Well, if there was any doubt about what a Trump presidency means for the US, and by extension for all of us, over the next four years there is little doubt now. In the first week alone a flurry of executive orders have been signed on a whole bunch of issues that Mr. Trump promised […]
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I am a glass half full kind of guy, someone who seeks to find the positive in life. I am an optimist tinged with realism. Three decades in intelligence and 15 years in counter terrorism do tend to give one a good look at the less savoury aspects of life on this planet and as […]
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What to do with IS defectors?
Years ago when I first joined CSIS there was a veteran CT (counter terrorism) guy whom I’ll call Mike. He had been around a fair bit and I had a great deal of respect both for his experience and his insight into Islamist extremism. In all his time in the trenches he had seen a […]
As scarcely a day goes by that we are not accosted with yet another story on a terrorist attack somewhere it is of little surprise that this form of violence has become a topic of conversation everywhere. What was once of interest to a niche market of specialists and confined to articles in little read […]
A lot of people and a lot of governments are getting tired of the so-called “War on Terrorism”. More and more attacks seem to be happening all the time. What we used to think was a problem “over there” is now “over here”: Brussels, Paris, San Bernardino, Ottawa… We cannot seem to get away from […]
If there is one theatre of war tactic that remains controversial – aside from the inevitable divisions of futuristic killer robots I keep reading about – it is the use of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles as the military prefers to call them. Relentless, tireless, brimming with state of the art gadgetry, these flying platforms […]
We’ve had a tough time coming up with a name for our fight against terrorism. Leaving aside the ill-considered “crusade” that was used right after 9/11 (who the hell thought that was a good idea?), we have cycled through the Global war on Terror (GWOT) to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE) – what […]
I bet some of you are wondering why this blog post is being written, in light of the title. Surely, you are probably saying, there is no contest. Iran meddles in the affairs of other countries, supports terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizballah and is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And then there is that […]
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It’s the message, not the messenger
There is no question that in the war of ideas between us and the terrorists we are not winning, despite the fact that the odds are so much in our favour. Our way of life is so superior to that of the terrorists that this should not really be a contest and I shouldn’t have […]
Most Canadians have heard of the “Toronto 18”, a group of homegrown extremists who were arrested in the summer of 2006 before they could detonate truck bombs, an act that could have killed and maimed thousands. At the time, and probably to this day for that matter, it was the largest and most complicated terrorism […]