Bruce Schneier reviews a paper that explains why terrorism doesn’t work. Examining 28 foreign terrorist organizations (so designated by the U.S. State Department), the author notes:

First, the groups accomplished their forty-two policy objectives only 7 percent of the time. Second, although the groups achieved certain types of policy objectives more than others, the key variable for terrorist success was a tactical one: target selection. Groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumbered attacks on military targets systematically failed to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature.

— Why Terrorism Does Not Work, by Max Abrahms, MIT Press Journals, 2006

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