Is the situation that bad? Is the Foreign Office erring on the side of caution? It does say that it does not warn against travel to every country where there is a risk of terrorists operating – for the obvious reason that it would cover virtually the whole world, ‘serving only to cause panic and disrupt normal life’. And there are countries that it advises against all travel to, including the likes of Chad, Ivory Coast and Somalia. It also advises against all travel to parts of another twenty-five or so countries – including Albania, India, Indonesia, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and Sri Lanka. That said, although detailed figures are not given on the website, the reality is that in countries like Egypt and Turkey far more British nationals die from natural causes (like heart attacks among the elderly), drowning, road and rail accidents, and natural disasters, such as earthquakes, than from terrorism.
The Foreign Office advice reflects – or perhaps along with other government agencies operating in the domestic environment stirs up – the sense of fear in which a large proportion of the developed world lives. During the time of writing, Britain’s Home Office assessed the security threat to Britain from terrorism as being ‘severe’. This is the fourth point on a five-point scale, going from low, moderate, substantial, to severe and finally critical. ‘Severe’ means that an attack is ‘highly likely’, while ‘critical’ means that an attack is expected ‘imminently’. You wouldn’t guess from watching the people wander the streets that we were on as high a level of alert as possible for that length of time without the authorities having knowledge of an ‘imminent’ attack. The US Department of Homeland Security had the country on the ‘elevated’ national threat level, the third notch on a five-point scale. Apart from asking all Americans to be ‘vigilant’, it scarily said that ‘everybody should establish an emergency preparedness kit as well as a communications plan for themselves and their family’.
Such a level of concern is reflected in the many alternative surveys that have been conducted assessing perceptions of the terrorist threat. One study showed terrorism to be ahead of all other worries in both Europe and the US, with 94 and 97 per cent respectively of those polled believing it to be an important threat.1 Another survey showed that 90 per cent of Britons and 84 per cent of Americans felt that their country is likely to be the target of a terrorist attack in the near future.2 A third put the likelihood of an attack a little lower – about two-thirds of respondents in the two countries thinking that an attack was somewhat or very likely in the next twelve months.3 Of course, the response depends on the exact wording of the question that is asked, but it is clear that concerns are there and they seem to be affecting our daily behaviour – roughly six out of ten Americans and Britons now look twice at other passengers on public transport.
But the figures are not high in every country. While the levels of fear in France (84 per cent) and India (82 per cent) are close to those seen in the US and the UK, other countries are lower – for example, Germany (47 per cent) – and some are much lower – for example, Hong Kong (12 per cent) and Hungary (17 per cent). Worries about terrorism are highest in countries that have already suffered an attack. It is only those countries that have to date been spared attacks that have citizens with greater worries than terrorism – for example, the dominant concerns in Hong Kong are SARS and bird flu.
Furthermore, concern about terrorism is not evenly spread within countries. One American survey showed that nearly a third of those who lived in big cities said they were ‘personally very concerned’ about an attack, compared to only one in eight of those living in small towns or rural areas.4 In New York, 69 per cent of people are ‘very concerned’ about another terrorist event, only fractionally down on the percentage recorded in October 2001 in the wake of the twin towers attack. The concerns of New Yorkers about terrorism remain high, but across much of the US concerns diminish as the vividness of the memory of the events of 9/11 fades. As if the fear of the terror act itself was not enough, surveys tend to find that a majority of residents in developed western countries feel that their country is not well prepared to respond to a terror attack.
Even economists are getting in on the act of worrying about terrorism: a prestigious survey of America’s dismal scientists showed that they believed the threat of a terror attack was the biggest short-term problem facing the US economy.5 Most people think that the failure to find a successful conclusion to the Iraq war has increased rather than decreased the perceived chances of terrorist attacks. One large survey spanning thirty-five countries found that 60 per cent of those polled shared this view, with only about one-quarter believing that the war had reduced the chances of an attack or had had no effect. In Britain, in contrast to the government view, 77 per cent of those questioned thought that the terrorist threat had risen since the 2003 invasion.6
The fear has had some odd consequences. One of Berlin’s top opera houses came under fire for cancelling a controversial production of Mozart’s Idomeneo, which was to show the severed heads of the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus and Buddha, due to concerns about Islamist attacks. German politicians condemned the cancellation as self-censorship, cowardice and damaging to the principle of free speech. The decision came in the wake of the riots following the publication of cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. There have been reports of other, seemingly absurd, reactions in Germany designed to avoid offending the 3½ million Muslim residents. These allegedly include a request to darken a school gymnasium when Muslim girls are working out and a woman being told to change the name of her horse from ‘Muhammad’ to something less troubling, such as ‘Momi’.
