Authentic Assessment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Authentic Assessment - Essay Example Introduction Despite some unquestionable achievements of the over-decade-long US anti-terrorist campaign, insofar as al-Qaeda’s terrorist network and the Taliban have suffered heavy blows with the loss of many key figures from their senior leadership, most notably Osama bin Laden, the terrorism – the Islamist extremist terrorism in particular – is neither vanquished nor eradicated. Moreover, following 9/11, there was a wave of terrorist acts worldwide, including such against US military personnel and civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.; while the tightened security measures, along with the intensified vigilance of the police, FBI and the intelligence community as a whole, prevented many terrorist plots to develop into violence on US territory (Mueller, 2011). Tragic occurrences such as the shootings at Fort Hood, where 13 people were killed and 32 wounded, allegedly by a radicalized Army psychiatrist, appear more or less an exception (King and Thom pson, 2011). The terrorists’ bigger success abroad, measured in sheer number of both cases of materialized violence and, regrettably, American citizens being murdered or injured, infers that the overseas security efforts of the US government are hindered by certain inadequacies. The suicidal bomb attack on the residential area inhabited by service personnel of the US military base in Floola and their families, along with the attack on the USA’s embassy in Libya, which resulted in the US Ambassador being killed, is a fresh reminder of this painful fact. Terrorism – Trends, Tactics and Perpetrators As Chasdi (2012) points out, the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System /WITS/ of the US National Counterterrorism Center /NCTC/ has identified certain trends in the field of terrorism, emerging from global, regional and national developments (p. 67). The figures provided by WITS indicate that over 10Â  000 terrorist attacks occurred in 2011, which affected 70 countries w orldwide and resulted in over 12Â  500 deaths (National Counterterrorism Center /NCTC/, 2012). While the total number of attacks has fallen by 12 percent and 29 percent, as compared to 2010 and 2007 respectively, the main foci of terrorist activities remain the regions of South Asia and the Near East; taken together, the two locations experienced almost two-thirds of the high-casualty attacks in 2009 and over 75 percent of 2011 total (NCTC, 2010; NCTC, 2012). Afghanistan, along with Iraq and Pakistan, bore the brunt of the reported attacks for the third consecutive year, both in terms of attacks’ number and ensuing death toll (NCTC, 2009; NCTC, 2010, NCTC, 2011). The number of terrorist attacks in Africa and related fatalities, mainly associated with the turmoil in Somalia and Democratic Republic of Congo, oscillated between a rise of 140 percent (2 200 fatalities) in 2008, as compared to 2007, and a drop of more than 30 percent in 2010, as against 2009 – from over 3à ‚  200 fatalities to 2Â  131 respectively (NCTC, 2009; NCTC, 2011). The increase of 11.5 percent during 2011, however, is mainly attributable to the Nigeria-based group Boko Haram (NCTC, 2012). The situation in the Western Hemisphere could be also described as variable, insofar as the number of reported terrorist attacks fell by about 25 percent in 2008 and subsequently rose by 27 percent in 2009; while in 2010, both attacks and deaths declined by