And thanks for that introduction, which was actually the perfect segue into what I'm going to be talking about, and then what I believe Gary is going to cover, and Bill will elaborate on. Yesterday, the Institute for Economics and Peace released the first Global Terrorism Index. Now this was authored by our research team in Sydney, but it came out of our institute, which is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization. And what we're really trying to do is develop metrics around peacefulness. And part of this is to understand and to communicate to a wider audience that violence and peace has a social and economic impact on our society. So for six years, we've produced the Global Peace Index, and this is a ranking of national peacefulness around the world. We also try to identify the drivers of peace through the Global Peace Index. And for the last two years, we've also produced a U.S. Peace Index looking at domestic levels of violence and crime in society. Now our data and analysis is fairly well known and used by a number of intergovernmental organizations, by academic institutions, and by policy makers. First, I just wanna quickly describe how we put together the Global Peace Index because that really provides the conceptual foundation for the Global Terrorism Index. So we start with a definition of negative peace, looking at the absence of direct violence and the absence of fear of violence. And we measure this through 23 indicators that look at international conflicts, militarization, and societal safety and security. We look at positive peace through statistical analysis and correlations with a number of other data sets. And the way that we put together this methodology was through consultation with a panel of peace and statistic experts across the world and also in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit, which is the research arm of the Economist Group and who we work with each year to collect the data and collate the report. So this is how the world looks in terms of peacefulness at the state level in 2012. And why did we do a terrorism index if we're studying peace? Well, first of all, one of the 23 indicators that we're looking at that I just mentioned is a measure of terrorism. And this year we were able to take that measure from a qualitative indicator that tried to evaluate the risk of a terrorist attack to a quantitative indicator that measured terrorist attacks in countries. And we were able to do that through using the start database, the global terrorism database. Another reason is that our panel of advisors said terrorism is a very specific form of violence and a specific form of negative peace. And through that indicator, you can develop an index that will help inform our understanding of impacts and trends. So what is the Global Terrorism Index? It's looking at 158 countries, the same countries that we're measuring through the Global Peace Index. And what we're trying to do is give the ability to statistically analyze trends in terrorism in the decades since 9-11. So we're looking at the impact of terrorism from 2002 to 2011. And we worked with START at the University of Maryland through their Global Terrorism Database. And that database is comprehensive. It includes 104,000 global incidents. And that's really the data basis of this index. Now, how do we put together the index? We started with the definition of terrorism. Now, terrorism is defined differently around the world. There's not one agreed upon definition. But we're looking at the following, the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal. So it's important to note that we're not including state-sponsored terrorism in this index. And that's a reflection of which incidents are included in the START database. So the criteria to be included is that the incident must be intentional. It must have some level of violence. And it must be perpetrated by subnational actors. Now, we use four indicators for the index. The total number of terrorist incidents, the fatalities from terrorism, injuries from terrorism, and the estimated property damage. But the index is structured in a way that develops a methodological framework to try to capture the impact of an attack on a country. So it's not just a sum of fatalities or incidents. So each of those four indicators has a weighting. Incidents is weighted at one. The number of fatalities has the heaviest weighting at three. Injuries at 0.5, and that's because it's often unknown the amount of injuries in a terrorist attack. And then the sum of property damage, we actually take a subweighting. And you can see that in the scale there. There are large ranges in those subweightings because it's difficult to ascertain the economic impact. But what that indicator is really trying to do is provide a proxy to measure terror. It's not intended to provide an exact amount of economic damage. Now, once the indicators are weighted, we take a sum of the five-year weighted average. And this is meant to reflect the lingering psychological effects of a terrorist incident. So when we're looking, shortly, at the 2011 index, what we're looking at is the impact of terrorism for the previous five years in a proportional decrease. Finally, we banned the scores and to account for variation between countries. And this is really to try to take into account the fact that if there's a country like Norway, for instance, that rarely experiences terrorist attacks, the residual psychological effect in that country might be more than a country like Iraq that frequently experiences terrorist attacks. So looking at the map of the impact of terrorism in 2011, the red here signifies the countries that are the most impacted. So we see Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, and green, the countries that had no impact in 2011. So there are 43 countries that had no impact in 2011. And remember that that includes the five-year proportional decrease. The North American region suffered the least from terrorism in the 2011 index. And the Middle East and North Africa, followed by Asia-Pacific, suffered the most. What we can see, and we're starting to see, is that most terrorism occurs in situations of wider conflict. And here we can see the distribution of terrorism incidents over the 10-year period. So while the distribution is global, and you'll see the red dots everywhere, and the black dots represent the largest incidents, which I'll show you later, what we can see also is that terrorism occurs around the world, but it's still highly concentrated. So for instance, over that 10-year period, 10 countries accounted for 87% of attacks. And only 31 countries have not experienced a terrorist attack since 2001. And these are the countries most impacted by terrorism in 2011. And remember, this is more than just a combination of fatalities and incidents. It's also meant to measure the impact. Iraq is at the top of this list. And interestingly, lower middle income countries account for seven of the 10 countries most impacted by terrorism. Now let's take a look at the trends over the 10-year period. We saw a spike in terrorist activity from 2005 to 2007. It reached a peak in 2007 and then started to level out. But the red line that you see is the trend in Iraq. And you'll see that the global levels closely follow what's happening in Iraq. And this is because about 25% of overall incidents are happening in Iraq. Looking at the countries where terrorism has increased the most, there are a total of 72 countries who've seen their score increase, so more terrorism. And that's compared to 63 countries whose scores have improved. So we're seeing an increasing spread of terrorism over the 10-year period. Now here is the number of incidents over the 10-year period. And there's a dramatic rise in 2004, up to 2008 corresponding with the invasion of Iraq. And it seems to be leveling off. You'll see that we say numbers of successful incidents. Now out of the terrorist attacks that were recorded, we saw around 90% of the incidents were successful. So once an attack begins to be executed, it's much more difficult to try to stop it. Now this chart shows which countries were most impacted and most increasing impact in the same Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia versus the largest decreases in terrorism led by the US, then Algeria, and then Colombia. But note when you're looking at this that the US's score was coming off of 9-11. So as the residual impacts of 9-11 began to fade, the US's score decreased significantly. And the top 10 attacks over that period, at the very top is an attack in Nepal. It had 518 fatalities. And interestingly, this is probably an attack that we don't often think about or hear about in the media and in our popular psyche. Of the 10 worst attacks in the last decade, four happened in Iraq. And here we're looking at the number of terrorism incidents. And as has been clear from these slides and then is reflected in that report, Iraq is really accounting for the majority of incidents with a high of over 1,200 in 2011 and India and Pakistan rising sharply in 2007. Iraq also experiences the majority of fatalities, one-third of the deaths. And take a look at the large gap between Pakistan and Iraq here. Now who's being targeted? We see that almost three-quarters of our private citizens and property government, only 4% is the military. If you look at this chart and there's a large section listed as other, that's a combination of civil society, utilities and infrastructure. But 2% of that other in the chart is representative of diplomatic or embassy targets. And I think for this audience and here in this country, given our focus on embassy targets of terrorism, this is a particularly interesting point that there are only 2% of the targets in the past decade. Now the weapons that are being used are primarily explosives followed by firearms, which are increasing. And then of the top 10 most impacted countries, only two of them are low income countries, Afghanistan and Somalia. The rest are lower middle income and one upper middle income country. So here we see that terrorism isn't just happening in the poorest countries of the world and not necessarily correlated with poverty. But it's religiously motivated, politically motivated, and here we see the ideological motivations over that period. And Bill is going to speak later about the changing evolution of al-Qaeda and can go into more detail about how some of the motivations might be overlapping and may not be entirely clear. Now looking at the most deadly terrorist organizations, the Taliban, although it's at the bottom of this chart, is at the top of the list as the most deadly organization. The organizations that are in orange, Tawid and Jihad, Islamic State of Iraq, and al-Qaeda in Iraq are principally all of the same organizations. So if you were to aggregate them, they would actually equal almost the same levels as the Taliban but have now disaggregated into separate units. And what we see here is really that most of the terrorist groups are small and domestic. They're not large international organizations that are executing attacks across borders. Rather, they are small and in-country. The red bubbles here show the countries impacted, the blue bubbles, the organizations, and then you can see the relationships. And one of the relationships is that most of the cross-border attacks seem to occur with countries with shared borders. And looking at regional trends, the US and Europe and the US versus the UK, in that 10-year period, Europe suffered 19 times more fatalities. Sorry, Western Europe suffered 19 times more fatalities. And then looking at the US versus the UK, the UK suffered more incidents than the US in the 10-year period. So the UK suffered 236 incidents versus 127 in the US. Now, in order to understand the environments that are correlated with terrorism, we took the index. We took hundreds of cross-country data sets, and this is what we found out. Terrorism correlates with higher levels of group grievances, lower measures of intergroup cohesion, lower levels of political stability, and lower human rights standards. And you can see in the series of scatter plots that I'll show that in the right-hand corner, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, and they remain there