The US State Department is mandated by law to produce a report for the US Congress on an annual basis. The report should provide details of the past year's terrorist incidents, the idea being that the US Congress can then analyse and study the impact of terrorism. The theory goes that given this information, one can manage terrorism. Yes? Sound Idea? No, not according to the grand panjandrums of the US State Department, who have got into a tight pickle over this. Let us take a view on measuring terrorism.
It is an old management theory which goes back to the time of 'time and motion' studies in the Detroit car industry and the basis of this theory is that you cannot manage what you cannot measure. It definitely makes sense, you need to have information on the number of units you have sold, the performance of the sales people, the cost of all units, the number of units manufactured per hour per shop floor employee, the number of tickets punched per hour, number of defects per 1000 widgets, etc. If you don't know these figures, you cannot improve on them, you cannot identify the problem, you cannot think about resolutions and solutions and you certainly cannot do any kind of forward planning.
Before you think that this is purely capitalism in play and it is only boring old managerial gits in suits who worry about this, I should point out that this theory is applicable to almost every human endeavour that you can think of. Take another example, if you look down history, states and countries have come and gone. There are many reasons for a state to be successful.
One of the common elements of a successful state is that it has a good bureaucracy with a meticulous and precise statistical and data collection service. Starting from the Inca's, Pharaohs of Egypt, the ancient Chinese civilisations down to the great dynasties of Abbasids, Guptas, Romans to the Moguls, Ottomans, Japanese, British, French, Germans etc.. A successful dynasty / kingdom had an able bureaucratic structure and lots of data collection.
That said there is a propensity of bureaucrats to report "good" numbers and try to diminish, delay or delete/ignore "bad" numbers. There are innumerable cases in old history to prove this, but we do not even have to go that far back. In our times, we can see this happening. Whether by accident or design, we have seen significant challenges to national statistics in the United Kingdom. Take the recent brouhaha over immigration numbers when the Prime Minister Tony Blair was roasted over his inability to give a number of illegal immigrants. He had absolutely no idea or he did not want to tell. In either case, it was amazing. The whole country thinks that illegal immigration is an important issue and here we have the Prime Minister, who is coming across like a startled fish on the issue. As it turned out, there were "estimates" but in the absence of hard core data, one wonders how one can manage this issue?
{{/usCountry}}That said there is a propensity of bureaucrats to report "good" numbers and try to diminish, delay or delete/ignore "bad" numbers. There are innumerable cases in old history to prove this, but we do not even have to go that far back. In our times, we can see this happening. Whether by accident or design, we have seen significant challenges to national statistics in the United Kingdom. Take the recent brouhaha over immigration numbers when the Prime Minister Tony Blair was roasted over his inability to give a number of illegal immigrants. He had absolutely no idea or he did not want to tell. In either case, it was amazing. The whole country thinks that illegal immigration is an important issue and here we have the Prime Minister, who is coming across like a startled fish on the issue. As it turned out, there were "estimates" but in the absence of hard core data, one wonders how one can manage this issue?
{{/usCountry}}On the other side of the world, China has significant issues around statistics and data collection. Because of the top down command structure of the country, resource allocation is also done top down. When such a thing happens, the lower level bureaucrats are naturally motivated to report "good" numbers. Once this pyramid builds up, the view from the top is extremely rosy while the view at the bottom is stinky. For people who are interested in understanding a bit more about China without the irrational exuberance showed by many a media, I strongly recommend the book 'The China Dream' by Joe Studwell. Be that as it may, because the data is so bad, the command structure is not working and the economy is massively overheating on all cylinders.
Just recently we saw that the Chinese economy is galloping away, thereby putting all the attempts of cooling to naught. While it's a problem that very many other countries will love to have, the over-riding impression I get is of incompetence on the part of the Chinese economic authorities, who are taking decisions based upon evidently false statistics.
You might say, nope, it will never happen in the USA. Not with the strong legal structure, checks and balances, computerisation and automation etc. etc. Oh! No, that is not the case at all. We have been hearing about the war on terrorism for a long time now. One of the key public policy elements in combating terrorism is to have a long term perspective in mind.
Terrorism comes and goes in cycles, and these cycles can be anything between 10 and 30 years in duration. On the other hand, we have the actual events, like 7/7 or 9/11. While it is important to look at the actual event and think, this is mainly a one-off event, people have to think that it's a campaign and hence manage the campaign suitably. For a parliament or the executive, it is therefore very important to have good statistics on the various terrorist events, because that is how one measures the progress and success of this war on terror. Just because President Bush says that terrorism is finished does not mean that it is finished indeed. He also proclaimed victory in Iraq a year or so ago! Terrorists do not down tools just because somebody said so; they have to have a good reason to do so. For us on the other side, the only way we can judge whether a terrorist campaign has finished is if there is an absence of terrorist events. For that, we need a consistent measure of terrorism.