Much of the concern of westerners is focused on the concept of ‘a Muslim problem’. One poll in Britain suggested that 53 per cent of people felt threatened by Islam, a rise from 32 per cent in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks on America. The appearance of a so-called clash of civilizations is supported by the fact that there has been a near doubling, to one in five, in the proportion of Britons who believe that ‘a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism’.7
But just how real is the threat? Some of the headline figures are, indeed, pretty scary. The roll call for global terrorism in 2006, compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center in the US, included over 14,000 terrorist incidents, 20,000 deaths of non-combatants, with many more thousands wounded and kidnapped.8 The figures are high enough, but the trend is even worse: the figures for 2006 were well up on those in 2005, which in turn were a hefty increase on the previous year. Part of the increase in 2005 is explained by definitional changes to the figures. In the light of the American government’s increased focus on the threat from terrorism, the authorities decided that the State Department’s annual publication needed to be changed, effectively ending a twenty-year run of consistent data.
The definition of ‘international terrorism’ was shifted from one of ‘involving citizens or territory of more than one country’ to a new definition of ‘terrorism’ meaning ‘premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience’. This might sound trivial but it has made a large difference to the figures. As the new definition has been brought in, the figures have increased. Some government critics cried foul, suggesting that the changes were only made to make the numbers larger, making it easier for the government to justify its policies. The old figures were criticized, however, as they failed to count some clear cases of terrorism, including the Van Gogh assassination, the Philippine super ferry and the blowing-up of a Russian aircraft. While a simple aggregation of terrorism incidents is hardly a perfect metric for measuring the scale of the problem or the success in tackling it, such a list does provide a useful basis for analysis.
The figures show that the Near East and south Asia are particularly hard hit by terrorism, accounting for 80 per cent of the attacks and 85 per cent of the fatalitie
s in 2005. Nearly two-thirds of the non-combatant fatalities worldwide in 2005 occurred in Iraq, with India, Afghanistan, Sudan and Sri Lanka collectively accounting for another large proportion. Several categories of civilians, including police, religious figures and journalists, bore a disproportionate brunt of terrorism. Over half the victims killed or seriously injured in 2006 were Muslims. Away from Iraq, Afghanistan and a handful of other terror hotspots, the number of reported terror incidents fell in 2006, after a fall in 2005.
The ex-Iraq numbers are not that large. This is reflected in the detailed information of attacks on the website of the UK’s Foreign Office – it lists only a couple of dozen terrorist incidents from the previous three years, focusing mainly on incidents in generally terrorist-free areas. A little over 500,000 people die each year in England and Wales yet typically only a dozen or two Britons have died as a result of terrorism in recent years. Annual deaths from terrorism have been much lower than deaths from transport accidents (3,000), falls (3,000), drowning (200), poisoning (900) and suicide (over 3,000).9 Twenty-eight non-combatant US citizens were killed by terrorists in 2006, of which twenty-two were in Iraq and three in Afghanistan. It is pretty clear that, so long as you stay away from the world’s insurgent hotspots, the chances of being caught up in a terrorist event are minuscule.
But to what extent can we ignore the threat? One view is that the reaction of western governments to the terrorist threat is exaggerated. Terrorist attacks can never amount to more than a ‘big, bloody nuisance’, as one columnist put it – and we should carry on with our lives as normal. An alternative view is that the government should do more, introduce new security measures and make more arrests, in order to minimize the possibility of further attacks.
The low fatality figures quoted above would appear to support the former argument. It has been pointed out that in most years more people die in their baths than at the hands of international terrorists, and that more Americans have been killed by lightning or an allergic reaction to peanuts than by terrorists. The argument continues that the cost of hasty and ill-considered anti-terror measures and the impact of panic on liberal institutions are far greater than the cost of the terrorism itself. But even a convincing argument against panic does not mean that there is no need for a vigorous policy to combat terrorism. In terrorism, as in crime more generally, the number of incidents is contained by the policies in place to combat it. Terrorism might after all be like a disease that starts with only a few people and becomes an epidemic, at which point it gets out of hand. Perhaps we should consider ourselves fortunate that terrorists are, with some notable exceptions, generally so inept.
The statisticians are doing more than publishing figures, they are playing a role in maintaining safety levels in society by using their skills in risk analysis, profiling and screening, coupled with the rapid identification of disease clusters in the event of biological or chemical attack. Meanwhile we are left with the near-impossible task of judging the tiny risk of an apocalyptic event. With the British newspapers saying in the summer of 2006 that there are at least 1,200 home-grown Islamic fanatics under surveillance by the security services in Britain, it is no wonder that many people remain nervous. If that wasn’t enough to worry about, by the end of 2006 MI5 was telling us that there were 1,600 ‘terror plotters’ up to no good in the country10 and by February 2007 the number had risen to ‘more than 2000’.11 That ‘inflation rate’ is certainly enough to get the pulse racing.