with, in this instance, high terrorism and low intergroup cohesion and high levels of group grievances and high levels of terrorism, low levels of political stability and higher levels of terrorism. And what's interesting to note from our analysis is that terrorism is higher in hybrid and authoritarian regimes. So as we see nations undergo regime changes, it's important to think about other forms of violence such as terrorism that might increase as group grievances move into a place with more political instability. And then finally, human rights and terrorism. So looking at that analysis that we did based off of the global terrorism database, what the index is showing is that in the decade since 9-11, terrorist attacks have increased of the 158 countries ranked, only 31 countries did not experience a terrorist attack. Most of the attacks were concentrated though with 87% of incidents in only 10 countries. That the great majority of terrorists are small domestic groups and that most terrorist attacks occur in the context of wider conflict. So Iraq and Afghanistan actually accounted for 35% of the global total. And what we're trying to do here with the terrorism index is bring further attention to these findings and to the hard data that supports them. As Brian mentioned, the aim is to bust through myths and our aim is to communicate this to a wider audience and an audience that not only includes policymakers, but an audience that includes the general public to help inform a more practical debate about terrorism. And Gary's going to describe this in much more detail but what we've seen is that policy and public perceptions about terrorism are informed by myths and they're driven by large unexpected events such as 9-11, but the reality of today's terrorism is that the majority of attacks are domestic concentrated perpetrated by smaller actors and in the context of wider conflicts. So possibly one of the most important findings for us as the Institute for Economics and Peace is that there are implications for the peace building community here too, that we need to focus on state building and peace building initiatives that continue to look at reducing tensions related to group grievances, to build intergroup cohesion and to create political stability while fostering human rights. And now Gary's going to go into his presentation. Thanks, Michelle, and thanks also to Brian Fishman from the New America Foundation for hosting us today. It's very exciting to be here today to participate in the launch of the Global Terrorism Index. And in fact, I'd like you to think back about I guess about 10 years ago or let's say the day after 9-11 when no such database existed. No one on the planet, the day after 9-11 could tell us definitively how many terrorist attacks were happening worldwide or whether total attacks were increasing or declining over time. I'm fond of saying in my classes that all science begins with counting things. You think about the beginning of biology, for example, the first biology experiments were to count and classify things. And this is true for Adam's earthquakes, distance from the earth to the sun, and also for terrorism. It seems clear that we cannot do a very good job of fighting terrorism if we can't first count how much of it there is. Imagine trying to construct policies to reduce crime without knowing how much crime there is or to reduce cancer without knowing how much cancer there is. And this stubborn fact has posed a central irony in our approach to global terrorism in the last half century. I was encouraged that Michelle pretty much made this point just a moment ago as well. While effective policy against terrorism depends especially on hard data, objective analysis, until recently the study of terrorism has lagged far behind many other fields in the social and behavioral sciences. My favorite quote on the subject is actually from Andrew Silke, a British psychologist who says terrorism research exists on a diet of fast food research, quick, cheap, ready to hand, and nutritionally dubious. Don't put this guy on your tenure review committee, by the way. 10 years ago, my colleagues and I at the University of Maryland, some of whom are in the audience today, I saw Aaron Miller back here, who's the director of our Global Terrorism Database collection group, Mike and Brian are here as well. We set out to develop a database on terrorism that would track every known attack around the world and would systematically code its major characteristics. That is who committed the attack, what happened during the attack, where it happened, when it happened, and anything we could determine about why it happened. And in fact, over the past 10 years we have developed such a database called the Global Terrorism Database which is being used to create the Global Terrorism Index being showcased here today. And as Brian noted, it now includes over 104,000 terrorist attacks from everywhere on the planet going back to 1970. We released the 2011 terrorism data a few weeks ago, and in 2012, the Start Center will supply terrorism data to the US State Department for its annual report to Congress on terrorism. So for my brief comments this afternoon, I wanna use the GTD to put global terrorism into a broader context. I'm going to argue that terrorism has two characteristics that in fact underscore what Brian was saying just a moment ago, that underscore its tendency to promote myths. On the one hand, it's black swan nature, and on the other hand, it's bursty nature. And I've been looking for an excuse to get bursty into a talk since I've always liked the word, and if you Google it, you get some interesting comments about burstiness. Anyway, SAS Naseem Talib defines a black swan incident as one that falls outside the realm of regular expectations has a high impact and defies predictions. The term is based on the observation that before they visited Australia, Europeans had assumed that all swans were white and assumption that at the time was supported, for Europeans at least, by their own experience. Talib claims that the coordinated terrorist attacks at 9-1-1 are a perfect example of a black swan event because they were unexpected, had a huge impact on history, and were difficult to predict. So one of the major challenges in responding to terrorism is that a handful of very rare cases can have a disproportionate effect on setting the agenda for the phenomenon more generally. But I also want to highlight a second characteristic of terrorism, that it tends to be bursty. Bursty distributions are those that are quite simply concentrated in both time and space. And the more we get into this area, the more distributions we find fit into this general model. Email messages tend to be bursty. Traffic on crowded freeways tends to be bursty. The frequency of forest fires, believe it or not, tends to be bursty, as does the global distribution of terrorism. In fact, I'll argue today that these two qualities, the black swan quality and the burstiness, are a large part of what makes terrorism so challenging to the modern world. So I want to begin by discussing seven myths about terrorism that have been strongly influenced by black swan events like 9-1-1. And I'm sort of gratified to see that Michelle's already dispelled some of these myths. So I think my job will be, at least for this lecture, will be completed when I can do this and people in the audience already know these myths in advance. So I think we are one of our main goals, in fact, in this whole enterprise, is to try to get as much of this information out as possible so that the public, in general, be more aware of these myths. So Michelle and Brian have made my job easier already. Myth number one, terrorist attacks were rapidly increasing in the years leading up to 9-1-1. The tragic events of 9-1-1 had an immediate and dramatic impact on levels of public concern about terrorism in the United States and well beyond. And I'm using 9-1-1 as the black swan event, but obviously events like the London bombings, the Madrid bombings, the Mumbai bombings. There are other signature events like this that have also been very important and probably also qualify as black swans. But because of 9-1-1, many observers assume that terrorist attacks and fatalities were up sharply in the years before 9-1-1. But in fact, when we look at the GTD data, we get a much more complicated story. And in contrast to Michelle's presentation, we actually go all the way back here to 1970. The red line on top tracks total attacks, the dashed line, fatal attacks, and the smaller dashed line near the bottom, what we could call mass casualty attacks. Those were the claim the lives of more than 10 people. But according to our data, terrorist attacks reached their 20th century high point not in 2001, but in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Total attacks the year before 9-1-1 were about the same level as they had been in the mid 1970s. In fact, in the four years prior to 9-1-1, worldwide terrorist attacks were at their lowest level in 20 years. Since 9-1-1, as Michelle demonstrated just a moment ago, they've gone up considerably so that we're now back to about where we were at the high point in the early 1990s. Myth number two, terrorist attacks reached every corner of the world. The ubiquity of modern communication systems means that individuals are now continuously bombarded by images of terrorist attacks from around the globe. And just a quick footnote here in terms of collecting these data, in the 10 years we've been working on it, the problem we used to face when we were relying on wire services was whether an incident that happened in a remote part of the planet like some small city in South America got into the worldwide press. Now the problem we face is stories get into the press 30 times. And we have to try to figure out whether we're triple counting, quadruple counting things. So it's really just in the last 10 years this whole issue has changed around very dramatically. And just if you think about how many times have you seen the iconic image of a fully loaded jet plane crashing into the World Trade Center? So we've got this blanket media coverage which gives us the impression that terrorism is happening all over the place and at all times. But in fact, it tends to be quite concentrated. And Michelle had a very similar slide. This one is a bit different in that I'm looking at the entire 40 years of data. But if we take over that 40 year period, we come up with the finding that 5% of the countries of the world account for half of all terrorist attacks, 10% of the countries of the world account for 75% of the world's terrorist attacks. And I don't have slides in time to go into it but this turns out to be true at smaller levels of aggregation as well. So within countries, terrorism is also highly concentrated. Even within cities it's highly concentrated. So we find a lot of concentration at the geospatial level. Myth number three, most terrorist attacks involve disgruntled groups and individuals from one country carrying out attacks on civilians in other countries. Again, the tremendous impact of 911 encourages us to think about terrorism as mostly being about unhappy individuals from one country attacking innocent civilians from another. To examine this issue in more detail, my colleagues, Martha Crenshaw and Su Ming Yang and I took the 52 organizations identified by the US State Department as posing the greatest risk to the United States in terms of terrorism. And we actually looked at how many attacks they did that were international and how many were domestic. And before we had these data, it was not possible to do this kind of analysis. So this has only been possible quite recently. Here's what we found. Of the 17,000 attacks that these groups had engaged in from 1970 to 2004, I believe we cut off, we found that 90% of them were domestic, which actually even surprised Martha and our analysts. That is more than nine times out of 10 these groups operated at home against local targets. This means that groups located in, for example, Pakistan were far more likely to use terrorist attacks against non-US targets in Pakistan than they were to attack US targets in Pakistan or to attack other countries. So most, by far, most terrorism is domestic. Myth number four, terrorism