With this volume of Terrorism: Commentary on Security Documents, Oxford continues the recent changes to this series that have justified a new publisher-brand, a new title, and a re-designed cover. That new title emphasizes the expert commentary now provided by three leading scholars in the field: Doug Lovelace, Director of the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School, and Aziz Huq of the University of Chicago School of Law. In this particular volume, Lovelace updates researchers on new developments in various regions of the world. He devotes many pages to the debacle along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where Pakistan harbors extremists conducting the insurgency in Afghanistan. Both the documents selected by Lovelace and his insightful commentary describe how the U.S., under advice from Special Envoy Dick Holbrooke, has changed its approach to the problem by treating Afghanistan and Pakistan as one party instead of two. Volume 103 ( "Global Issues ") also examines the complex issue of China's possible assistance to terrorists overseas. For example, some weapons used against coalition forces in Afghanistan originate from China, despite China's promise to help the U.S. in its war against terror. Lovelace and the documents he presents also assess India's measured, thoughtful reaction to allegations that Pakistan facilitated the November terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The volume also alerts readers to disturbing developments in South America, where such groups as FARC in Colombia and The Shining Path in Peru have persisted in their profit-seeking campaigns of violence, despite those countries' general success in diminishing their power.

Index V contains the cumulative index to the Terrorism: Commentary on Security Documents series from volume 121 to volume 140, and adds to earlier index volumes to ensure comprehensive searchability within the series. Although each volume in Terrorism: Commentary on Security Documents contains its own volume-specific index, this comprehensive index volume fully indexes the last twenty volumes in the Terrorism series, and provides far more detail than can be found in the individual volumes. The five different index formats included in this volume feature indices by subject, title, name, and year, providing readers with multiple ways to conduct research within the twenty most recently published volumes of the series.

Terrorism: Commentary on Security Documents Volume 104: Current Trends brings readers up to date on the major trends in U.S. counter-terrorism efforts. In this volume, General Editors Doug Lovelace, Kristen Boon and Aziz Huq categorize the selected documents into three realms: strategic trends, economic trends, and intelligence trends. In the strategic realm, Lovelace provides helpful commentary on such underreported national security threats as the threat of conventional arms posed by developing countries. The main economic trend that this volume explores is the immense economic burden created by the US military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. The last section of this volume presents the latest information on how technology is improving the intelligence capabilities of the U.S. military. In particular, Volume 104 (Current Trends) details how the U.S. military has adjusted its counter-terror strategy in light of the Global War on Terrorism's open-ended, seemingly endless nature. Lovelace's commentary and document selection also reveal the problem the U.S. federal government faces in its commitment to insure victims of terrorism for their losses. Lastly, this volume shows how the U.S. intelligence community has now sought to improve its effectiveness by studying the non-terrorist criminal steps that extremist groups take in preparation for an attack.