I’ve often commented on my confusion as to why terrorists don’t abstain from massive 9/11 style attacks and instead focus on numerous small-scale attacks — like walking into a 7-11 and blowing everyone away with an AK-47. In the current Time magazine, Fareed Zakaria argues they are beginning to do just that.

Over the past year we have seen the rise of a new kind of warfare: microterrorism, which can be defined as small-scale terrorism, driven from the local level, whose practitioners choose not the largest or most spectacular operations but those that are likely to succeed.
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“We do not need to strike big,” [Al Qaeda] say. “Attacking the enemy… is to bleed the enemy to death,” a tactic they dubbed “the strategy of a thousand cuts.”

This is, of course, what terrorists have been doing in Israel for decades, and many other parts of the world. Strap a bomb on someone, march them into a pizzeria, and whammo — 20 people are dead. A steady onslaught of such attacks could cause a radical restructuring of democratic society. And, as technology becomes more available, bombs and bio weapons become only easier to make.