is unrelated to traditional political grievances. Because of the seeming irrationality of the Al Qaeda-inspired 9-11 attack, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that a large number of terrorist attacks involve fairly rational political disputes over territory. When we use the GTD to identify the most active terrorist organizations in the world, we find that a large proportion of them involve groups organized around disputes having to do with political control over territory. And I'm not going to get into a sophisticated analysis of this, but just cast your eyes, because I know we have a sophisticated bunch out here. If you just look at the top 10 terrorist organizations in there, you're hard pressed to find one of these that isn't mostly about or at least a lot about disputes over territory, Shining Path, the ETA, FMLN, and so on. A lot of these groups are predominantly organized around control of territory, so they have very strong political agendas. Myth number five, most terrorist attacks are incredibly lethal. Again, because of the highly lethal terrorist attack of 9-11, it's easy to suppose that most terrorist attacks are incredibly lethal. However, from the GTD, we find that more than half of all terrorist attacks since 1970 involve no fatalities. And a colleague of mine, when I showed him this, said, how can this be that so many terrorist attacks do not in fact result in fatalities? Well, many incidents are directed at property, at bridges, at electric plants, at factories. Other attacks are aimed at civilians, but they fail. And still other attacks involve groups that give warning to civilians before they strike. This has been common practice for ETA, for the IRA. It used to be common for the weather underground. So 30 years ago, these considerations led terrorism researcher Brian Jenkins to suggest that terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead. You know, in red here, I go up to 2004. It is interesting though, if you look at what's happened since 2004 in yellow, we'll see that the field is changing a bit, that the number of cases with no fatalities is going down, and all of the cases with fatalities has gone up. And this in fact led Brian recently to revisit his earlier statement and after reviewing attacks by terrorist groups operating in the early 21st century conclude that many of today's terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead. Nonetheless, when you look at the big picture, about half of all terrorist attacks since 1970 produced no fatalities. Myth number six, most terrorist attacks rely on sophisticated weaponry. The coordinated attacks of 911 involve long-term planning, split second timing, and an innovative use of existing resources. And of course, the sophistication of 911 pales into insignificance compared to the diabolical sophistication of the enemies of people like Claire Danes, Kiefer Sutherland, Bruce Willis, and other television and media heroes. These images no doubt encourage us to think that most terrorist strikes depend on such sophisticated weaponry. But contrary to the view of terrorism that we commonly get from Hollywood, the vast majority of terrorist attacks rely on non-sophisticated, readily accessible weapons. According to the GT database, 80% of all attacks rely on explosives and firearms. And for the most part, the explosives are relatively common, especially dynamite and hand grenades. Similarly, the most common firearms are also widely available, including especially shotguns and pistols. Fortunately, sophisticated weapons, including chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons are so far the rare exception. And finally, myth number seven, most terrorist organizations are long-lasting and difficult to eradicate. Given the persistence of high-profile, long-lasting groups like Al Qaeda, the Tamil Tigers, the Irish Republican Army, there's a common perception that most terrorist groups have long lifespans. The GTD identifies more than 2000 separate terrorist groups. We gauge their longevity by simply looking at the amount of time from their first strike to their last known strike. And here's what we find. We see that nearly 75% of the terrorist organizations identified in the GTD have lasted for less than a year. Most terrorist groups are like most business startups, very likely to disappear during their first year of operation. Forming and maintaining groups is not all that easy despite impressions to the contrary from the media. Why do we have the impression that terrorist groups are long-lasting and difficult to eradicate? Probably because we hear so much about the few groups that are successful. But for every Al Qaeda and every ETA, there are many more short-lived, relatively obscure groups such as the anti-capitalist brigades and the revolutionary flames. At the Start Center, we sometimes have this game where we ask people if they can classify which groups is a terrorist group and which is a relatively obscure rock group. You'd be surprised how badly people do at that. So contrary to our stereotypes based on 911 and a few other extraordinary events, terrorism is highly concentrated in a relatively small number of countries and within smaller regions within those countries. Most terrorist attacks for the past four decades have relied on readily available, unsophisticated weaponry and frequently involve few or no fatalities. The typical terrorist group disappears in less than a year. Attacks were declining just before 911 and very few attacks involve disgruntled groups from one country attacking civilians in another country. If 911 is a black swan event and hence very rare, why not simply ignore terrorism and go back to business as usual? The reason why ignoring terrorism is a bad idea is directly related to the second characteristic of terrorism I mentioned above. It tends to be bursty. That is when it starts to happen, you tend to get a lot of it rapidly. We have many examples of this phenomena provided by research being conducted at the Start Center. I just brought with me a few of them. One is this earlier study I mentioned where we tracked 52 organizations identified by the US State Department as being especially dangerous. And we used a statistical methodology from criminology called trajectory analysis and what this does is it tends to group or it tries to group different organizations based on their attack patterns. And when you do this you see that going back to 1970 the US was not attacked by a kind of monolithic set of organizations but you see three pretty distinctive groups. So you've got a group in green here on the far left-hand side. Most of these groups were leftist organizations, some involved Puerto Rican dissidents and they were very active in the 1970s and then virtually disappeared. Then you've got a big group in the middle that's kind of purple. Many of these had origins in Latin America. They also were more Marxist-Leninist type organizations. They were very active in the 1980s and tended to collapse especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then on the far right, I think my clicker's off. Anyway, the far right here, you have a small red group. We've actually just redone this analysis and this goes up to 2004. If you take this up to 2011, this number goes way up. This includes al-Qaeda, the Taliban and sort of the kind of most recent groups that in fact Bill's gonna be talking about in just a second. So in each case, you have this kind of wave-like or bursty characteristic. So you tend to get waves and the waves come to a peak eventually. We figure out how to deal with them and they recede. And we tend to find this in lots of situations. Here are aerial hijackings from the whole planet going back to 1948. You can see this huge swell of aerial hijackings in the late 1960s. Governments tried all sorts of things to counter it. What I think worked the best was metal detectors. They went down dramatically after metal detectors started to be introduced in most airports in the world. But again, you get this big burst in the late 1960s. Suicide bombings look this way as well. We track suicide bombings. There are almost none of them until the mid-1980s. And you get this real burst in the 1990s. And they're finally starting to fall off today. Improvised explosive devices. You know, a word that if you go back, you can't find it even in the literature until you get back pretty recently. Once they start being used in the early part of the last decade, you start to get this really rapid rise. So in all of these cases, you get this kind of bursty quality. And researchers are beginning to take more seriously this bursty quality of terrorism, as well as the potential burstiness of other types of crime and violence, so that there's a general form that burstiness takes with regard to crime, to violence, and perhaps to terrorism as well, which is illustrated in this next slide. This figure shows the probability, and this is applied to crime in this case, but it shows the probability that a second crime will occur after a certain number of days from the first crime. And the prediction is that most of the occurrences of subsequent crimes will be concentrated around short time intervals. In criminology, this phenomenon is now referred to as near repeats. And there's a rapidly developing literature suggesting that this near repeat pattern may apply to a wide variety of different types of crimes and violence. So far, the most extensive research has been done on burglaries. Unfortunately, if you're the victim of a burglary, there's a very high probability that the offenders will return, and soon. But it turns out that when you're victimized, it also raises the risk of your neighbors for victimization. And urban police departments in the United States and other places have begun to take these types of statistics into account when they decide how to deploy police officers, that you can actually start to get much more detailed predictions about where burglaries are likely to happen by tracking these things. But these patterns may generalize to lots of other types of violence and crime as well. For example, some recent research suggests that near repeat patterns provide good estimates not only for burglary, but for behavior as disparate as improvised explosive devices and rival criminal gangs. And I just brought a couple examples with me. These are from a colleague at UCLA, Jeff Brantingham. On the left-hand side, residential burglaries in the Hollenbeck neighborhood of Los Angeles. On the right-hand side, gang shootings in the same neighborhood in Los Angeles. You notice how similar these patterns are. And interestingly, look at these patterns in Baghdad of improvised explosive devices in January to May 2007. And you can clearly pick out roadways in there. Roadways figure in very prominently with gang attacks, with burglary efforts as well. So there's getting to be some very interesting possibilities for looking at connections between these. And I just want to finish my remarks this afternoon by talking about one of these that we're engaged in. We've been trying to use this quality or this near-repeat pattern to actually try to see if we can get a better handle on terrorism and perhaps even do a better job of predicting where the next attack is going to happen. In a recent study, my colleagues at Maryland and I examined the spatial and temporal distribution of terrorist attacks by the Basque separatist group ETA in Spain from 1970 on. ETA has been one of the deadliest and longest-lasting terrorist organizations in the world. We also examined the attack patterns of the Farah Bundy Marti National Liberation Front or the FMLN in El Salvador. The first attacks by the FMLN and the GTD happened in 1980, and their last attack happened in 1992. The way we tried looking at this issue was in terms of what we call microcycles, which we define as localized bursts of terrorist attacks. So we began by classifying the 2,000 attacks attributed to ETA and the 3,300 attacks attributed to FMLN into a space-time grid like this. So the dark squares in here indicate concentrations that are higher than you would expect randomly. So across the type, we have time for the next attack in weeks. Across the side, we've got distance for the next attack given that a particular attack happened in a particular location. So we see that there are, it's certainly not a random distribution, but it's pretty generalized over a wide number of different squares. However, we found a very large proportion of attacks in both countries were actually in a relatively small segment of the diagram. My thing is fading here, but basically right up here, and this square right up here in both cases. If you look at the square right up there, for ETA, 52% of all attacks happened within microcycles that were within two weeks and five miles of each other. 