"I reached out to eight terrorism experts who’ve long studied the phenomenon at the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the National Security Council, the State Department, the Rand Corporation, and in academia. They identified six ways terrorism evolves, fades, or dies—and under what conditions it succeeds.
Fewer than five per cent of terrorist groups succeed outright...
Extremist groups are more likely to succeed when objectives are limited or attainable, “such as independence, a role in government, or a piece of territory,” Richard Clarke, the national coördinator on counterterrorism under the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations, told me. “If a group can increase the pain point to the decision-makers, they will give in. That was true of many independence movements, including the American Revolution.”
“Then they go straight,” Clarke added. “They trade off their radicalism to become a government that is not that out of line with other governments of the world.”
More common—about eighteen per cent—are terrorist movements that end up negotiating to achieve their political goals. “They are the groups that hang on the longest. Their life span as terrorists is usually twenty to twenty-five years,” Cronin told me. “Usually, the talks trundle along. They often take years, and some lower level of violence continues,” she said. “But they rarely fail outright.”...
“Military repression usually backfires,” Jessica Stern, the co-author of “ISIS: The State of Terror” who was a national-security staffer in the Clinton Administration, told me. “Even when they seem to end, they keep merging, splitting, renaming. When a particular group is banned or defeated in one area, it may very well appear in a new guise, under a new name.”
Other terrorist movements collapse as the national and international political dynamics that fuelled them fade...
“I’m less confident those lessons apply to the groups we face today,” Brian Jenkins, the author of “Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?,” said. “We’re dealing with adversaries who, tactically, organizationally, and strategically, have given the same amount of thought to terrorism as we have. They have adapted, and, as a consequence, many of them have survived. The idea of ending terrorism looks more complex than it did in the nineteen-seventies.”"
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