"Fortified, Yet defenseless, The West Suicidal Response to Terrorism.

 I tend to agree, the people of old from the West, would have just eradicated the scrounge from their country, but now they refuse to mention for fear that they might "offend" or be called a "racist" or an islamophobe"...Oh the horror.....the shame.   When regular people are fighting back like that 12 year old girl did in scotland did because she was tired of her and her sister being harassed by "Migrants" and nobody in power would do anything about it, they would turn a blind eye, unless you made a mean tweet or some other social media post, then the full weight of the British judicial system would fall on you.  Me personally, I have concerns about travelling to the former Great Britain because they would lock me up because of my social media post

   The same thing is going on in the rest of Western Europe, the Europeans are afraid to call out the Muslim invaders for what they are, and the common people know but the people in power don't listen to the "Riff-Raff", and any deprevations done by the "refugees" are not experienced by the power class so the S-A's continue, the r*apes continue, in england they have the pakistani grooming gangs and nobody does anything about it...."we can't appear intolerant...mind you".  In a couple of generations, the conquest of Western Europe will be complete, and the people in Eastern Europe will have a hard time stopping the flow of refugees from the west.  I won't live to see it.  The people that built the Sistine Chapel and other great works are being replaced by people that can't build mud huts effectively.

Yeah I shamelessly clipped this one also.

Michael Smith

13h ·

When terrorists strike, Western governments have perfected a predictable playbook: retreat, restrict, and reassure the public that their growing helplessness equals safety. This defensive surrender, while wrapped in the language of security, represents a catastrophic misunderstanding of how free societies survive existential threats. We’re building a modern Maginot Line—and pretending it’s victory.

The Maginot Line failed because France chose expensive static fortifications over adaptable strength. The Germans simply went around it. Today’s security theater follows the same doomed logic. Birmingham installs “hostile vehicle mitigation bollards and upgraded CCTV at strategic locations” to keep the city centre safe. The Australian Prime Minister responds to violence by demanding even tighter gun restrictions on law-abiding citizens. These aren’t solutions—they’re admissions of defeat dressed up as policy.

Consider what this approach actually accomplishes. Bollards protect one street while terrorists strike the next. CCTV cameras create perfect footage of atrocities for the evening news. Gun control ensures that when violence erupts, victims are guaranteed to be defenseless for the critical minutes before police arrive—if they arrive at all. We’re not making citizens safer; we’re making them more photogenic victims.

This is the bunker mentality in action: harden specific targets, disarm the public, expand surveillance, and hope terrorists don’t notice the obvious workarounds. But terrorism succeeds precisely by exploiting vulnerability and spreading fear. When governments respond by rendering citizens even more dependent on protection that cannot be everywhere at once, they validate the terrorist’s central message: you are helpless, your leaders cannot save you, and your way of life is indefensible.

The alternative requires acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: in a free society, security is a distributed responsibility, not a service governments can provide through concrete barriers and security cameras. This means empowering citizens to respond to threats rather than training them to cower and wait for rescue. It means recognizing that capable, trained civilians are force multipliers, not liabilities to be managed.

History demonstrates this clearly. Israel’s security model, forged through necessity, emphasizes armed citizens and immediate response over passive measures. Switzerland’s approach reflects similar wisdom: a prepared populace is itself the deterrent. These societies haven’t eliminated terrorism, but they’ve fundamentally changed the equation. An attacker facing potential resistance from multiple directions confronts a vastly different scenario than one assured several minutes of unopposed slaughter.

The standard objection—that armed civilians would cause chaos—reveals the bankruptcy of current thinking. This argument demands that citizens remain helpless while assuming they’re too incompetent for anything else. But proper training and clear legal frameworks address these concerns far better than policies guaranteeing that only criminals come armed. The real question is whether we trust free people with the responsibility of freedom, or whether we prefer the comforting illusion of safety through submission.

Each bollard installed, each surveillance camera mounted, each restriction imposed on law-abiding citizens represents a choice: are we free people capable of defending ourselves and our communities, or subjects to be managed and protected by an apparatus that demonstrably cannot be everywhere at once? The bunker mentality chooses the latter while pretending it’s the former.