60% happened within microcycles that were within two weeks and 10 miles of each other. The concentration was even greater for the FMLN. 67% of FMLN attacks happened within microcycles that were within two weeks and five miles of each other, and 81% happened within microcycles of two weeks and 10 miles of each other. Moreover, we found that compared to other attacks, attacks that were part of microcycles had significantly different characteristics in both countries, which I think gives us some idea about how data such as the data we're talking about could even be useful for policy makers in terms of countering terrorism, and I'll just close with a couple of examples. We found that compared to other types of attacks, bombings by ETA and the FMLN are more likely to be part of microcycles. So if you get a bombing by one of these groups, they're more likely to repeat another bombing in a close location fairly early on. Likewise, we find fatal attacks tend to be part of microcycles. If there are casualties, they tend to be repeated and they tend to be repeated in the same location. On the other hand, assassinations tend to be isolated events. They don't tend to be repeated quickly and in similar locations, and likewise armed assaults are in the same boat. They're more isolated. We find that these sorts of things can also predict where the attacks happen. We found, for example, that attacks in the national capital for both ETA and the FMLN were more likely part of microcycles. They were more likely to be repeated and soon. So if you get an attack in the capital, you better get ready for another one to happen rapidly. On the other hand, there was a difference between ETA and the FMLN in terms of the regional capital, which makes good sense because ETA's goal is to get a Basque homeland, whereas FMLN was trying to get control of the whole country and was therefore less interested in the regional capitals. We found that both of these groups were more likely to attack another time, rapidly, close location, if the attack was in their defended space, where their headquarters were located as well. So these results, of course, are very preliminary, but they're making this bigger point that if we're going to understand terrorism, if we're going to counter terrorism, we really need to know as much about it as we possibly can. And they, I think, give us some reason to hope that analysis of the spatial and temporal patterns of terrorism might help to guide policies on countering terrorism as well as other types of criminal violence, which brings me to a few, hopefully, short conclusions. I've argued that policies on terrorism are strongly affected by Black Swan events and that 911 is a good example of such an event. It was unexpected of great magnitude and had a huge impact on policy. But in addition, terrorism has a burst equality. When it is effective in a particular time and place, we get a lot of it rapidly. This last point suggests that it would be foolhardy to ignore the threats posed. And in fact, in this regard, early events may be a harbinger of things to come. There's a brilliant portrayal of a similar idea in one of my favorite films, the classic Alfred Hitchcock film, The Birds. It's a great scene, I'm sure many of you have seen this movie. It's a great scene where a single bird lands on the jungle gym equipment behind Melanie Daniels, the rich socialite played by Tippi Hedron. On February 16th, 1993, a truck bomb in the basement parking garage of the World Trade Center killed six people, injured hundreds, and destroyed a half a billion dollars worth of property. We didn't really have a framework for understanding this incident in 1993. But looking back at the incident, which happened nearly two decades ago, we can now see that it too was a harbinger of things to come, that this group would morph into a worldwide movement that would mount a series of deadly attacks around the globe, as in the Hitchcock film, basically. So I guess they say that hindsight is 2020, and in fact, Bill's going to follow up with more detailed discussion of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. So I think this is the challenge posed for contemporary societies by terrorism. There are dangers in overreacting, but there are also dangers in not reacting, and we've got to get it right. This is why I applaud the efforts of the Institution for Economics and Peace to bring these important events to the attention of the public and to the attention of policymakers. Thanks for your attention. Well, first let me echo my thanks to our host, especially the staff of the New America Foundation, not just my friend, Brian Fishman, but the people who actually did the real work to put on the event today, and as well to Michelle and her colleagues for taking the really amazing work that Erin Miller and Gary Lafrie and the GTD team at Start do, taking that data and putting it to use, and helping us get that data out to the broader public. It's a great collaboration for us to benefit from organizations like yours who can take our data the extra mile. So thank you for that. Again, my name is Bill Braniff. I'm the executive director at the Star Consortium, and my small contribution to the much larger effort represented by today's event is to provide a little context to one of the most puzzling subplots revealed by the Global Terrorism Database and the Global Terrorism Index. And the broad brushstrokes of this subplot have already been laid out, but let me repeat them. The GT, the Global Terrorism Index lists Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia as experiencing the greatest increase in impact of terrorism between 2002 and 2011, over the last decade. The 10 most lethal organizations in that time frame include the Taliban, the Islamic State of Iraq, and its two precursor organizations, Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Sa'hid al-Jahad, which make the top 10 on their own accord, Tariq-e-Taliban Pakistan and Boko Haram. Four of the five most lethal single attacks of 2011 were conducted by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with 110 killed, the Tariq-e-Taliban Pakistan with 80 killed, Al-Shabaab 70 killed, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq 65 killed. According to the GTD, 11 of the 20 most active groups globally were Al-Qaeda linked. However, Al-Qaeda, the Al-Qaeda organization itself was responsible for only one incident in 2011, a kidnapping out of the 5,000 terrorism incidents of the year. Now, this is puzzling because the Al-Qaeda organization has been synonymous with jihadism since 2001, and not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but globally. And yet it appears that Al-Qaeda has been temporarily neutralized as an organization, and yet jihadism seems to be flourishing. And these data beg the questions, did Al-Qaeda win? Has it successfully incited a global, excuse me, a global revolution in its own image, or has Al-Qaeda lost? And has it merely been replaced, outpaced, by more parochial actors around the world? And of course, the simplest explanation for the data that I've just cited is that Al-Qaeda is one corporate organization that has been pummeled over the last several years, and these other corporate organizations sit somewhere far away, and while Al-Qaeda has drawn most of the tension of the United States government, these other organizations have been allowed to flourish. But the problem with that analysis is that we all know too much about the intertwined history of Al-Qaeda and many of these other organizations to see them as merely corporate entities with no relation to one another. We understand that there's a relationship between Al-Qaeda core and al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Tariq-e Talab in Pakistan. So I'm going to walk us through the history of the evolution of global jihadism and try to tease out what is going on. Has Al-Qaeda successfully instigated a global revolution or has Al-Qaeda actually lost in its endeavor to hold the mantle of global jihadism? And so I'm going to lay out a very simple timeline, and again, I'll walk very quickly through this story because it's one we're familiar with. There have been local and irredentist or regional jihadist movements in the past, reclamation campaigns intending to reclaim territory and instill a certain kind of Islamic rule in those geographic locations. And this raw material, so to speak, was sucked up, incentivized ideologically and operationally to enter into a 10-year long conflict with Soviet Union in Afghanistan, known as the anti-Soviet jihad. And there were organizations enabling and inciting this behavior. The Maktab al-Kiramat is the most famous, led by Abdullah Azam, financed in large part by Osama bin Laden. And they actively recruited individuals from these extant militant campaigns. In many cases, governments also incentivized the travel of individuals from these regions into the anti-Soviet jihadi theater. Out of this milieu comes the Al-Qaeda organization established in August of 1988. And when it exits this 10-year long struggle, it's not a mass movement. It's a small vanguard organization. But it has rubbed shoulders with individuals from across the world. It has socialized an idea that the grievances of an individual combatant in Algeria are very, very similar to the grievances of an individual combatant in Egypt, to those of Afghanistan, to those of Southeast Asia. There's a larger story at play, a cosmic narrative. And Al-Qaeda sort of collects these business cards, makes these contacts, and will benefit from those contacts for the next 30 years. They're not the only thing to come out at the other end of the anti-Soviet jihad, however. A lot of these organizations go back home. Or individuals from this theater, veterans from the anti-Soviet jihad, go back home and start their own organizations. For example, a Southeast Asian group names itself after an Afghan warlord from the anti-Soviet jihad, Abu Sayyaf, right? Those two groups have nothing to do with one another, except that a veteran from the anti-Soviet jihad inspired by what he experienced, fighting arm in arm with Afghan Mujahideen, brings that back with him to Southeast Asia. Other organizations like La Shkari Taiba, inspired by Abdullah Azam, fighting the anti-Soviet jihad, are picked up in this case by the Pakistani state, relocated to the Kashmiri front, where they begin conducting irredentist or reclamation jihadist attacks against India for the disputed territory of Kashmir, right? So these fellow travelers go sort of out into the world, but they do so with these connections, operationally and ideologically, to this global conflagration that they took part in Afghanistan. Some of these organizations, the leadership will be so closely intertwined with al-Qaida core that they may eventually adopt the al-Qaida moniker, right? The most, I think, telling example is a little-known group named Taohidwal Jihad, right? Taohidwal Jihad. Show of hands, right? How many people are intimately familiar with the group Taohidwal Jihad? Okay, Brian Fishman is probably the country's leading expert on Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, Abu Musab al-Zarkawi and al-Qaida in Iraq. Now how are we, right? Okay, is al-Qaida in Iraq al-Qaida? Al-Qaida in Iraq is Taohidwal Jihad, rebranded as al-Qaida in Iraq, in order to benefit from the resource mobilization that a defensive jihadi struggle can provide, that al-Qaida's brand name can provide, the financing and propaganda capabilities. It's also a way for al-Qaida core to get skin in the game in a fight where it had to be if it was going to remain relevant. How could you be al-Qaida and not be in Iraq fighting against United States military? You needed skin in that game, and so