ABSTRACT
As Walter Laqueur observed, most terrorist groups in the contemporary world “have been attacking the military, the police, and the civilian population.” Terrorism is often carried out by nonstate groups seeking to cause fear – or terror – in a wider population beyond those actually attacked. And it often succeeds in doing so. But much military action by states has a similar intention. Law enforcement and national security and intelligence agencies presume the justifiability of the laws they enforce and the national interests they protect. And if the potential terrorists’ objectives are not justifiable, such as when they seek to impose by force their religious views on others, the focus should be on persuading the potential terrorists, through argument and education and nonviolent pressure and law enforcement, that their objectives as well as their method of achieving them, are not justifiable.