True security in a free society doesn’t come from fortifying targets and disarming citizens. It comes from distributed resilience—the recognition that strength resides in the fabric of civil society itself, not in fixed defenses that can be bypassed or overwhelmed. When Birmingham installs more bollards—and inventing Orwellian names for them like Hostile Vehicle Mitigation barriers—and Canberra demands more gun restrictions on top of some of the strictest in the Western world, they’re not solving the problem. They’re building their own Maginot Line while congratulating themselves on their prudence.

The Maginot Line was expensive, impressive—and ultimately useless— because it was static and rigid. Our current response to terrorism follows the same failed playbook. Strategists bank on the enemy following their playbook.

The question is whether we’ll recognize this before the cost becomes unbearable, or whether we’ll continue fortifying while surrendering the very freedoms that make our societies worth defending.

Courting Disaster......

CIA Book Review, for the historical record . . .

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As President George W. Bush's top speech writer, Marc Thiessen was provided unique access to the CIA program used in interrogating top Al Qaeda terrorists, including the mastermind of the 9/11 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM).

Now, his riveting new book, "Courting Disaster", How the CIA Kept America Safe (Regnery), has been published.

Here is an excerpt from "Courting Disaster":

"Just before dawn on March 1, 2003, two dozen heavily armed Pakistani tactical assault forces move in and surround a safe house in Rawalpindi. A few hours earlier they had received a text message from an informant inside the house. It read: "I am with KSM."

Bursting in, they find the disheveled mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in his bedroom. He is taken into custody. In the safe house, they find a treasure trove of computers, documents, cell phones and other valuable "pocket litter."

Once in custody, KSM is defiant. He refuses to answer questions, informing his captors that he will tell them everything when he gets to America and sees his lawyer. But KSM is not taken to America to see a lawyer Instead he is taken to a secret CIA "black site" in an undisclosed location.

Upon arrival, KSM finds himself in the complete control of Americans. He does not know where he is, how long he will be there, or what his fate will be.

Despite his circumstances, KSM still refuses to talk. He spews contempt at his interrogators, telling them Americans are weak, lack resilience, and are unable to do what is necessary to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals. He has trained to resist interrogation. When he is asked for information about future attacks, he tells his questioners scornfully: "Soon, you will know."

It becomes clear he will not reveal the information using traditional interrogation techniques. So he undergoes a series of "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved for use only on the most high-value detainees. The techniques include waterboarding.

His resistance is described by one senior American official as "superhuman." Eventually, however, the techniques work, and KSM becomes cooperative-for reasons that will be described later in this book.

He begins telling his CIA de-briefers about active al Qaeda plots to launch attacks against the United States and other Western targets. He holds classes for CIA officials, using a chalkboard to draw a picture of al Qaeda's operating structure, financing, communications, and logistics. He identifies al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens, and helps intelligence officers make sense of documents and computer records seized in terrorist raids. He identifies voices in intercepted telephone calls, and helps officials understand the meaning of coded terrorist communications. He provides information that helps our intelligence community capture other high-ranking terrorists, KSM's questioning, and that of other captured terrorists, produces more than 6,000 intelligence reports, which are shared across the intelligence community, as well as with our allies across the world.

In one of these reports, KSM describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994-1995 plan known as the "Bojinka plot" to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean.

Years later, an observant CIA officer notices the activities of a cell being followed by British authorities appear to match KSM's description of his plans for a Bojinka-style attack.

In an operation that involves unprecedented intelligence cooperation between our countries, British officials proceed to unravel the plot. On the night of Aug. 9, 2006 they launch a series of raids in a northeast London suburb that lead to the arrest of two dozen al Qaeda terrorist suspects. They find a USB thumb-drive in the pocket of one of the men with security details for Heathrow airport, and information on seven trans-Atlantic flights that were scheduled to take off within hours of each other:

* United Airlines Flight 931 to San Francisco departing at 2:15 p.m.;

* Air Canada Flight 849 to Toronto departing at 3:00 p.m.;

* Air Canada Flight 865 to Montreal departing at 3:15 p.m.;

* United Airlines Flight 959 to Chicago departing at 3:40 p.m.;

* United Airlines Flight 925 to Washington departing at 4:20 p.m.;

* American Airlines Flight 131 to New York departing at 4:35 p.m.;

* American Airlines Flight 91 to Chicago departing at 4:50 p.m.