you found it. You found it from your network of individuals that you trained and fought with during the anti-Soviet jihad that you maintain contact with. And when the opportunity came, you rebranded that organization, right? Al-Qaida in Iraq is born. So you have this very confusing network, dynamic network of associated movements, associated groups, and then affiliated groups that formally take on the moniker. But you have something else as well. Some individuals don't get to go home. It turns out that many countries aren't very interested in receiving back individuals who spent 10 years fighting in terrorist style combat or in certain style combat. So for example, if you were from the Moroccan Islamic combatants group, you didn't go home after the anti-Soviet jihad because Morocco wouldn't have it. You might have found yourself in Spain. If you're, however, countries like Yemen didn't prevent individuals, veterans from the anti-Soviet jihad from coming back into Yemen. And so what you have is this interesting diasporization of veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad. And this phenomenon gets repeated over and over again in the Balkan jihad, the Chechen jihad, and then again after Iraq. So there's this substrada across the world of jihadist veterans who have been there and done that. And these individuals in concert with al-Qaeda's propaganda help to inspire another aspect or facet of jihadism. It's a younger generation, individuals who haven't been there and done that but want to look up to those grizzled veterans and say, I want to be like that guy. That guy fought the good fight. He's something I'm inspired by. So the global jihadist phenomenon that we're actually talking about when we talk about this isn't just the al-Qaeda core organization. It's this very dynamic set of organizations. Now, let me, before we move on, I just want to talk quickly about al-Qaeda core. If it's only one small organization in this broader milieu, why is it so central? And especially if it's safe haven, it's flesh and bone, real safe haven is on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan under the roof of the Haqqani network. It has a home address. It has a geographic place where it was really born and raised. How could it have centrality in Somalia, in Yemen, in Southeast Asia? What about al-Qaeda gives it this ability to influence events so far afield? And I think what al-Qaeda has benefited from is a very simple narrative that they've helped to amplify and it's a narrative that resonates across many of these conflict zones. The narrative is very simple. If your government has been so weak that it hasn't provided for you, and instead it's allowed outside forces to suck resources that rightfully belong to you to manipulate your political environment, then this outside enemy is really the source of the problem, right? So your local grievances, the fact that your local government is corrupt or in the case of a jihadist narrative, apostate, it is rejected true Islam, it isn't governing according to the right kind of Islam, it's, that's not unrelated to the fact that it is supported or buoyed by the far enemy. Groups like the United States or the West. So al-Qaeda has taken this narrative, it's harmonized local grievances with a broader cosmic narrative that pins responsibility not just to the local governments who have failed you, but to a far enemy that's manipulating you and pulling the strings. This is one aspect of its ideology, and that ideology can be picked up and put down in a lot of local contexts and be convincing. A second, I think, however, or the thing that it led al-Qaeda to be able to tell this story globally was the Gulf War in 1991, in which Osama bin Laden takes many veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad, a lot of this organization sort of represented crudely on this schematic, and approaches the royal family and said, I can protect the land of the two holy places from Saddam Hussein's Bathis regime. We've just defeated a superpower in Afghanistan, we can now protect Saudi Arabia, and instead the Saudi government opts for the Department of Defense, right? And this is a humiliating blow to bin Laden. It's seen as a complete rejection of the responsibilities of the Saudi royal family, whose primary goal or responsibility is to protect Mecca and Medina. And what he realizes and what he's able to elaborate is that these regimes are just the puppets of foreign powers. In a very high-profile way, these regimes are so bankrupt that they will not even allow Muslims, Mujahideen, to protect Mecca and Medina, that instead they're just in the pocket of these foreign powers. So this is sort of the crystallizing story that sets al-Qaeda's grand strategy, and which al-Qaeda is then able to promote prolifically for the next 30 years. Specifically, the grand strategy reads like this. Al-Qaeda would enable and repurpose the violence of other militant actors to attrit the political, economic, and military will of the United States to remain engaged in the Muslim world. If al-Qaeda's geographically distributed attrition warfare could sever the ties between the puppet masters and the puppets, revolutionary local and regional campaigns could then reestablish Islamic governance for the Muslim nation. So to realize this grand strategy, al-Qaeda exploited the relationships it created during the anti-Soviet Jihad and then glommed on to these excellent violent campaigns. It provides training, financing, propaganda support when it does not also engage directly in the violence, and this increasingly intertwined history of local, regional, and global actors has multiple consequences. One, al-Qaeda gets to benefit from all the resources mobilized for those local causes, and ideas of defensive or classical jihad are much better resource mobilizers than al-Qaeda's very cosmic sort of abstract notions of global jihad. Second, the multiplicity of grievances represented by local, regional, and local actors creates numerous radicalization pathways, and the harmonization of those parochial and cosmic narratives by al-Qaeda's propaganda organ then helps them to conflate actions on the ground. So now more people have more resources and more grievances to get into the fight, and al-Qaeda tells one story over those three layers of conflict. And then additionally, although bin Laden clearly desired greater command and control and greater operational freedom of maneuver than he had, when history presented him and the al-Qaeda organization with an opportunity to endorse lone wolf jihadism, and I'm thinking of the instance of Major Nadal Hassan's attack at Fort Hood, bin Laden and al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula all chose to endorse lone wolf activism, meaning to privilege lone wolf activism as opposed to privileging command and control. And this I would argue is consistent with its broader sense of mission, that it sees itself as an enabler of the violence of others in a strategy of attrition warfare, in which it's primary job is to promote violence elsewhere. So when you lay those five categories out that I've described, and you think about al-Qaeda's resonant ideology, the way they formulated the argument, and the implications of the way they've layered local, regional, and global jihadist activism, what you get is sort of a dynamic network. The global jihadist front isn't one thing, and we don't experience threat from any one portion of this Venn diagram. Instead, all of these represent a threat to the United States, to the West, and in fact, as Gary's data points out, in most cases to local actors or local regimes and local civilians. So let me just describe this sort of quickly. These are obviously the five categories that I've just said came out of the anti-Soviet jihad. The core affiliated and associated organizations, those who have networked with the core, but never officially joined, and then those inspired more recently by the movement. And if we look at just a handful of plots from the United States over the last decade, what we find very anecdotally is that the trend seems to represent the data that we've talked about at a global scale, which is most of the plots don't hit Al-Qaeda core. What we see is Al-Qaeda core playing the central role, and I'll illustrate this very quickly with the plot of Najib al-Azazi. But instead, the majority of the violence is coming from autonomous adherents, those inspired by the idea, or by other associated organizations, and occasionally by those who actually network into a training camp or network into an actual Al-Qaeda affiliate. The story of Najib al-Azazi, I think, evidences the dynamism of this community. And that's what I think is lacking in many sort of descriptions of violent jihadism. It's represented in very static categories. What I'd like to suggest is that these categories are not static and that people move as individual vectors through this environment. Najib al-Azazi from Queens of the United States in New York, he and his two high school buddies, Ahmadzah and Madunjanin, decide they're going to get into this environment. But do they, and we know Najib al-Azazi eventually winds up being arrested for plotting to attack the New York City subway. High profile mask, casualty, economic attack, sound, smells, looks, tastes like an Al-Qaeda core plot. But how does he get into this environment? Is that where he starts? Is that what he had in mind when he began his journey? When he pleads guilty, he talks about being inspired to go defend Afghans from the United States military in Afghanistan by joining the Taliban. Defensive jihad, classical jihad gets him in the door. But in route, he finds an Al-Qaeda middleman, whose name is Ahmed on email, and Ahmed in Peshawar convinces him that if he wants to change the world, if he wants to really do something in this environment, he shouldn't go die anonymously on the battlefield in Afghanistan. He can do that. The DOD will help him do that. But what he should do is turn around. He should go to spend about a month in a training camp in November, along with other potential bombers, go back to his country of origin because he has a clean passport, link back up with his friends, his high school friends, and they should conduct a high profile mass casualty attack. That'll actually change the world. So Al-Qaeda reorients that violence, gets him into a training camp, and the rest is history. This is, these are overlapping forces and individuals pass through this environment and their behavior has changed as a result of the different actors that they come in contact with. So what are the implications of this? And what does this mean for the story I tried to start off with? Has Al-Qaeda lost or has Al-Qaeda won? Al-Qaeda benefits from defensive jihadist narratives. It always has and it always will. So if Al-Qaeda can siphon off resources that are going in to defend Muslim territory from occupation, it gets stronger. It mobilizes money, it mobilizes men, and it mobilizes weapons. If it can then establish a footprint in that environment for a long enough time, it can actually reorient the violence of groups or individuals in that environment. Or it can convince them of this cosmic narrative that their violence is better oriented not towards local targets, local civilians of Muslim origin in that country, but towards Western targets in that same environment. And this advances its geographic, its distributed attrition strategy. But the problem for Al-Qaeda is that it's frequently competing with more popular parochial actors who oftentimes have a better claim at legitimacy in the specific regions where Al-Qaeda tries to operate. And the farther away you get from Al-Qaeda's geographic safe haven in South Asia, Al-Qaeda loses centrality. So given this, we have this interesting phenomenon. After Bin Laden's death, and Al-Qaeda is obviously under great strain in South Asia, you see local actors take on a greater leadership role in local jihadist conflicts, and you see the nature of the violence change. In many cases, the violence is on the uptick, but the degree to which it is conducted in Al-Qaeda's image has decreased. That, I would argue, is the general story of the last few years. So what does that mean? What are the implications? It means very simply that counterterrorism, not