Bang Bang
‘Debate rages over number of civilians killed’ Independent
Television images and newspaper reports give the impression that violent conflicts and uprisings of one sort or another are sprouting up across the world. Yet the people who keep the tally of such things reckon that the last two or three years have seen the number of wars drop to the lowest level since the mid-1960s. It seems that only about half the number is taking place now compared to the peak in the early 1990s – some twenty-eight wars were counted in 2005 compared to fifty-five in 1992.1
Notwithstanding all the methodological difficulties in counting and classifying such activities, the downward trend in the last decade or so represents a stunning turnaround from the seemingly inexorable rise over the preceding twenty years. Data are also collected for ‘armed conflicts’ which are of lesser severity or which for other reasons do not qualify as full-scale wars. These have also been on a downward trend in recent years although the data have only been collected for a decade or so. A different source collects figures on the number of ‘political conflicts’ and assessed that there were nearly 250 live in 2005, of which 24 involved a high level of armed violence and 74 involved occasional violence.2
Although the number of conflicts might be declining, very little is known about how many people fall victim to this organized violence. Most data collection efforts are focused on battle deaths, ignoring civilian deaths, especially those which may result from the indirect consequences, such as failing economies and collapsing health systems. The second-round effects of conflicts are laid bare in the example of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A study in the Lancet estimated that nearly 4 million people have died there since 1998, and that less than 2 per cent of the deaths were the direct result of violence, with most people succumbing to disease and hunger.
The difficulties of counting war dead came to a head in October 2006 when the Lancet (again) published a controversial study regarding the number of dead in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003.3 It suggested that more than 600,000 people had been killed since 2003, equivalent to 2½ per cent of the population, and much higher than other estimates derived from counting bodies in mortuaries or tabulating media reports of deaths. The widely quoted Iraq Body Count, one such compilation of media reports, gave a death toll of about 50,000 over the same period.4 Experts in the field typically say that body-count methods underestimate the true count by a factor of at least five, but there has been no ‘scientific’ corroboration of this.
Although President Bush, who described the estimates as ‘not credible’, along with the US commander in Iraq and Iraqi officials questioned the methodology, the figures seemed to confirm the widely held impression that Iraq was descending into what the researchers called ‘blood-thirsty chaos’. They surveyed nearly 2,000 households at forty-seven sites across Iraq, asking about births, deaths and migration in and out of the areas. The mortality rate had more than doubled since the invasion, and more deaths, which were mostly confirmed by death certificates, had been caused by gunshot wounds than anything else.
Arguing about the exact number, which will never be known, is to miss the point. In any case, the researchers did give an admittedly wide range of the estimate of the number of deaths from 390,000 to 940,000. Rather, it is the scale of the carnage hinted at by the survey that is important. Even a figure close to the bottom of the Lancet range would be roughly ten times as great as the ‘official’ estimate of civilian deaths – 30,000 to 50,000 was typical of the figure coming at the time from the administrations involved in the war. Yet even the low figures have the power to shock: one estimate, 50,100, of the number of Iraqi dead made in the summer of 2006 prior to the Lancet study was described in one newspaper as ‘staggering’.
Needless to say, such figures of Iraqi dead are very politically sensitive. The US general Tommy Franks was famously quoted as saying, ‘We don’t do body counts,’ and, at least until late 2005, the Pentagon claimed that it did not keep a running total of Iraqi deaths. It refuses to make public the figures that are collected, presumably for fear of inflaming concerns about the war. The sensitivities were emphasized by the news in October 2006 that a leaked memo from the office of the Iraqi prime minister to the country’s Health Ministry had asked that it stop providing mortality figures to the United Nations.
Deaths among the Allied troops are, in contrast, logged in meticulous detail. By October 2007, 3,800 American troops and over 150 British troops had been killed in Iraq, with another 120 death
s from twenty other countries. The lists of servicemen deaths on the US Department of Defense and British Ministry of Defence websites are collated on other sites run by interested parties. The coalition has so far been far less enthusiastic when it comes to publishing either death rates (the number of dead relative to the number serving) for its military personnel or the number wounded. While any individual death is regrettable for those immediately involved, from the point of view of the media, public opinion, government policy and military planning, it is arguably more important to have the death rates that measure the risk of death for personnel located in any particular area.
Some independent analysts have tried to compile such figures from official sources, but this can be difficult without being sure how many forces of various types are stationed in each country at any one time. One such study suggested that the death rate (the number of deaths per thousand years of serving personnel) of British soldiers based in Afghanistan was six times higher than for their peers in Iraq in 2006, double that for those who were involved in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003.5 The author of the report said that ‘The commentary we are getting from politicians about the conflicts does not do justice to the threat our forces face.’ The authorities resisted demands for the publication of figures showing the extent of injuries to the forces on active duty.
The pattern of declared military expenditure by the world’s governments has followed a slightly different path from that of conflicts. Expenditures (in inflation-adjusted terms) peaked in the early 1980s and, after a period of stability, fell in the early 1990s at the end of the Cold War. By the mid-1990s, expenditure was only two-thirds of the level in the late 1980s. More recently, however, and especially since the September 2001 attacks in the US, military spending has been rising more strongly. Countries in many regions of the world have been increasing their expenditure, but the rises have been more modest in Central and South America and in western Europe, notably in Brazil, Mexico and Germany, where expenditure has been cut back.
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