They seize bomb-making equipment and hydrogen peroxide to make liquid explosives. And they find the chilling martyrdom videos the suicide bombers had prepared."

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Today, if you asked an average person on the street what they know about the 2006 airlines plot, most would not be able to tell you much.

Few Americans are aware of the fact al Qaeda had planned to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with an attack of similar scope and magnitude.

And still fewer realize the terrorists' true intentions in this plot were uncovered thanks to critical information obtained through the interrogation of the man who conceived it: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

This is only one of the many attacks stopped with the help of the CIA interrogation program established by the Bush Administration in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Editor's Note: For other foiled terrorist plots, see page 9 of "Courting Disaster".

In addition to helping break up these specific terrorist cells and plots, CIA questioning provided our intelligence community with an unparalleled body of information about al Qaeda Until the program was temporarily suspended in 2006, intelligence officials say, well over half of the information our government had about al Qaeda-how it operates, how it moves money, how it communicates, how it recruits operatives, how it picks targets, how it plans and carries out attacks-came from the interrogation of terrorists in CIA custody.

Former CIA Director George Tenet has declared: "I know this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than what the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."

Former CIA Director Mike Hayden has said: "The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work."

Even Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, has acknowledged: "High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country."

Leon Panetta, Obama's CIA Director, has said: "Important information was gathered from these detainees. It provided information that was acted upon."

And John Brennan, Obama's Homeland Security Advisor, when asked in an interview if enhanced-interrogation techniques were necessary to keep America safe, replied: "Would the U.S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities? I would say yes."

On Jan. 22, 2009, President Obama issued Executive Order 13491, closing the CIA program and directing that, henceforth, all interrogations by U.S. personnel must follow the techniques contained in the Army Field Manual.

The morning of the announcement, Mike Hayden was still in his post as CIA Director, he called White House Counsel Greg Craig and told him bluntly: "You didn't ask, but this is the CIA officially nonconcurring". The president went ahead anyway, over ruling the objections of the agency.

A few months later, on April 16, 2009, President Obama ordered the release of four Justice Department memos that described in detail the techniques used to interrogate KSM and other high-value terrorists. This time, not just Hayden (who was now retired) but five CIA directors -- including Obama's own director, Leon Panetta -- objected. George Tenet called to urge against the memos' release. So did Porter Goss. So did John Deutch. Hayden says: "You had CIA directors in a continuous unbroken stream to 1995 calling saying, 'Don't do this.'"

In addition to objections from the men who led the agency for a collective 14 years, the President also heard objections from the agency's covert field operatives. A few weeks earlier, Panetta had arranged for the eight top officials of the Clandestine Service to meet with the President. It was highly unusual for these clandestine officers to visit the Oval Office, and they used the opportunity to warn the President that releasing the memos would put agency operatives at risk. The President reportedly listened respectfully -- and then ignored their advice.

With these actions, Barack Obama arguably did more damage to America's national security in his first 100 days of office than any President in American history

Gadhafi"s Ex-soldiers spreading Chaos throughout Africa

That hope and change just spread more Chaos throughout Africa.

      I remember a quote from a book I had read a long time that explained the situation in Africa.  "it is 5 minutes to high noon somewhere in Africa."

      Due to the boundaries cutting across tribal boundaries, that is where the genocide that crops across there from time to time.

• Gadhafi's Mercenaries Spread Guns …

When Libya's dictator for more than four decades fell victim to the Arab Spring, Col. Moammar Gadhafi's influence didn't end.  It is now contributing to increased attacks by rebel groups, the arming of terrorists and a hunger crisis in other parts of Africa. "This is a setback for the international community which has invested so much money in the past decade in democracy, peace, and security in Africa," said Dr. Mehari Taddele Maru at the Institute for Security Studies based in Pretoria, South Africa.
After Gadhafi's fall, thousands of his soldiers left the country with stockpiles of weapons, including machine guns, ammunition, and shoulder-fired missiles.  Maru says at least 2,000 of them were mercenaries who returned to their native countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including Mali, Niger, Mauritania, and Nigeria. .  Many have already returned to fighting.

