A new Rand Corporation report on the end of terrorist organizations supports the views that police and law enforcement tools are generally more effective than military force in countering most options.

The Associated Press version emphasized in its lead that “The United States can defeat al-Qaida if it relies less on force and more on policing and intelligence to root out the terror group's leaders”. Our team has directly contributed to fighting the war on terrorism in many ways and possesses a great deal of personal experience in the areas of counterterrorism, terrorist behavior, surveillance / surveillance detection and intelligence operations.

The AP report noted that the Rand report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies and that American officials should stop using the term "war on terror" and replace it with "counterterrorism."

This useful report focuses on how various terrorist groups have ended their activities. It said that by analyzing the 648 terrorist groups that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006, the authors found that 268 terrorist groups ended during that period. 40% ended because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, 43% reached a peaceful political accommodation with their government. In 10% of cases, terrorist groups ended because they achieved victory, while the application of military force led to the end of terrorist groups in only 7% of cases.

Seth Jones, the lead author of the study was quoted by AP as saying that “terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism.”

Actually the emphasis on describing terrorists as criminals goes back to the Reagan administration.. This has been largely overlooked in recent years as the use of the law enforcement tool became a political points scoring issue. Republicans recently criticized Senator Obama emphasis on the use of the criminal justice system as one of the weapons against terrorism. Senator Kerry also was criticized in the last election. There are legitimate arguments either way about the ability of past administrations in tracking down and prosecuting terrorists but ignored and forgotten in the criticism is the fact that it was the Reagan Administration that refined and pushed the concept of strengthening and applying the rule of law against terrorists.

After the bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the early 1980’s, the Reagan administration developed an interagency public diplomacy campaign with the intent of deglamorizing terrorists and countering perceptions among some Europeans and Middle Easterners that terrorists were romantic “freedom fighters.” True, the Reagan administration did use military force in a spectacular way, the bombing of Libyan targets after the Libyans orchestrated the 1986 bombing of the La Belle disco in Berlin that killed two American soldiers and a Turkish woman. There has been speculation however that the bombing of Pan Am 103 in December 1998 by Libyan agents was prompted in part as retaliation for the U.S. bombing of Tripoli.

At the same time, however, the Reagan administration pushed the theme that hijacking aircraft, blowing up buildings and taking hostages is a criminal act, regardless of the cause and that terrorists should be tracked down, prosecuted and imprisoned. It also helped develop additional international counterterrorism conventions requiring nations to prosecute or extradite terrorists.

I know this first hand from my involvement at the time in these efforts as an officer at the time in the State Department counterterrorism office. I had been recruited from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff partly because I had been a foreign correspondent before working on the Hill. I served on an inter-agency team, that included the State Department Public Affairs Bureau, USIA, and the Defense Department, and developed a counterterrorism public diplomacy campaign.

The group developed talking points, speeches and testimony using the themes cited above. Major “target” groups were writers and “intellectuals” who justified as “freedom fighters,” groups such as the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist groups that were involved in hijackings and kidnappings.

The State Department Legal Advisor’s office and the Justice Department meanwhile stepped up efforts to strengthen the regime of international conventions against terrorist acts, such as hijacking ships (after the hijacking of the Achille Laura passenger liner in 1985) and mutual assistance treaties.

The public diplomacy effort later faded and was dropped after James Baker became Secretary of State in 1989. An official in the State Department Public Affairs Bureau told me that Baker did not believe in Public Diplomacy.

Nonetheless, the use of legal instruments against terrorists continued even though the public spotlight focused more on the military options since 9/11. Although military tools have their use when appropriate, I have not seen any explanation of how American military force could be applied to terrorist cells in Britain, Spain, Turkey or other countries that have been hit by home-grown terrorists.

Touching on the disputes over labeling the effort to counter terrorism, the Rand report also said that “Calling counterterrorism efforts a war on terrorism raises public expectations that there is a battlefield solution. It also tends to legitimize the terrorists' view that they are conducting a jihad (holy war) against the U.S. and elevates them to the status of holy warriors. Terrorists should be perceived as criminals, not holy warriors.”