Dying to Understand
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
Robert A. Pape
Published by Random House, 2005
ISBN 1400063175 Hardcover
ISBN 0812973380 Paperback
This is another book that’s only been out a year or so, though the author did publish a monologue on the subject in 2003 in the American Political Science Review. Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago (Go Maroons!), has put together one of the most comprehensive studies of the causes of suicide terrorism. If you’ve ever uttered the phrase "They hate us for our freedoms!", "Islamofascists!" or anything along the lines of "They blow themselves up because they have nothing to live for!" then this book might do your slogan-embracing little mind some good. Here are a few of the teasers from the dust jacket, just to get you warmed up:
"FACT: Suicide terrorism is not primarily a product of Islamic fundamentalism.
FACT: The world’s leading practitioners of suicide terrorism as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – a secular, Marxist-Leninist group drawn from Hindu families.
FACT: Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
FACT: Al-Qaeda fits the above pattern.
FACT: Despite their rhetoric, democracies – including the United States – have routinely made concessions to suicide terrorists. Suicide terrorism is on the rise because terrorists have learned that it’s effective."
I was skeptical going in, but Prof. Pape makes a convincing case. He has had Chicago grad students combing reports the world over and compiling as much information about each and every suicide terrorist as is possible. Nowhere else have I seen a discussion of this topic backed by such comprehensive data. Even the respected experts on today’s terrorists such as Steve Sloan, Bruce Hoffman and Rohan Gunaratna, have not tackled the question of why suicide terrorism persists with such vigor and such resources. Prof. Sloan has spoken at length over the years about his desire for a comprehensive database of terrorism, and uses the question of how to design one as a standard puzzle for his classes. A terrorism database is far larger than a suicide terrorism database, but Prof. Pape and the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism have achieved at least a small part of Prof. Sloan's dream.
The book is broken down into three major parts. The first discusses the strategic logic of suicide terrorism. Here, Prof. Pape discusses the widely accepted premise that terrorism in general, and suicide terrorism specifically, are weapons used by the weak against the strong. He points out that suicide terrorism occurs in campaigns, not isolated incidents, and so the threat of continued suicide attacks is as effective a weapon as the attacks themselves. His second major point in this section, and the most relevant, is that suicide terrorism campaigns occur only against democracies, or reasonable facsimiles thereof. India, the US, Israel, modern Russia, France, terrorists have realized that autocratic states are not susceptible to the kinds of fears and pressures that democracies feel, and thus choose other methods to attack them (see the USSR in Afghanistan compared with the US/NATO in Afghanistan and democratic Russia in Chechnya). Finally, Prof. Pape offers proof that suicide terrorism pays. Those who use it tend to get what they want and, if they do not, they tend to abandon the tactic. [As a topical aside, I’m applying his thoughts to the current situation in Lebanon. Hezbollah was a regular user of suicide terrorists in the past, but have not chosen to go down that road (yet) in the current round of hostilities. Why? My take is that they are capable of damaging Israel using more conventional rockets and guerilla warfare; they feel that Israel is being led by emotion and the military, not democratic principles in this case, and they feel that Israel’s invasion of Southern Lebanon will result in Israel being perceived as the bad guy. Why spoil that through suicide terrorism?]
Moving on, Prof. Pape looks at the social logic of suicide terrorism. This section features in depth examinations of groups such as the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), the Tamil Tigers, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. Each study is meticulously researched and emphasizes not just the group dynamics, but the operational context of each group. The most important part of Section II, though, is the thorough categorization and analysis of the common and dissimilar factors surrounding each suicide terrorist campaign. Prof. Pape determines that nationalism and "national liberation" from occupation perceived or real, are the wellsprings of suicide terrorism, rather than religion. Religion plays a role, but it is secondary to the nationalist side. He also shows that up until now, terrorist campaigns are not a "spiral" of death, as commonly portrayed by frustrated foreign ministers and media experts, but logical and linear military campaigns with specific motivations and goals. A corollary argument, again well documented, is that these groups (of all creeds) do not seek world domination, no matter what the PR says: they have mostly local goals.
