Not Terribly Surprising, but Still Terrible
Terrorist violence in Russia has increased dramatically over the past two year, so the attacks in Moscow yesterday are just a reflection of that broader trend:
Subway Blasts Kill Dozens in Moscow – NYTimes.com
Female suicide bombers set off huge explosions in two subway stations in central Moscow during the Monday morning rush hour, Russian officials said, killing more than three dozen people and raising fears that the Muslim insurgency in southern Russia was once again being brought to the country’s heart.
According to the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), terrorist attacks in Russia increased from 243 in 2007 to 428 in 2008 to 325 for the first nine months of 2009 (which projects to 433 for the whole year). Almost all of these attacks are Islamist in orientation — though NCTC coding rules before 2008 had almost all of that violence coded as “unknown” in the earlier period.
Regardless, the level of violence in Russia has increased dramatically over the past two years.
The big challenge in terrorism research is trying to get a handle on what individual spectacular attacks mean. Do the attacks in Moscow represent an escalation? A change in strategy? Or are they just a random consequence of the underlying level of violence?
This is a tremendously complicated issue. It is reflected in policy debates in the United States when we debate whether to use metrics such as attacks on the U.S. as the key indicator of success versus the overall level of violence by Islamist or anti-American groups abroad.
I tend to think that these spectacular attacks are just a function of dumb luck. If you have enough radicals out there, sooner or later some cell is going to get the bright idea to do a subway or airliner attack, and sooner or later, they’ll succeed. I don’t discount the importance of central decisions to specifically plan and launch such attacks. it just occurs to me that that (a) is not the only pathway, and (b) capacity to attack is at least in part a function of the existence of cells in the right place at the right time.
The problem, of course, is that we tend to think of major attacks as being purely a function of strategic calculus rather than contingent opportunity. But, on the other hand, thinking about contingent opportunity drives a lot of people down the strategic rabbit hole of promoting “drain the swamp” approaches to the terrorism problem.
Ultimately, I don’t think those work either, which leaves me in a risk-management mode. Create redundant 90% solutions. Two overlapping 90% solutions give you 99% reduction in risk, but at probably 1/10th the cost of a single 99% percent solution, and at 1/100th the cost of a 99.9% solution, etc.
