Why Terror is a Poor Political Tactic

This is a significant week for all people concerned with public affairs for it sent minds back to the dreadful event in New York a decade ago. For all the evil, that event necessarily changed many people whether believers in freedom or not because it suddenly put those who favour wide freedoms on the defensive. Ten years later, the guy who took responsibility for the attack on the US has been taken out and everyone reflections on the extent to which all the predictions about impending woe have come to fruition or not.

To my mind, it is very clear that notwithstanding the ability of terror groups to harm people here and there, the whole world accepts that perhaps we either are all stronger than we imagined or the terror groups not as formidable as was imagined. Placing facts as they are, most people ceded freedoms at airports and accepted statist interpretations of the events with minimum fuss.In spite of the initial success in scaring people to surrender freedom, few people would say that mass murderers intent on causing terror have won. And yet the missing piece is why it has all come to nothing and the terror groups are nowhere near achievement of whatever amorphous goals that they claim to advance. 

Steven Pinker in this well-composed article provides an incisive view for why groups that deploy terror and fear as a political tactic almost always fail. His conclusion is that these groups gain recognition but that terror tends to feed on itself with groups collapsing through overreach and senseless violence.