In the West African country of Mali, when ethnic Taureg fighters returned from Libya well armed, it encouraged Taureg separatists to launch a new rebellion against the government in January.  While Gadhafi's weapons were no match for the NATO forces that came to the rescue of Libyan revolutionaries, they were far superior to the weapons of the impoverished Malian army.  A mutiny by Mali's out-gunned and frustrated soldiers turned into a coup d'etat when they stormed the Presidential Palace in March, erasing more than two decades of democratic rule.

In the chaos that has ensued after the coup, Taureg separatists in Mali have had more success than ever before.  On Sunday they seized the last government holdout in the north, the legendary town of Timbuktu.  There is now concern a Taureg victory in Mali could inspire another rebellion in neighboring Niger.

"The Tauregs in Niger got funding from Gadhafi.  The government of Niger has been able to negotiate with them for peace, but for how long? That is questionable," said Maru.

Gadhafi's fighters and weapons also streamed into other nearby countries in the Sahel region bordering the Sahara desert.  It is an area where a major Al-Qaeda affiliate has announced it acquired thousands of Gadhafi's weapons.

"We have been one of the main beneficiaries of the revolutions in the Arab world," Mokhtar Belmokhar, a leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) told Mauritanian news agency ANI last November.

The proliferation of weapons in the Sahel comes at an especially bad time.  After another year of drought in parts of Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, and Burkina Faso, aid agencies say millions of people need urgent food assistance, but violence in the region makes it hard- in some places impossible- to help.

"Under these security conditions, we are not able to access the displaced who are living in extremely difficult conditions," said UNHCR spokeswoman Fatouma Lejeune-Kabu about trying to help those forced to flee their homes in northern Mali.

The U.N. estimates about 130,000 people in Mali have been displaced by the fighting between Taureg rebels and the government army.

Maru believes Gadhafi's weapons will spread farther in Africa.  Gadhafi supported insurgencies in several African countries including Chad and Sudan.  He also voiced support for Islamic separatists in northern Nigeria, and some analysts suspect he had been supporting Boko Haram Islamic militants.

"Those arms can circulate and come into the hands of anyone who can pay for them," Maru said.

The impact of Gadhafi's trained mercenaries and arsenal of weapons will likely be felt on the continent for years.

"Until such time as the root causes of rebel uprisings are addressed, such as marginalization by governments and socio-economic struggle, the demand for arms and rebel movements will continue," said Maru.

Colonel West identifies the enemy of the 21st century

Click on the link, Colonel West is accurate in his protrayal of the enemy and only political correctness prevents us from naming them for fear of "offending" the self same enemy.   Sun zsu stated, to defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy.  Until we identify the enemy, we cannot win.  All we do is waste time and lives to describe a tactic of the enemy, not the enemy itself.

Rep. West offers sweeping vision for keeping America secure in the new century

Freshman Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) on Thursday afternoon offered detailed and aggressive prescription for how the United States can ensure its security in the new century, and warned that the nation faces “dark days ahead” if it does not prepare for several emerging security threats.

“For the sake of our nation, and of all nations who seek freedom for their citizens, we must be prepared to fight on the 21st Century Battlefield, and we can settle for no less than victory upon it,” he said on the House floor (prepared text here).

West said defining the enemy is a key component of this strategy, and that the United States is not at war with terror, because terrorism is just a tactic used by an enemy. Instead, he said a chief U.S. enemy is Hezbollah, even though the United States rarely names it.

“Until we, as a nation, are able to correctly and openly identify our enemy, we will continue to put our men and women on the ground in harm’s way without a clear mission for success,” he said. “On this 21st Century Battlefield we are not fighting against a single organization, a single leader, or a single nation. We are fighting against Islamic fundamentalism, which knows no country, recognizes no borders, and wears no uniform.”

West added that Islamism is a “theocratic-political totalitarian ideology no different from Nazism, Fascism, and Communism which threatens the free world.”

West said the United States needs to deny this enemy any sanctuary and resources, reduce its sphere of influence and “win the information war” by limiting its ability to use the Internet as another medium for its own purposes.

West’s remarks hit countries and regions. He warned that China is looking to use its economic strength and waxing naval strength to advance communism.

