Friday, June 06, 2008

The Five Worst Places To Be A Terrorist

Foreign Policy Magazine has the list, and the winners are:

France
Though many Americans view them as softies when it comes to the war on terror, the French actually have some of the world’s toughest and arguably most effective antiterrorism laws...

Jordan
Since the November 2005 hotel bombings carried out by al Qaeda in Amman, Jordan’s King Abdullah II has made it a priority to stop the infiltration of terrorists from neighboring Iraq and Syria. Jordan’s intelligence service, the General Intelligence Department, has exploited close ties with Sunni tribes in Iraq’s Anbar province to provide its U.S. and Israeli counterparts with valuable intelligence about the structure and financing on terrorist organizations...

Egypt
No less an authority than al Qaeda’s No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri recently said of Egypt’s State Security, “They know more about the Islamic movements than many of those movements’ members know about them.” Zawahiri’s followers have good reason to worry...

Singapore
Singapore, which is 15 percent Muslim, has had enormous success in combating regional terrorist groups such as the al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah through a combination of tough Special Forces tactics and savvy rehabilitation programs...

Russia
In 1999, Boris Yeltsin elevated an obscure midlevel politician named Vladimir Putin to the rank of prime minister and entrusted him with putting down a raging insurgency in the breakaway region of Chechnya. Ever since, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism have been the hallmarks of Putin’s tenure, and he has largely built his popularity around his success in these areas...
Israel is not mentioned, nor is the success of the US surge in Iraq.

Interestingly, the techniques vary from hardline questionable tactics (remember when Russia gassed the Moscow Theatre, killing hostages as well as hostage-takers) to rehabilitation by employing "volunteer clerics who counsel detainees and rebut extremist arguments" (Singapore).

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tag: .