very simply, it means counterterrorism professional should therefore be sure to disentangle local, regional, and global jihadist behaviors and actors. This is exceptionally difficult to do, because Al-Qaeda, as Brian suggested at the beginning of the talk, very deliberately tells lies to conflate those very behaviors. But by disentangling local, regional, and global jihadist actors, we can in effect atomize them from one another and then treat them all separately. Part of the way to do this is to avoid the defense of our classical jihadist narratives that Al-Qaeda is so successful at telling. Local actors can be fought through proxies, regional actors through the international system and regional alliances, and global jihadist actors as Al-Qaeda's sort of strength is diminished should, I think, be treated very carefully. Unfortunately, given the success against the Al-Qaeda core organization, we're now in this very interesting moment where if we're too aggressive in continuing to strike, global jihadist actors in other regions, we run the very real risk of incentivizing local and regional groups to take up the global fight by conducting those perceived invasions of sovereignty. We also need to understand that nonviolent Islamism is different from jihadism, and that's a subtext to a lot of what is going on in many of the post-Arab Spring countries, that nonviolent Islamist groups are a political reality. They're a political reality that are seeking to lead within the international system, and that's a place where, although our policy options might be less attractive than they were five years ago, that we still have a market advantage within the international system. And I would argue that it probably makes good sense to treat nonviolent Islamist actors firmly within the international system and in a very different way than we treat jihadist actors. And then finally, understand the implications of the defensive jihadist narrative. For my dollar, this is the single most important radicalization and mobilization principle. That defensive jihad is what gets people into the door, as I discussed with Najib al-Azazi, and our counterterrorism policy and practice should understand this very clearly. It's not to suggest that there are in times of national interest trumps all else, but when that isn't the case, understanding how to avoid the pitfalls of the defensive jihadist narrative will serve us well. So with that, I think we're to Q&A. Thank you. Okay, that was great, guys. I'm gonna take the moderator's prerogative and ask a couple of questions. When I throw it out to the audience, make sure please state your name and affiliation, and remember we like questions better than statements, so try to keep it in that direction. The first question I'm gonna have is sort of a big one, which is how do we take the lessons here and turn them into effective policy-making, especially when there is a clear tension, I think, between some of the comments that Gary made and some of those that Bill made. When you look at the idea that terrorism, when it is most impactful, comes in the form of these black swan events, don't you, isn't the implication there, that you have to do everything possible to prevent those single large-scale attacks, right? That might be the argument that might come out of that, and we had Greg Johnson, expert on AQAP here earlier today, some of you may have been here for that as well. That might mean we need to be using drones to attack AQAP targets in Yemen. But as I think, well, as Greg did argue, that does have a radicalizing impact on local tribal folks inside of Yemen, but if the implication is that there are AQAP people in Yemen that are trying to attack the United States and that if you don't disrupt their activities, they are more likely to commit a large-scale terrorist attack against the United States of the kind that will be a black swan event, how do you strike this balance? That's where the rubber hits the road, right? And what I would put into that is when that black swan happens, and this is what I'll throw to Michelle, is when that large-scale attack occurs, and it will happen again, right? In the United States, in other countries around the world, whether it's Western Europe or in India with Mumbai, like attack, how do you take the kind of data that we have here so that we in the aftermath of an attack can put these sorts of things into context, using the sorts of information that you're providing in the Global Terrorism Index about building a path forward out of a major black swan-style incident? And I don't know who wants to go first, but I'll start there. So I'll take the first part of the question, Bryan. Thank you. This is the tension of counterterrorism in a democratic setting, right? Your primary mission as a professional counterterrorism practitioner is to prevent that event from happening, but your higher calling is to support and defend the Constitution that you've taken an oath to operate under. And so you have these really interesting tensions where what you know might be most effective kinetically and operationally might violate some of the very principles that you're sworn to defend, and at the same time, might also be counterproductive in the long term for very similar reasons. And as Greg mentioned, the idea of inciting greater radicalization. So I think the answer eventually is that you get good enough at what you do. And I think that the United States has had an amazing growth in its capacity in the counterterrorism realm to do what you do very well, very effectively, but with a very light footprint. If you think about law enforcement in the United States, it isn't a draconian system. It isn't a system that has sort of a zero-risk threshold. It assumes some risk, but it has enough confidence in itself and it's in its systems and its intelligence apparatus that it thinks it can get the job done without trampling on, without operating with the heavy-handed sort of posture. And I think that's what professional counterterrorism looks like. It's doing exactly what you need to do and no more. And that's not easy. I'm just saying I think that's what an ideal counterterrorism posture looks like. There are some, though, that would argue that that's exactly what a policy of iterative drone strikes is, is a light footprint. Do you think that that's an accurate statement or an inaccurate statement? I think it depends entirely on who you're asking. And while it feels, I would argue that it probably feels calculated, iterative, and that it's minimizing collateral damage from this side of the table. If you're a civilian in Yemen, you probably disagree. And so then the question is, what do we try to accomplish? And if you're greatest concern are the citizens of Yemen and their potential for radicalization or not, then I think that changes your calculus for how valuable the drone program is in that circumstance. I could just check if I'm live here. Hello, hello. I just got back from actually a meeting of the World Economic Forum. Maybe some of the folks in the room were at that meeting in Dubai. But I can tell you the attitudes towards drones varied a great deal, depending on the country you were there from. That's for sure. And it actually perfectly illustrates, in a sense, the genius of terrorism as a technique, that it does force this, it has this jujitsu quality to it so that you can do things to make things worse. So it's this really careful balancing act between doing successful countermeasures but not making the situation worse than it already is. And in terms of your original question, I think what I'm hopeful that we can do with data, and obviously data doesn't solve all of your problems. I certainly would be the last to think. In fact, in some cases, it may exacerbate or maybe having the knowledge may make you even more nervous than you should be. But I'm thinking like, for example, the knowledge that when you're going into another country where there are organizations that have been engaged in quite a bit of terrorism that some nations, other nations regard as dangerous, one of the interesting things is the most likely impact of countering those organizations and their narratives is not to save citizens' lives from the other countries but citizens from the country where the groups are originating, which I think is quite a powerful narrative. My background is in criminology and one of the ironies I know in coming up with laws against drunk drivers. If you get a better law against drunk driving, the first people you save are drunks, basically. And it seems to be there's a kind of a parallel with regard to terrorism. If you have effective countermeasures, the first people you save are the domestics from the countries that have the groups. And so I think those sorts of things do provide some avenue for perhaps more intelligent policymaking. I think that as far as the study that we did and what we're looking at, we really want to try to draw attention to evaluations of efficiency in our counterterrorism measures and in our counterterrorism spending in particular. Now, we weren't able to do an economic analysis for the Global Terrorism Index, but we're hoping that it could help inform US policymakers and policymakers around the world to think about how efficient is our counterterrorism spending and how efficient are our measures. So looking at the change in the score in the US over that period, there's no doubt that there's been some efficacy of our counterterrorism policies. But the idea is really, where is there an optimal balance here? And we were recently releasing a report. We recently released a report looking at violence containment spending in the United States and all the money that goes to dealing with the consequences of violence and looking at the comparison between how much money could be saved investing in preventing violence. And there is a similar analogy here with terrorism where although terrorism is highly unpredictable and difficult to counter, if we start to look at trends in the data, if we start to take the types of points that both Gary and Bill made to understand what the realities really are, then we can start to think about where our levels of spending are and what are the most efficient processes. For instance, the amount of money of the federal budget that's going into defense and counterterrorism and homeland security versus how much of the federal budget goes to any sort of investments in foreign aid for state building. There's a huge discrepancy there. Is there a more optimal balance? Somebody had pointed out in that study also that more people died in the wake of 9-11 taking cars because they got into automobile accidents and they were too scared to take planes because of the fear of dying in a terrorist attack. So I think that there's something to be said and to look to in those types of figures about where our levels of risk really are and what our measures are against them. Yeah, it's a fascinating dynamic of terrorism that there is the attack itself and then there is this sort of transference process that occurs that translates the actual kinetic impact into political impact. I think one of the more interesting sort of hard findings from the report is the sort of decline in influence and yet the United States at the top coming off of sort of the immediate post 9-11 period. But the second country there was Algeria which had been number two I think and then dropped to number 15. This is really interesting to me as well as it's coming out of a period of quite a lot of violence, internal domestic terrorism during the 1990s. And then the first decade of the 21st century though, you know, I think a lot of counterterrorism professionals would say, well, yeah, but there's still a lot of terrorists running around in Algeria during that time period. I mean, in there are Al Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb which grew out of the GSPC and this is the story that Bill was talking about. You know, how do we understand where you do have some of these transnational groups that find themselves in a territory and they're wrestling with their own dynamic? Are they going to be a local group versus engaging in this broader global dynamic? How do we balance that? I think the case of Algeria is a reasonably good case