“If we cannot protect the sea lanes of commerce, we leave ourselves vulnerable not just militarily, but economically, to a power in China that continues to seek world communism as its ultimate goal, irrefutably so,” he said.

On Iraq, he questioned “the motives of President Barack Obama in announcing a full withdrawal of American forces in October 2011.” West warned that leaving Iraq runs the risk of abandoning U.S. allies there.

He also said he would continue to press the Obama administration to get Pakistan to do more to crack down on terrorists, offer full support for Israel, reject a Palestinian state until it cuts ties to Hamas, keep up pressure for reforms in Iran and impose new sanctions against Syria as a way of pressuring that government to stop its crackdown on pro-democracy forces.

I get this from STRATFOR.  They send out free emails...worth looking at.  As a former intel weenie I still like to keep up to date on events that can affect us and try to plot or predict the next event.  

   I posted the older article last week

Detection Points in the Terrorist Attack Cycle

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By Scott Stewart
Last week's Security Weekly discussed the fact that terrorism is a tactic used by many different classes of actors and that, while the perpetrators and tactics of terrorism may change in response to shifts in larger geopolitical cycles, these changes will never result in the end of terrorism. Since that analysis was written, there have been jihadist-related attacks in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Yemen and Pakistan, an assassination attempt against the president of Abkhazia, and a failed timed-incendiary attack against the Athens subway. (The latter incident, which militant anarchists claimed, reinforces that jihadists are not the only ones who practice terrorism.)
But while terrorism is a continuing concern, it can be understood, and measures can be taken to thwart terrorist plots and mitigate the effects of attacks. Perhaps the most important and fundamental point to understand about terrorism is that attacks do not appear out of nowhere. Individuals planning a terrorist attack follow a discernible cycle -- and that cycle and the behaviors associated with it can be observed if they are being looked for. We refer to these points where terrorism-related behavior can be most readily observed as vulnerabilities in the terrorist attack cycle.

The Attack Cycle

Many different actors can commit terrorist attacks, including sophisticated transnational terrorist groups like al Qaeda; regional militant groups like India's Maoist Naxalites; small, independent cells like the anarchists in Greece; and lone wolves like Oslo attacker Anders Breivik. There can be great variance in attack motives and in the time and process required to radicalize these different actors to the point that they decide to conduct a terrorist attack. But once any of these actors decides to launch an attack, there is remarkable similarity in the planning process.
First, there is the process of selecting or identifying a target. Often an actor will come up with a list of potential targets and then select one to focus on. In some cases, the actor has preselected a method of attack, such as a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, and wants to find a target that would be vulnerable to that specific type of attack. In other cases, the actor will pick a target and then devise a method of attack based on that target's characteristics and vulnerabilities. Simply put, the execution of these steps can be somewhat fluid; some degree of planning or preparation can come before target selection, and sometimes target selection will be altered during the planning process. The time required to execute these steps can also vary considerably. Some attacks can be planned and executed within hours or days, while more complex plans, such as those used in the 9/11 or Mumbai attacks, may take months or even years to complete.
Frequently, those planning an attack will conduct detailed surveillance of potential targets to determine what security measures are in place around the target and to gauge whether they have the ability to successfully attack it. If the target is too difficult to attack -- commonly known as a hard target -- the attack planners will typically move on to their next target, which may prove easier to attack. (When they do continue with attacks against targets whose security measures exceed the attackers' capabilities, those attacks fail.) We refer to this stage as preoperational surveillance, which means surveillance that is conducted before the operation is fully planned.

        Read the rest here

The myth of the end of Terrorist.

I got this in my e-mail and they are very good. 



The Myth of the End of Terrorism

By Scott Stewart | February 23, 2012

In this week's Geopolitical Weekly, George Friedman discussed the geopolitical cycles that change with each generation. Frequently, especially in recent years, those geopolitical cycles have intersected with changes in the way the tactic of terrorism is employed and in the actors employing it.

The Arab terrorism that began in the 1960s resulted from the Cold War and the Soviet decision to fund, train and otherwise encourage groups in the Middle East. The Soviet Union and its Middle Eastern proxies also sponsored Marxist terrorist groups in Europe and Latin America. They even backed the Japanese Red Army terrorist group. Places like South Yemen and Libya became havens where Marxist militants of many different nationalities gathered to learn terrorist tradecraft, often instructed by personnel from the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi and from other militants.

