Terrorism is increasing despite years of war on terror

last updated 8 January 2015

Terrorism is on the rise worldwide, and a new Global Terrorism Index report from the Institute for Economics and Peace suggests America's war on terror could be exacerbating the problem. After 13 years of spending trillions on two wars with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, the annual count of terror attacks has more than quadrupled, from about 1,500 in 2000 to almost 10,000 in 2013.

The report connects American foreign policy with this spike, noting that the "rise in terrorist activity coincided with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This created large power vacuums in the country allowing different factions to surface and become violent." Four out of the five countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria) that witness 80 percent of terror attacks today are sites of U.S. intervention.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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