study. I mean, the history, I think, to explain why Algeria's experience that declined is that the central or the most prolific folks within Al Qaeda and Islamic Maghreb left Algeria and were in the Sahel. I mean, they just physically were in Mali or other countries in the south. So they, in some ways, Algeria benefited from the fact that the folks in the highlands outside of Algiers were largely smoked out of the mountains there and then the group moved south. I mean, so part of this is history, right? Part of it is less to do with the specific counter-terrorism actions and maybe the fact that AQIM benefited from ungoverned space in the Sahel and decided it could do more of what it wanted to do there in terms of kidnapping and drug running, et cetera. I think that your question, though, gets to the point that I was trying to make, which I don't know that I made very well, which is that in some cases the counter-terrorism actions that one takes can help the organization sort itself out and give it an enemy to concentrate on. And so for Western nations for the United States, if al-Qaida and the Islamic Maghreb is not thinking about the United States right now, I don't necessarily want to give it a reason to think about it more. I would instead try to work through local actors through the counter-terrorism sort of collaboration going on between North African and Salian countries out of Naqshat that is trying to deal with that problem at a local level and enable those actors. But there's absolutely tensions within these groups and those tensions are not unique to AQIM. They're true in Somalia, they're true in Yemen, they're true in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And this I think is the point where you've got to decide how far down on your high-value target list does it make sense to conduct unilateral actions because below a certain point, you're doing more damage and radicalizing more than you are getting a key player off the battlefield. And I just wanted to respond in more general broad brush strokes ways. I think Algiers is a very interesting example of the wave-like phenomenon we were talking about. Everywhere we've looked to terrorism and has this, I mean, the good news is extreme violence is very disorienting and disturbing. And you find the same sorts of things in many criminological situations. So gang warfare, for example, the typical thing is it builds up to this sort of fever pitch and then both sides says, oh my God, there are all these people being killed, what are we gonna do about it? And then they sort of back off and then there's another fever pitch. You find the same thing with crime. You get sort of crime waves and then people back off with use of extremely destructive drugs. You have that same kind of a phenomenon. So the good news about humans, and I think we've seen this over and over in the database, is no terrorist organization lasts forever. They tend to have these wave-like qualities and eventually people say, you know, enough is enough. I mean, we don't want to live under these circumstances. And I think to some extent, we can perhaps take more advantage of that situation. And I think that really has happened to some extent in Algeria. Gary, I just, I wanna ask one quick question on the sort of burstiness phenomenon and then I'm gonna hand it over to the audience. You know, assuming there is an attack next week, firearms against a police station in rural Tennessee believed to be sovereign citizen or patriot movement. Understanding the sort of burstiness phenomenon that you're talking about, what do we do from a policy perspective after an attack like that occurs? Well, I guess what you could do, and one attack isn't enough to make a statistical analysis, unfortunately. But policy makers are gonna wanna make a choice based on that attack. Of course, of course. Well, what we can tell people is that if you look at these waves, they don't look like EKGs. So in other words, they're not bouncing like this. They go up, they have a peak and they have a decline. They're pretty orderly enough that you can almost predict what next year's value is gonna be based on the last year. So I'd say if you look at country, and countries work that way as well. So terrorism at a country level. So we could go through as has happened in the database and find the 10 countries with these upward trajectories and say, boy, you ought to be paying attention to that. We are not yet very good at predicting where the apogee of that movement is, but we're pretty good at saying if you have a strong upward trajectory and nothing is done, it's gonna continue for some amount of time enough to kill a lot of people, basically. So at least in that sense, I think there is an argument to be made, basically. Okay, questions from the audience? Yeah, Jen, why don't we start with this gentleman back here? Please again, state your name and affiliation. Monty Marshall, Center for Systemic Peace. I work with the US government's political instability task force. The question I have regards identifying terrorist groups. You say there's a low amount in North America, but you're totally discounting drug trafficking as a terrorist group. And they operate the same way. They engage in the same tactics. Their political agenda is very similar, although differently defined, because their interests are different. But if you added those in, we wouldn't be nearly as calm and peaceful as you let out. So as another example of this way of setting or framing the issue to distort how we react to it. I think the biggest problem is terrorism in North America. We're not paying attention to it. And it's rampant throughout Central America. So why is the violence in Central America and Mexico not included as terrorism? I can probably respond most directly to that. We have gone with the, and good to see you Monty, by the way. No, we've corresponded over the years. We have taken the idea that the most useful approach for us with regard to the global terrorism database is to keep the coding consistent. So it started out in 1970, trying to exclude organized crime, trying to exclude kidnapping or ransom, just where there wasn't a clear political message. Excluded drug cases where there wasn't a clear message. There's a lot of gray areas, you well know. FARC is a great example of organization that a lot of times is using some kind of narco-trafficking to further its political ends. But we have been doing work on this, but I think I would argue that one effective way to do this is to keep the same definition over time so you can get some sense of trends and longitudinal measures, but then bring in another database to look at things like narco-trafficking, like organized crime, and so on. And we've begun to do some of that kind of work too. And beyond that, there is a lot of gray area, obviously. I mean, a lot of people in the room deal with these statistics, and we're dealing with open sources. Sometimes we don't have nearly as much information as we'd want. So all I can argue is we're doing the best we can, and we try to keep out, if the case involves narco-trafficking, but it fits the rest of our definition, it's in there. If it doesn't, then it's not. A follow-on point too, I think it's important that, and Brian mentioned this actually, before we started to discuss, discussions about definitions are really instructive, because in this case, while it's an enormous problem, and it's an exceptionally violent problem, and at a superficial level, if you look at the tactics used themselves, the tactics can be identical. But the reason I think it's important to have strict definitions, and to study things within that discipline, is that the countermeasures for one problem are entirely different than the countermeasures for the other, and that goes back to the motivations, the impetus for the violence, the tactic itself, or terrorism is just a tactic, but what we're trying to get at when you're trying to mitigate that tactic from happening is the human behaviors and motivations behind the tactic, and because those are so very different, an engagement strategy, right? A community-orienting policing strategy, similar to what the United States government was advocating for counter-radicalization in the United States, would have very little effect with cartels, if applied directly along the southwest border. It's not to suggest that it's not an exceptionally violent and important problem. Next, there's somebody down here, yes. David Sturman from Georgetown Security Studies Program. My question regards the myths of terrorism. Do you find that there are groups that break those myths, either a couple of them or across the board? And if so, are those groups, do you find that those groups group together under certain ideologies, under certain methods that they use regionally, or are they, and in particular, with regards to the most attacks are domestic with very few of any international attacks? Well, I can answer that. I mean, the best example of a group that breaks the stereotypes, of course, is Al-Qaeda, which is part of the function of the stereotype. So an organization that has been responsible for lots of transnational attacks, oftentimes with mass casualties. So I mean, I would say it's the outstanding modern counter example. Michelle, one of the interesting things about the report, I think, is how you correlated levels of terrorism with metrics of state functionality, especially corruption, income, these sorts of things. I'm wondering why, especially when you look at corruption in particular, I would have assumed a stronger positive correlation between terrorism and corruption measures. Do you have thoughts on those numbers in the report and how that shakes out? And same to Gary and Bill. Well, we actually saw with those correlations, and we did correlate against corruption. The more interesting relationship was between peace and levels of corruption. So there is a bit of a tipping point where increasing corruption can lead to lower levels of peace in a society. I think the unique aspect of terrorism and the fact that it's really more closely related to measures of political stability are what we found in the correlations rather than just specifically corruption. But there is a sense that if there is a breakdown in confidence in rule of law, particularly around the police, then that is also a proxy and a measure for how people are feeling about their own political stability. I might just add to it too. I think part of the challenge in terms of correlating things like national levels of corruption with terrorism is that the location of the terrorist attack itself is fairly complex in the sense that if you think about what we've done in this comparison is just linked every terrorist attack to the territory where it's connected. But you really have at least three variables. Where the attack happened, you've got the nationality of the group who did it and you've got the nationality of the target. So you could have, for example, an attack on a Greek organization that's located in the United States by Turks. Now normally those things all line up. Most of the action is sort of on the diagonals. Most common thing as we've seen is you get domestic attacks by domestic groups on domestic targets. But there are lots of exceptions to that actually. And so part of the noise in the corruption relationship might be able to be teased out as we get more sophisticated in classifying these cases. Yeah, why don't we go back here? I had Dixon Osborne with Human Rights first. What does the data suggest about whether or not we are in armed conflict or not? The Bush administration said we were in a global war on terrorism. The Obama administration says that we are in a war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But armed conflict is really defined by a couple of factors. One is the organization of the entities that are involved and the duration, intensity of the conflict itself. And whether we're at war or not, dictates what sort of measures we can take to counter the threats that we're facing. So I didn't know in looking at the data that you all produced if you've given consideration to that question. Actually I think of this debate about whether we're best to think about terrorism, a war on terrorism versus terrorism is more