The Cold War also spawned al Qaeda and the broader global jihadist movement as militants flocking to fight the Soviet troops who had invaded Afghanistan were trained in camps in northern Pakistan by instructors from the CIA's Office of Technical Services and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. Emboldened by the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and claiming credit for the subsequent Soviet collapse, these militants decided to expand their efforts to other parts of the world.

The connection between state-sponsored terrorism and the Cold War ran so deep that when the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union's collapse, many declared that terrorism had ended as well. I witnessed this phenomenon while serving in the Counterterrorism Investigations Division of the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) in the early 1990s. While I was in New York working as part of the interagency team investigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newly appointed assistant secretary of state abolished my office, declaring that the DSS did not need a Counterterrorism Investigations Division since terrorism was over.

Though terrorism obviously did not end when the Berlin Wall fell, the rosy sentiments to the contrary held by some at the State Department and elsewhere meant that there was no impetus to mitigate the growing jihadist threat or protect diplomatic facilities from it. The final report of the Crowe Commission, which was established to review the twin August 1998 bombing attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, explicitly noted this neglect of counterterrorism and security programs, as did the 9/11 Commission report.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks triggered a shift in international geopolitics by leading the United States to concentrate the full weight of its national resources on al Qaeda and its supporters. Ironically, by the time the U.S. government was able to shift its massive bureaucracy to meet the new challenge, creating huge new organizations like the Department of Homeland Security, the efforts of the existing U.S. counterterrorism apparatus had already badly crippled the core al Qaeda group. Though some of these new organizations played important roles in helping the United States cope with the fallout of its decision to invade Iraq after Afghanistan, Washington spent billions of dollars to create organizations and fund programs that in hindsight were arguably not really necessary because the threats they were designed to counter, such as al Qaeda's nuclear briefcase bombs, did not actually exist. As George Friedman noted in the Geopolitical Weekly, the sole global superpower was badly off-balance, which caused an imbalance in the entire global system.

With the continued diminution of the jihadist threat, underscored by the May 2011 death of Osama bin Laden and the fall in Libya of the Gadhafi regime (which had long employed terrorism), once again we appear on the brink of another cyclical change in the terrorism paradigm. These events could again lead some to pronounce the death of terrorism.

Several developments last week served to demonstrate that while the perpetrators and tactics of terrorism (what Stratfor calls the "who" and the "how") may change in response to larger geopolitical cycles, such shifts will not signal the end terrorism.

The Nature of Terrorism

There are many conflicting definitions of terrorism, but for our purposes we will loosely define it as politically motivated violence against noncombatants. Many terrorist acts have a religious element to them, but that element is normally related to a larger, political goal: Both a militant anti-abortion activist seeking to end legalized abortion and a jihadist seeking to end the U.S. military presence in Iraq may act according to religious principles, but they ultimately are pursuing a political objective.

Terrorism is a tactic, one employed by a wide array of actors. There is no single creed, ethnicity, political persuasion or nationality with a monopoly on terrorism. Individuals and groups of individuals from almost every conceivable background -- from late Victorian-era anarchists to Klansmen to North Korean intelligence officers -- have conducted terrorist attacks. Because of the impreciseness of the term, Stratfor normally does not refer to individuals as terrorists. In addition to being a poor descriptor, "terrorist" tends to be a politically loaded term.

Traditionally, terrorism has been a tactic of the weak, i.e., those who lack the power to impose their political will through ordinary political or military means. As Carl von Clausewitz noted, war is the continuation of politics by other means; terrorism is a type of warfare, making it also politics by other means. Because it is a tactic used by the weak, terrorism generally focuses on soft, civilian targets rather than more difficult-to-attack military targets.

The type of weapon used does not define terrorism. For example, using a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device against an International Security Assistance Force firebase in Afghanistan would be considered an act of irregular warfare, but using it in an attack on a hotel in Kabul would be considered an act of terrorism. This means that militant actors can employ conventional warfare tactics, unconventional warfare tactics and terrorism during the same campaign depending on the situation.

