Buch, Englisch, 360 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 229 mm x 151 mm, Gewicht: 538 g
How the War on Terror Escalates Violence in America's Partner States
Buch, Englisch, 360 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 229 mm x 151 mm, Gewicht: 538 g
Reihe: Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare
ISBN: 978-0-231-20987-8
Verlag: Columbia University Press
Harrison Akins reveals how the war on terror has led to the unintended consequence of increasing domestic terrorism in U.S. partner states. He examines the results of U.S.-backed counterterrorism operations that targeted al Qaeda in peripheral regions of partner states, over which their central governments held little control. These operations often provoked a violent backlash from local terrorist groups, leading to a spike in retaliatory attacks against partner states. Senior U.S. officials frequently failed to grasp the implications of the historical conflict between central governments and the targeted peripheries. Instead, they exerted greater pressure on partner states to expand their counterterrorism efforts. This exacerbated the underlying conditions that drove the escalating attacks, trapping these governments in a deadly cycle of tit-for-tat violence with local terrorist groups. This process, Akins demonstrates, accounts for the lion’s share of the al Qaeda network’s global terrorist activity since 2001.
Drawing on extensive primary sources—including newly declassified documents, dozens of in-depth interviews with leading government officials in the United States and abroad, and statistical analysis—The Terrorism Trap is a groundbreaking analysis of why counterterrorism has backfired.