Terrorism?  On the decline?  Not possible some might say.  But in fact,
the Human Security Report Project, based at the School for International
Studies, part of the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver Canada (hardly
a White House mouthpiece) released a study in May showing that global
terrorism is on the decline.  And not just a small decline; global
terror attacks dropped by about 40 percent in 2007, paralleled by a
major deterioration in support for Al-Qaeda throughout the Islamic
world.

The report focuses on the misleading information that most of the world
is fed; in a poll in 2007 a nonpartisan survey found that of 100 leading
US foreign policy and security experts, 84 percent "rejected the
assertion that the US was winning the war on terror."  So why do so many
of the experts believe we're losing, if the numbers say we're winning?

As the Human Security Report shows, the data most people rely on is
miscalculated.  The major data on terrorist attacks come from three
notable sources: one dataset from an official US government agency, and
two funded by the Department of Homeland Security.  Because of
"political considerations," i.e. not wanting to appear to cover up
violence in Iraq, officials have included incidents that qualify only as
part of an Iraqi civil war in the count of terrorist activities.  If
this method of counting acts of terrorism were applied evenly across the
globe, we would then have to include the incidents in the Sudanese civil
war.

The report did just that- they calculated the number of terrorist acts,
applying the definition US officials used across the globe, to include
the civil war in Sudan along with the war in Iraq, and they found that,
even with this broader definition, terrorism started peaking back in
1998. Unbeknownst to most, terrorism has actually been on the decline
since before 9/11, that attack was a major exception to the trend.

There is still a war to be fought; there are still terrorists lurking
out there, and the influx of Taliban fighting along the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border is sure evidence of this.  But the truth
remains, terrorism as a whole is on the decline, and we are winning the
Long War.