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The National Interest
Scoring the War on Terrorism
by Daniel Byman
. . . To gauge success, it is tempting to rely on a "body count" approach. In their public statements to Congress on February 11, 2003, fbi Director Robert Mueller III, cia Director George Tenet and other senior officials emphasized the number of arrests and disruptions. Mueller testified that "We have charged over 200 suspected terrorists with crimes", while Tenet noted that "more than one-third of the top Al-Qaeda leadership identified before the war has been captured or killed." President Bush himself reportedly keeps a "scorecard" that notes which Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are dead or in custody. A body count approach is appealing because it provides a concrete measure of success and failure. Yet this approach is deeply flawed — and it is not, by the way, something new in the annals of American thinking. A body count can be misleading because the size of the terrorist cadre is often unknown, and many of those killed or captured are low-level recruits who can easily be replaced. More importantly, it fails to reflect the impact on the adversary's morale, recruitment, fundraising, and residual ability to conduct sophisticated attacks. Serious data problems, however, put a more comprehensive and sophisticated approach to measuring success nearly beyond reach. It is difficult to gauge precisely the morale or skill of Western military forces, let alone those of shadowy terrorist organizations. Most of Al-Qaeda's money comes from private sources — and some of the donors do not know that they are supporting terrorism, believing that their contributions are for charity. Even recruitment is difficult to measure. There is no easy way to determine the size of Al-Qaeda, the number and scale of its affiliates and proxies; or who its donors, active supporters and potential sympathizers are. Local governments often do not know, deliberately conceal, or may at times exaggerate the Al-Qaeda presence in their countries. Despite these limits, it is still better to struggle with less precise categories and poor data than to rely exclusively on a body count approach to the problem. . . .