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MEI is honored to host Seth Jones and Martin Libicki, to discuss their new Rand Corp. report,"How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al-Qaeda."

About the Report:

All terrorist groups eventually end. But how do they end? The evidence since 1968 indicates that most groups have ended because (1) they joined the political process (43 percent) or (2) local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members (40 percent). Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups, and few groups within this time frame have achieved victory. This has significant implications for dealing with al Qa'ida and suggests fundamentally rethinking post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism strategy: Policymakers need to understand where to prioritize their efforts with limited resources and attention. The authors report that religious terrorist groups take longer to eliminate than other groups and rarely achieve their objectives. The largest groups achieve their goals more often and last longer than the smallest ones do. Finally, groups from upper-income countries are more likely to be left-wing or nationalist and less likely to have religion as their motivation. The authors conclude that policing and intelligence, rather than military force, should form the backbone of U.S. efforts against al Qa'ida. And U.S. policymakers should end the use of the phrase “war on terrorism” since there is no battlefield solution to defeating al Qa'ida.

Find our more about the report here: http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG741/

Author Biographies

Seth G. Jones is a political scientist at RAND and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He specializes in stability operations and counterinsurgency. He is the author of In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (W. W. Norton, forthcoming) and The Rise of European Security Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has published articles in such journals as International Security, National Interest, Security Studies, Chicago Journal of International Law, International Affairs, and Survival, as well as such newspapers and magazines as the New York Times, Newsweek, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Martin C. Libicki is a senior management scientist at RAND, focusing on the relationship between information technology and national security. This work is documented in commercially published books, Conquest in Cyberspace: National Security and Information Warfare (2007) and Information Technology Standards: Quest for the Common Byte (1995). His most recent assignments were to create and analyze a database of post–World War II insurgencies, devise a strategy to maximize the use of information and information technology in countering insurgency, explore terrorists’ targeting preferences, develop a post–September 11 information technology strategy for U.S. Department of Justice and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Terrorist Information Awareness program. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.