I realise it is quite difficult to define terrorism and we have spoken about this methodological issue before (http://piquancy.blogspot.com/2003/11/whats-in-name-definition.html). But as we also said, what matters is whether there is a domestic legal definition and the USA has it. So measuring terrorist events is not a problem for the USA. USCS section 22 subsection 2656f is the relevant law/section which lays out the requirement for the US Secretary of State to produce this report for the US Congress. For what it is worth, the law is reasonably clear, clearly asking the Secretary to produce a report on international incidents of terrorism which affect Americans in some shape or form with details, on a yearly basis.
So far so good, and for well over a decade (since 1988), the process worked reasonably well, reports were produced and presumably the US Congress, Executive, military, intelligence agencies and other interested parties were busy gobbing on the report and using it for their own planning, analysis, forecasting and execution purposes. I know for a fact that this dataset was definitely used by academics and researchers to understand and analyse terrorism. But 9/11 changed the equation as I have mentioned above and suddenly three major issues popped up with the compilation of this report after 9/11.
The first issue was that it concentrated on international terrorism only, therefore strictly speaking, 9/11 and the associated terrorist incidents on US soil would not show up. It was perhaps optimistic and a bit foolish to expect terrorism to be solely international and not ever invade domestic territory, but there you have it. But if you include domestic terrorism, then the problem of distinguishing between ordinary crimes and terrorism comes up. (This can be reasonably be resolved by knowing the relevant law under which the perpetrator has been charged - whether terrorism related law or criminal law). The other problem is that if you suddenly include domestic terror attacks (Oklahoma bombing, Jose Padilla, etc. etc.), then the number of terrorist incidents would dramatically increase. Going by the propensity of sound bite media coverage, one can just imagine the tabloid press going berserk over 600% increase in terrorism. One way to fix this would be to go back and fix every previous year's figures, but that would be a logistical nightmare.
The second issue was that it is very difficult to disentangle terrorist actions from war-time actions such as in Iraq. See the problem? A Sunni suicide bomber looking for raisins in the afterlife goes and blows up a humvee killing two marines, three children and one vegetable seller in a Shia dominated suburb of Baghdad (can we get a name of the suburb? Will add verisimilitude). The methodological and political issues are tremendous. Do you classify it as a terrorist event? If that is the case, then the number of incidents absolutely balloons up and throws the President's claim that they are winning the war of terror into the bin. If they do not include this as a terrorist event and take it as a continuation of the War - consider it as a resistance event or mopping up after the war event, then they are not winning the Iraq War at all. In either case, the choices are unpalatable. As it turns out, this is the major factor behind dropping the report.
The third and final problem is that the methodology of looking at international terrorism solely from the perspective of USA was proven as being limited (do we include 7/7 if no Americans were killed or injured?). Just because you have a US centric view does not mean that the terrorists are going to be very polite towards every other nationality and only attack US targets and nationals. As we have already discussed (http://piquancy.blogspot.com/2005/08/worst-curse-in-world-may-you-get-what. html), Al-Qaeda is against many countries and people and to properly combat them, you have to include every event.
This rather myopic view is why USA isn't taking a closer look at Pakistan. Before I keep on going on about it, the situation is not so dire. There are other outlets where one can find terrorism related data, such as www.tkb.org, but it was simply the entire situation around the US Secretary of State trying to explain why the US State department is no longer publishing this data that brought this on. If nothing else, the loss of confidence is worrying. The strength of our societies is that we are open. Open with our strengths and open with our faults!
If there is a jump in the statistics, then by all means let us point that out. That is what is the truth and trying to hide important data like this is certainly not done nor helpful. If the methodology was faulty, then fix that rather than stopping the report. Perhaps the US Secretary of State did not realise how important this report was around the world, and thought that stopping the production of this report would not be noticed. By stopping the publication of this report, the over-riding impression that one got was a combination of (1) hiding negative news; (2) political impressions over the data took precedence over actually fighting the war on terror; (3) incompetence (can't even produce a list of terrorist events?) and finally (4) bureaucratic confusion. But all is not lost yet, the State Department should bring this report back post haste. At the same time, I have not seen anything that the UK political establishment is doing like this. Are you listening, Tony Blair?
All this to be taken with a grain of salt!