You Can't Stop Terrorism. You Can Only Slow It Down A Little.

You Can’t Stop Terrorism

The U.S. Federal government is spending billions of dollars on two fronts to prevent terrorism. It won’t work. It will only delay when such an event occurs.

The government thinks it can prevent terrorism on airlines, and prevent terrorist weapons from getting into the country via freight barges, railroads, etc. But the number of avenues that are available to terrorists for doing terrorist acts is actually quite enormous. This is primarily due to the centralized nature of energy and transportation. For a very good accounting of this see the somewhat dated book ‘Brittle Power” by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins.

But you say “There hasn’t been a major terrorist attack in the U.S. since 2001.” Take a look at the rest of the world, especially London, India and Pakistan which have all had major attacks since then. So far major terrorist acts have been stopped by a combination of Intelligence, counterintelligence, advanced surveillance technology and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have served to minimize the proliferation of terrorist training camps. But this is now backfiring in Afghanistan where the Taliban now have a very strong foothold and new training camps are forming in the mountainous areas that serve as the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Intelligence and surveillance techniques, along with efforts to freeze funds going to terrorist groups have worked to date because terrorism is still in its primitive organizational stage. The number of terrorists and their financial and technical resources have been limited. But as long as nations like the U.S. keep increasing the gap between the rich and poor nationwide and globally, as long as rich nations continue exploiting the non-renewable natural resources of third world and emerging nations without any consideration of the forms of government that exist in these nations, as long as global instant communications and information and technology transfer via the world wide web and via corrupt black markets gets larger and larger, the efforts of terrorists will grow until a critical mass is reached.

A recent assessment of terrorism by various U.S. intelligence resources has concluded that the probability of a major nuclear or biological strike in the U.S. will grow to exceed 50% within the next 1900 days, or 5 years.

While terrorists may claim their motives are religious, they are really the newest geopolitical force for change in the world. Their goals are geopolitical, and their alliances with governments are difficult to determine because these are very opportunistic organizations. As the world depletes its supply of non-renewable resources like fossil fuels, minerals, and fresh water, there will be national conflicts to obtain such resources at the expense of other powerful nations. Since a global nuclear war is not an alternative, much of what happens in this arena will play itself out in terrorist acts. This will happen unless a world government forms and a long term global plan emerges on how to deal with global resource depletion, and determining which advanced technologies to save resources, stop global warming, and clean up the air will be implemented and in what sequential order these things will be implemented in.