Step 1 - Locate a recent article that focuses on the ways in which the United...

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Psychology

Step 1 - Locate a recent article that focuses on the ways inwhich the United States deals with terrorism.
Step 2 - Address the following in your article review:
Summarize the main points of the article
Explain your position on the topic.
What is the difference between domestic and internationalterrorism?
What sort of balance must the government's law enforcementapparatus maintain in terms of prosecuting terrorism cases whilealso respecting the Constitution and the privacy rights ofcitizens?

Answer & Explanation Solved by verified expert

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The United States has now been at war in Afghanistan for some seventeen years and been fighting another major war in Iraq for fifteen years It has been active in Somalia far longer and has spread its operations to deal with terrorist or extremist threats in a wide range of conflicts in North and SubSaharan in Africa South Asia and South East Asia In case after case the US has moved far beyond counterterrorism to counterinsurgency and from the temporary deployment of small antiterrorism forces to a near permanent military presence The line between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency has become so blurred that there is no significant difference The national academic consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism START has just issued new trend data on terrorism that are updated through the end of 2017 When they are combined with other major sources of data on terrorism they provide the ability to trace the history of US wars against terrorism in countries like Afghanistan Iraq and Syria They show the results of Americas long wars of attrition where it is increasingly unclear that the United States has a strategy to terminate them or has the capability to end them in ways that create a stable and peaceful state that can survive if the United State should leave The resulting graphics and maps are provided in the full text of the report on which this summary is based and which is available on the CSIS website here This summary both summarizes how the trends in such data reveal the patterns in terrorism and impact on US strategy The key conclusions and an index to these graphics are provided in this summary Examining the Terrorist Threat The trends in terrorism and extremism are only one part of this problem and part of the lack of any clear grand strategy that can offer the US a credible probability of lasting victory in its wars if victory is defined a stable friendly postwar state They are however as important and revealing as the trends on the battlefield and they reveal major global and regional challenges that go far beyond todays wars Unfortunately there is no official US database on global terrorism to draw upon Just as the US has failed to create a consistent level of reporting on warfighting and civilmilitary affairs as well as on the cost of its wars it has abandoned the effort to create such a database by the National Counter Terrorism Center NCTC and effectively subcontracted the effort to a national academic consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism called START which is managed by the Homeland Security Center of Excellence and led by the University of Maryland httpwwwstartumdedu Limits to the Data The START effort does an excellent job of tracking unclassified open source material providing a readily accessible database that is clearly tied to assessment of the uncertainties in the data and to individual acts of terrorism in ways the explain it limitations and validate its counts This database is available to the public at httpwwwstartumdedugtdsearch and is used to provide the statistical trend data in the US State Departments annual country reports on terrorism httpswwwstategovjctrlscrt It is not designed for the purpose of tracking the interactions between terrorism and insurgency or how extremism affects warfighting but it does provide information that provides considerable insight into each of the wars on terrorism and can be used to put the impact of those wars in context relative to the global regional and national trends in terrorism That is the central focus of the maps and Figures in this report and each of its major sections There are however some important and unavoidable limits to the START database There is no clear or consistent way to define a difference between terrorist acts and acts of war Extreme violence has been a constant tactic of war Insurgencies and civil wars have always used asymmetric and extreme means of combat as have counterinsurgency efforts Almost all warfare has a decisive phase in heavily populated areas that raises questions about the resulting uses of force and every act of military violence andor intimidation has some elements of terrorist impact on combatants and civilians The phrase that one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter may be a clich but that does not make it incorrect It is a fact that nonstate actors facing serious governmental opposition feel they are forced to use the population as both a shield and a weapon These problems are particularly serious in the cases where terrorism succeeds in escalating to the level of insurgency andor this occurs in an environment where there are many other incidents of serious internal violence that have related causes like sectarian ethnic tribal regional differences deep political tensions or the failure of the state to provide effective governance Terrorism is hard to define at the best of times As later parts of this analysis show it See Answer

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