Most terrorist groups have the concept of "legitimate target". This includes the armed forces, the police forces, government officials, etc. For people like the Mardi Gras bomber it would be people working at banks. They tend not to target "civilians".
> terrorist organizations never use terrorism as a last resort and seldom seize opportunities to become productive nonviolent political parties;
> terrorist organizations reflexively reject compromise proposals offering significant policy concessions by the target government1;
This is just game theory. You have the game "Chicken" - two cars drive towards each other, the last to swerve away wins. Imagine two drivers walk arrive. One gets out of his car. He's alert, awake, aware, keen. Good odds, you think. The other driver falls out of his car. He's steaming drunk, with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a crack pipe in the other. He takes his prescription glasses off, and stamps on them, and puts on some dirty cracked sunglasses. You realise that this guy is not going to swerve away, this guy is going to win "Chicken".
The government offers anything? You have the vocal terror group yelling "NO SURRENDER!!" while the political wing is secretly discussing how to accept the deal and what they need to do in return. This keeps the supporters supporting you in very polarised situations.
> terrorist organizations generally carry out anonymous attacks, precluding target countries from making policy concessions;
I'm not sure what this means. Some terrorist organisations have press offices and use code words to declare actions. Others are umbrella groups allowing anyone to claim an action under that main name.
> terrorist organizations with identical political platforms routinely attack each other more than their mutually professed enemy;
But the People's Front of Judea are the real splitters.
> terrorist organizations resist disbanding when they consistently fail to achieve their political platforms or when their stated political grievances have been resolved…
People use all sorts of things to define themselves. Some people define themselves as freedom fighter, and it's hard to re-define yourself when circumstances change. (You like Ruby now, but what about in 10 years?)
I guess it's interesting that terrorists fall into the same trap as most other people.
It's interesting to play games about "how many people could I kill if I had 5 people and $10,000" or "how much havoc can I cause with very little money", but that's not the point of terror. You only need to do a few things occasionally to have huge impact. Killing more people doesn't have particularly more impact, but does make people less sympathetic to your cause.
It was reasonably common to hear people say things like "I dislike the means they use, but the IRA have a reasonable cause" (although the much more common line was "terrorist scum") but killing more people would have stopped that pretty quickly.