Terrorist attacks are relatively easy to conduct if they are directed against soft targets and if the assailant is not concerned with escaping after the attack, as was the case in the Mumbai attacks in 2008. While authorities in many countries have been quite successful in foiling attacks over the past couple of years, governments simply do not have the resources to guard everything. When even police states cannot protect everything, some terrorist attacks invariably will succeed in the open societies of the West.

Terrorist attacks tend to be theatrical, exerting a strange hold over the human imagination. They often create a unique sense of terror dwarfing reactions to natural disasters many times greater in magnitude. For example, more than 227,000 people died in the 2004 Asian tsunami versus fewer than 3,000 on 9/11, yet the 9/11 attacks produced a worldwide sense of terror and a geopolitical reaction that has had a profound and unparalleled impact on world events over the past decade.

Cycles and Shifts

A number of events last week illustrate the changes happening in the terrorism realm and demonstrate that, while terrorism may change, it is not going to end.

On Feb. 17, the FBI arrested a Moroccan man near the U.S. Capitol in Washington who allegedly sought to conduct a suicide attack on the building. The suspect, Amine el Khalifi, is a clear example of the shift in the jihadist threat from one based on the al Qaeda core group to one primarily deriving from grassroots jihadists. As Stratfor has noted for several years, while these grassroots jihadists pose a more diffuse threat because they are harder for national intelligence and law enforcement agencies to focus on than hierarchical groups, the threat they pose is less severe because they generally lack the terrorist tradecraft required to conduct a large-scale attack. Because they lack such tradecraft, these grassroots militants tend to seek assistance to conduct their plots. This assistance usually involves acquiring explosives or firearms, as in the el Khalifi case, where an FBI informant posing as a jihadist leader provided the suspect with an inert suicide vest and a submachine gun prior to the suspect's arrest.

While many in the media tend to ridicule individuals like el Khalifi as inept, it is important to remember that had he succeeded in finding a real jihadist facilitator rather than a federal informant, he could have killed many people in an attack. Richard Reid, who many people refer to as the "Kramer of al Qaeda" after the bumbling character from the television show Seinfeld, came very close to taking down a jumbo jet full of people over the Atlantic because he had been equipped and dispatched by others.

Still, the fact remains that the jihadist threat now predominantly stems from unequipped grassroots wannabes rather than teams of highly trained operatives sent to the United States from overseas, like the team that executed the 9/11 attacks. This demonstrates how the jihadist threat has diminished in recent years, a trend we expect to continue. This will allow Washington to increasingly focus attention on things other than jihadism, such as the fragmentation of Europe, the transformation of global economic production and Iran's growing regional power. It will mark the beginning of a new geopolitical cycle.

Last week also brought us a series of events highlighting how terrorism may manifest itself in the new cycle. On Feb. 13, Israeli diplomatic vehicles in New Delhi, India, and Tbilisi, Georgia, were targeted with explosive devices. In Tbilisi, a grenade hidden under a diplomatic vehicle was discovered before it could detonate. In New Delhi, a sticky bomb placed on the back of a diplomatic vehicle wounded the wife of the Israeli defense attache as she was headed to pick up her children from school.

On Feb. 14, an Iranian man was arrested after being wounded in an explosion at a rented house in Bangkok. The explosion reportedly occurred as a group was preparing improvised explosive devices for use against Israeli targets in Bangkok. Two other Iranians were later arrested (one in Malaysia), and Thai authorities are seeking three more Iranian citizens, two of whom have reportedly returned to Iran, alleged to have assisted in the plot.

While these recent Iranian plots have failed, they nonetheless highlight how the Iranians are using terrorism as a tactic in retaliation for attacks Israel and Israeli surrogates have conducted against individuals associated with Iran's nuclear program.

It is also important to bear in mind as this new geopolitical cycle begins that terrorism does not just emanate from foreign governments, major subnational actors or even transnational radical ideologies like jihadism. As we saw in the July 2011 attacks in Norway conducted by Anders Breivik and in older cases involving suspects like Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski in the United States, native-born individuals who have a variety of grievances with the government or society can carry out terrorist attacks. Such grievances will certainly persist.

Geopolitical cycles will change, and these changes may cause a shift in who employs terrorism and how it is employed. But as a tactic, terrorism will continue no matter what the next geopolitical cycle brings.