I know Paul fairly well, and he gave me a copy of this book last year. I have to confess, I am less enthusiastic than Bill is.
My take was that the tone was too much "state as victim" and lacked a balanced addressing of the causal role governance and government often have to the conditions from which organizations who employ illegal violence and terrorism for political purpose tend to emerge.
The reality is that many types of organizations employ terrorist tactics. Heck, our drone campaign is the FATA of Pakistan is terrorism in the eyes of those who live there and also with much of the global "jury"of people and governments everywhere who judge our actions. So "terrorism" or "terrorist" is a clumsy category at best. Most often it is a category that leads to il-defined strategies and the application of TTPs wholly unsuited for the purposes one hopes to achieve.
I personally think we get to much more effective categories when we bundle organizations by a combination of their primary purpose for action and their relationship to the population they operate among. Once this foundation is established one knows if they are dealing with a nationalist insurgent or a foreign fighter or a UW operative or a for-profit criminal, etc. Only then, upon this foundation should one further sort out and refine their understanding of the threat by tactical criteria, such as the tactics they employ, who they associate with or accept help from, or what ideology they employ. IMO, we jump straight to tactical factors, and end up applying solutions that really don't fit the problem. And when a solution does not fit a problem, it tends to make the problem worse.
It's been several months since I last looked at it, but I tabbed some examples in my copy that I will track down this week. Much good in the book, but again, I felt it lacked balance and served to reinforce some of our least productive behavior in dealing with terrorist organizations.
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