Finally, Prof. Pape presents his data on the individual logic of suicide terrorism. He discusses suicide as a societal phenomenon, drawing heavily on Émile Durkheim’s seminal theories on the topic. He combines the accepted theories on individual logic for suicide with the data available on who suicide terrorists were and what motivated them to choose that course of action. The results are somewhat surprising: the majority of suicide terrorists were not maladjusted, depressed, fanatical teenaged loners, but rather people with a strong connection to their society, with secular and political motivations that fall firmly in the "altruistic" category of suicides. They tend to be from the middle class, in their 20s, and well educated. Hezbollah suicide bombers during the 1982-86 campaign, for example, were Christians or Communists/Socialists (and thus prone to atheism) 92% of the time, and only 8% Islamist. He shows his demographic data, broken out admirably by group, conflict and opponent, and finishes with a detailed look at three specific cases: Mohammed Atta from the Al-Qaeda attacks on 11 September 2001, a young woman named Dhanu of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and Saeed Hotari who blew up a Tel Aviv disco in June of 2001 at the behest of Hamas.
Professor Pape, in his recommendations, accepts that the United States is involved in the Middle East and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. He advocates combating suicide terrorism in two ways. The first is military and diplomatic action against existing terrorist groups, eliminating or marginalizing as many of their members as possible. The second recommendation is to prevent a new generation of terrorists from appearing by slowly reducing our contributions to the conditions that spawn them. This means withdrawing our military from the region as much as possible, particularly the very visible elements of the armed forces. We must encourage and support local solutions to the problems and work through alliances and proxies rather than directly. The question of Israel is one for which he has no concrete solution, though US support for Israel (our proxy occupation of Jerusalem) is a prime cause for terrorism in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In the end, this book seems to prove that terrorists, specifically suicide terrorists, are both more complex and more easily understood than most people like to believe. Politicians, the media, academics and the military take comfort in describing terrorists as being completely foreign, people we don’t understand and could never understand. As in all wars, we try to de-humanize our opponents. In reality, though, the groups studied are working for goals we can all associate with: freedom from oppression, freedom from foreign rule, and national identity. It is not particularly pleasant to realize that suicide bombers are not that different from any of us, but it is a realization that we must all come to if we are to have a hope of slipping out of the crosshairs of these groups. Criminals and murderers they may be, but while we can and must condemn their means, we must also accept that we can understand their goals, and perhaps even sympathize with their plight to a certain extent.
Robert A. Pape
Published by Random House, 2005
ISBN 1400063175 Hardcover
ISBN 0812973380 Paperback
This is another book that’s only been out a year or so, though the author did publish a monologue on the subject in 2003 in the American Political Science Review. Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago (Go Maroons!), has put together one of the most comprehensive studies of the causes of suicide terrorism. If you’ve ever uttered the phrase "They hate us for our freedoms!", "Islamofascists!" or anything along the lines of "They blow themselves up because they have nothing to live for!" then this book might do your slogan-embracing little mind some good. Here are a few of the teasers from the dust jacket, just to get you warmed up:
"FACT: Suicide terrorism is not primarily a product of Islamic fundamentalism.
FACT: The world’s leading practitioners of suicide terrorism as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – a secular, Marxist-Leninist group drawn from Hindu families.
FACT: Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
FACT: Al-Qaeda fits the above pattern.
FACT: Despite their rhetoric, democracies – including the United States – have routinely made concessions to suicide terrorists. Suicide terrorism is on the rise because terrorists have learned that it’s effective."
I was skeptical going in, but Prof. Pape makes a convincing case. He has had Chicago grad students combing reports the world over and compiling as much information about each and every suicide terrorist as is possible. Nowhere else have I seen a discussion of this topic backed by such comprehensive data. Even the respected experts on today’s terrorists such as Steve Sloan, Bruce Hoffman and Rohan Gunaratna, have not tackled the question of why suicide terrorism persists with such vigor and such resources. Prof. Sloan has spoken at length over the years about his desire for a comprehensive database of terrorism, and uses the question of how to design one as a standard puzzle for his classes. A terrorism database is far larger than a suicide terrorism database, but Prof. Pape and the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism have achieved at least a small part of Prof. Sloan's dream.
