Twenty-First-Century Terrorism: How Should We Respond?
Are we safer now from terrorism than we were ten years ago, in the year of the 9/11 attacks? Have the War on Terror and other western efforts to defeat terrorism worked in practice? Richard English, author of Terrorism: How to Respond and Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, argues that while there has indeed been much progress in the conflict with al-Qaida in the past decade, many mistakes have been made - mistakes which would have been avoidable had we learned lessons from the long history of terrorism, and had we adopted the appropriate framework for responding to the terrorist threat.