When Terrorism and Counterterrorism Clash: The War on Terror and ...

That study conducted by Enders and Sandler (2005) focuses on changes in quarterly transnational terrorist activity using the ITERATE database compiled by Edward Mickolus. However, since it makes an operative assumption that terrorist activity is cyclical, it does not specifically test the extent to which transnational terrorism has escalated. Moreover, it does not try to separate out the impact of the War on Terrorism on the chief target of that war; that is, al Qaeda and its shadowy network of affiliated Islamist terrorist organizations and associations. In addition, the analysis uses a preintervention period extending back to 1968 (although one could argue that such a lengthy period may dilute significant changes in transnational terrorism that occurred in the 1990s), and the analysis only extends through the second quarter of 2003. As a result, even if it had attempted to test if escalation had occurred, it would not have been able to capture the potentially inflaming effects of such events as the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 and the release of photos from Abu Ghraib in April 2004.

Goals

This time series intervention analysis³⁴ of quarterly transnational terrorist events after the onset of the War on Terrorism seeks to contribute to the debate in several ways.

First, to capture more data and provide a richer picture of the effects, the analysis uses transnational terrorist event data from more than one transnational terrorism incident data set (ITERATE plus RAND–MIPT).³⁵

Second, the analysis specifically tests the force escalation hypothesis; that is, the extent to which the GWOT, with its emphasis on military force, has increased transnational terrorism.