The book is broken down into three major parts. The first discusses the strategic logic of suicide terrorism. Here, Prof. Pape discusses the widely accepted premise that terrorism in general, and suicide terrorism specifically, are weapons used by the weak against the strong. He points out that suicide terrorism occurs in campaigns, not isolated incidents, and so the threat of continued suicide attacks is as effective a weapon as the attacks themselves. His second major point in this section, and the most relevant, is that suicide terrorism campaigns occur only against democracies, or reasonable facsimiles thereof. India, the US, Israel, modern Russia, France, terrorists have realized that autocratic states are not susceptible to the kinds of fears and pressures that democracies feel, and thus choose other methods to attack them (see the USSR in Afghanistan compared with the US/NATO in Afghanistan and democratic Russia in Chechnya). Finally, Prof. Pape offers proof that suicide terrorism pays. Those who use it tend to get what they want and, if they do not, they tend to abandon the tactic. [As a topical aside, I’m applying his thoughts to the current situation in Lebanon. Hezbollah was a regular user of suicide terrorists in the past, but have not chosen to go down that road (yet) in the current round of hostilities. Why? My take is that they are capable of damaging Israel using more conventional rockets and guerilla warfare; they feel that Israel is being led by emotion and the military, not democratic principles in this case, and they feel that Israel’s invasion of Southern Lebanon will result in Israel being perceived as the bad guy. Why spoil that through suicide terrorism?]
Moving on, Prof. Pape looks at the social logic of suicide terrorism. This section features in depth examinations of groups such as the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), the Tamil Tigers, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. Each study is meticulously researched and emphasizes not just the group dynamics, but the operational context of each group. The most important part of Section II, though, is the thorough categorization and analysis of the common and dissimilar factors surrounding each suicide terrorist campaign. Prof. Pape determines that nationalism and "national liberation" from occupation perceived or real, are the wellsprings of suicide terrorism, rather than religion. Religion plays a role, but it is secondary to the nationalist side. He also shows that up until now, terrorist campaigns are not a "spiral" of death, as commonly portrayed by frustrated foreign ministers and media experts, but logical and linear military campaigns with specific motivations and goals. A corollary argument, again well documented, is that these groups (of all creeds) do not seek world domination, no matter what the PR says: they have mostly local goals.
Finally, Prof. Pape presents his data on the individual logic of suicide terrorism. He discusses suicide as a societal phenomenon, drawing heavily on Émile Durkheim’s seminal theories on the topic. He combines the accepted theories on individual logic for suicide with the data available on who suicide terrorists were and what motivated them to choose that course of action. The results are somewhat surprising: the majority of suicide terrorists were not maladjusted, depressed, fanatical teenaged loners, but rather people with a strong connection to their society, with secular and political motivations that fall firmly in the "altruistic" category of suicides. They tend to be from the middle class, in their 20s, and well educated. Hezbollah suicide bombers during the 1982-86 campaign, for example, were Christians or Communists/Socialists (and thus prone to atheism) 92% of the time, and only 8% Islamist. He shows his demographic data, broken out admirably by group, conflict and opponent, and finishes with a detailed look at three specific cases: Mohammed Atta from the Al-Qaeda attacks on 11 September 2001, a young woman named Dhanu of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and Saeed Hotari who blew up a Tel Aviv disco in June of 2001 at the behest of Hamas.
Professor Pape, in his recommendations, accepts that the United States is involved in the Middle East and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. He advocates combating suicide terrorism in two ways. The first is military and diplomatic action against existing terrorist groups, eliminating or marginalizing as many of their members as possible. The second recommendation is to prevent a new generation of terrorists from appearing by slowly reducing our contributions to the conditions that spawn them. This means withdrawing our military from the region as much as possible, particularly the very visible elements of the armed forces. We must encourage and support local solutions to the problems and work through alliances and proxies rather than directly. The question of Israel is one for which he has no concrete solution, though US support for Israel (our proxy occupation of Jerusalem) is a prime cause for terrorism in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In the end, this book seems to prove that terrorists, specifically suicide terrorists, are both more complex and more easily understood than most people like to believe. Politicians, the media, academics and the military take comfort in describing terrorists as being completely foreign, people we don’t understand and could never understand. As in all wars, we try to de-humanize our opponents. In reality, though, the groups studied are working for goals we can all associate with: freedom from oppression, freedom from foreign rule, and national identity. It is not particularly pleasant to realize that suicide bombers are not that different from any of us, but it is a realization that we must all come to if we are to have a hope of slipping out of the crosshairs of these groups. Criminals and murderers they may be, but while we can and must condemn their means, we must also accept that we can understand their goals, and perhaps even sympathize with their plight to a certain extent.
Labels: Great Reads, Non-Fiction, Political Science, Terrorism
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