War on the Rocks:

Sean M. Zeigler is an associate political scientist and Meagan Smith is a quantitative analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

When a Special Forces mission prompts a U.S. senator to exclaim that he has no fewer than “100 questions” the Pentagon could not answer, you know you have someone’s attention.

In October, four U.S. servicemen were killed in Niger by Islamic militants. The American commandos were part of a clandestine operation to kill or capture an Islamic State operative. The botched raid has prompted a Pentagon investigation, but it has avoided sparking a broader debate about whether the threat posed by terrorism continues to justify the resources, and, more importantly, the attending risk, that the United States commits to it. It is now more than 16 years after 9/11 – long enough to provide a sense of perspective about how the world has changed since the attacks. Policymakers would do well to reexamine the wisdom of characterizing transnational terrorism as an existential threat to international security.

In a recent article, we took a studied look at the number of terrorist attacks before and after 9/11, both inside and outside warzones. The study paired the Global Terrorism Database from the University of Maryland with civil war and insurgency data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in 194 countries. Spanning the years 1989 to 2014 allowed us to directly compare terrorist attacks in the early post-Cold War era with those since 2001.

Figure 1

Figure 1 displays the number of terrorist attacks worldwide in the Global Terrorism Database each year from 1989 to 2014. The graphic indicates that global terrorist attacks rose dramatically after 2004: There were just over 1,000 in 2004, but almost 17,000 in 2014. The numbers from 2015 and 2016 (not shown) have remained remarkably high, but below the 2014 peak. The upward pattern holds even when removing attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is tempting to surmise from the strong trend upwards in Figure 1 that terrorism is on the rise and that the threat is expanding worldwide. The absolute numbers are, after all, higher in the past few years than they were a decade ago. However, this is only part of the story. More than 70 percent of the attacks in the past 10 years transpired in just two regions, both of which have seen extensive insurgency and civil conflict during that time: North Africa/Middle East and South-Central Asia.

It is no secret that most terrorism transpires in the context of insurgency, but to equate the two phenomena is misleading and inaccurate. We therefore wondered, what do the numbers of attacks look like outside of places beset with civil strife? Figure 2 shows terrorist attacks between 1989 and 2014 in countries with and without active civil wars. (A country is designated to be experiencing civil war in any year if violence was ongoing in that year and if at least 1,000 battle-related deaths had taken place there prior to that time.)...

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