ordinary crime, I mean is a huge political philosophical debate. I don't know that our database frankly has much to say about it one way or the other. I will say this that probably the most, and I can see the GTD squad back there as well. And I think you'd agree with me. One of the most difficult tasks in terms of doing an open source database using unclassified data is to deal with countries that are at war. It's very difficult in a place like Iraq to separate terrorism from insurgency, from ordinary military violence, from crime, et cetera, et cetera. I mean that's the most difficult task you face in trying to do these databases. So I think all those connections are easy to blur. But I think what you're raising is a political issue. And I don't know that we really have, I don't think the data themselves really address that issue. The only thing I would offer is that if about 35% of the incidents from 2011 occur in Iraq and Afghanistan and the United States is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, then that would lend you to think that, yes, this is happening in the context of war. And that might be as close to the answer and answer to the question as we can get. As much of this violence happens in the context of war in which we're actively engaged, or have been for the last decade anyway. I'm sure I got the numbers wrong, but you understand the point I'm making. It gets much more confusing outside of those combat zones. And so as the troop levels decline and the political context changes, this is actually where I was going with my point about the nature of counterterrorism, kinetic counterterrorism operations likely ought to change as the political environments in which we're conducting them change. Alejandro. Hi. Should I stand? Yeah. Alejandro Bittel. So first of all, thank you very much. This has been a very informative program, presentation from all the speakers. I guess my question is kind of directed to all three individuals, but particularly to Mr. Lafri and Mr. Braniff. One of the subtext that I sort of got out of the data, in particular when it came to the bursty nature of it in the context of jihadist terrorism was that a lot of Muslim civilians seem to die. And Bill had just mentioned before that we need to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of the defensive jihadi narrative. And so I'm just curious to know, perhaps in the broader context of the report, if there are sort of other historical examples and data points across ideologies where there has almost reached a certain threshold or tipping point of civilian casualties that has eventually led to a terrorist campaign decline and or in other instances where government actions have either prolonged or sped up that decline as well. Excellent question. Across ideologies is tough for me just because I don't have much expertise beyond the global jihadism sphere, but we can talk about a few examples that could be sort of lumped into the local jihadist realm. Glamaslamia is a famous example from Egypt. I think part of the reason for this burstiness with respect and how it relates to the jihadist narrative, organizations like the Salafist Group for Preaching in Combat were able to send individuals to Iraq. As resources poured into Iraq up to the US invasion of Iraq, GSBC was able to set up shop on the periphery of that conflict and just siphon off. One for the fight in Iraq, one for me. One for the fight in Iraq, one for me. And then reorient those resources. It's part of the reason for the change in name from GSBC to al-Qaeda in Iraq. That's how that evolved. So there's this idea that defense of jihad creates resource mobilization. Resource mobilization empowers groups and groups therefore can take on a greater lethality and frequency of operations that the burstiness phenomenon, right? So that's I think how these things correlate. Outside of, I don't think it's unique to jihadism. I think it's about defending one's country and defense of jihad creates a narrative to do that, but I don't have great examples historically of similar phenomenon from other theaters. Well, I could say a couple of general things, which is if it's, we've been sort of applauding the improvements we've made in terms of producing global data on terrorism in the last decade, but data on countermeasures by governments is almost non-existent and very difficult to come by and impossible oftentimes to get through open sources. So in fact, I suspect a sort of GTI involving responses of governments and how effective they were in the situations where they made things worse and where they made things better would be extremely valuable, but very difficult to imagine how you'd do that. We have done some case studies. In a way, I think a lot of groups operate like the IRA goes in that way. I mean, the British did all sorts of, they tried all sorts of things, many of which made things worse, some of which were more successful over time and eventually the event is pretty much now petered out. Same with ETA. Our colleagues, one of the projects we've been funding at the Start Center that Erica Chenoweth and Laura Dugan are involved in have been collecting detailed country by country information on all of the various things that could be identified as responses, not just military options, but peace talks, all kinds of ranging from sort of peace building operations all the way over to military operations and are looking at using the GTD then as a dependent variable, looking at what happened after those sorts of initiatives and they're beginning to find some interesting information, but we are nowhere near a situation where we can report that data for the globe. They have, you know, they've got a few case studies right now, basically. So, good question. Yes, sir, let's take these last two here. Hi, my name is Avi Bhatti. I run a data analysis consulting company. I'm curious whether the star's database includes cyber terrorism events and whether, even if it doesn't, whether you are analysis of burstiness and things like the displacement of old modes of terrorism by newer technology and new circumstances suggest some kind of going forward, some kind of a plan about when to expect cyber terrorism events and how to deal with them? Well, if you want to answer, and then we'll go to the next one. I think the answer, I can look at my crew back there. I think the answer is we don't have a single cyber terrorism case yet. We've looked at some things, but they haven't met our definition thus far. So, you know, we're obviously looking for those cases and we have a large project looking at cybersecurity, but none of the world cases so far do we have classified in that category. Yeah, the idea of a comprehensive cyber terrorism database is a challenging one because most attacks don't make any, you know, there's no indicator of the attack. They're oftentimes you're attacking a company and they have no interest in sharing the fact that they've been attacked and government's the same way. And so because there's no flash or bang, it's a very hard thing to count because it's not going to show up in the media. So what you're going to have instead are very small projects that might collect data from a very, you know, from one or two terminals, those sorts of things, and then try to extrapolate, but having a big terrorism incident database on cyber terrorism is unlikely. Thank you for the presentation. My name is Robert Dreye, I work at Columbia University and I'm interested in counterterrorism, strategic communications, countermeasures, kinds of questions, but I just wanted to ask you what, how would you have dealt with or how will you deal with the launches of the Fajr-5 missiles out of Gaza? Thank you. Well, it's a great question. I can see my colleagues from GTD smiling back there. One of the things that was interesting in the most recent sort of furor over the rockets coming into Gaza is that we get, you know, people who are studying this know there have been dozens going. And what do you do with that when you have tons of rockets coming in, but nobody's injured? And we do not count every one of those, basically, when they don't hit targets. And so you'd imagine we have these big debates about, you know, at what point do you include those and what point do you not? We've developed, actually, we won't bore you with the details on this, we've developed a quite, you know, extensive code book for how to handle those cases, but as you know, there are dozens of those rocket attacks, even when there is not much talk about it in the press, that's been going on, but very few of them actually hit targets and injure people. So we've excluded a lot of them at this point. I'm gonna ask one final question, because I can't help myself, which is when we get to, you know, one place where all of this comes together at a policy level is in the US's reaction to an attempt to shape the political evolution in the Middle East around the Arab Spring, right? This is a place where we are moving from, in many cases, autocratic governments to more democratic governments, but along with that transition comes a lot of political chaos. In some of these states, we have started to see incidents of terrorism in places like Syria. You see a dramatic increase in violence, including by al-Qaeda-linked organizations. That fight has been framed by jihadi organizations as a defense of jihad, as Bill was talking about. To all three of you, based on the information that you've been looking at, you know, what do you think the impact is going forward based on this data of the transition away from autocracy, at least on some level, but towards a very complicated political environment in the Middle East? And what do you think in 10 years when we look back, what are we gonna say in the Global Terrorism Index about these countries going through these transitions? Are they going to move up in terms of the impact of terrorism, or are they going to move down? I think it's pretty hard. I don't know if Joe Young is still back there. Monty Marshall's worked this area a bit too, but it's pretty hard to be optimistic about this. I think pretty much every study I've seen suggests higher rates of terrorism in transitioning societies. And I think as Michelle noted a while back, that's actually a much better predictor than corruption. So it's hard to see a flight path that doesn't lead there, at least in the short run. I agree entirely. That democratic peace theory asserts that established democracies tend to fight one another less, but the corollary to that theory is that democratizing places are bare-knuckle violent places, because you're basically instilling competition for power in places where that hasn't been the norm. And it's a very difficult thing to do peacefully, and it rarely happens peacefully. So that mixed with the sort of the middle income and the idea of a hybrid or flawed democracy, right? A lot of the Islamist regimes will likely be hybrid regimes where there's some degree of authoritarianism, some degree of representative government. All of that I think would force them into the category that Michelle described of more likely than not to increase on the impact scale. Yeah, I mean, I agree obviously with both of you and as the data was showing in the terrorism index. I think Syria is just looking down here quickly, currently ranked 14th in the terrorism index. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see that number decrease in the coming years. When we are looking at the global peace index and this more multidimensional measure of violence internally and externally, Syria was one of the largest droppers in the index this year, so much higher levels of violence as we all know. And that index actually correlates quite strongly with the terrorism index unsurprisingly because we define peace as an absence of violence. But I think that that's also another indication that there are all of these levels that are ripe for terrorism in Syria, whether it's between political instabilities, regime changes, transitions, and group grievances. Okay, all three of you, thank you very much for coming in, this has been really great. As I said at the outset, data fact-based discussions of terrorism are all too rare in Washington and I appreciate you coming in and helping us with that. So thanks very much.