After Sen. Obama’s well-publicized foreign policy speech last week, it became clear to me that many Americans, including many in this community, remain poorly informed about what the social sciences have been able to learn about suicide terrorism and suicide terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. As this is clearly a major issue in the upcoming 2008 elections, I felt it would be good to attempt to give a summary of what is and is not known about suicide terrorism, to start us all on a path where we can support policies based on a realistic understanding of their efficacy. It is also important because many people, pundits, and candidates have deeply incorrect and counter-factual views about suicide terrorism, its causes and its threat to the United States.
While this summary will draw on a variety of sources, the most essential and invaluable source comes from the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, directed by Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. Pape published the major findings of the Chicago Project in the book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Pape built his reputation as a teacher of political science and as one of the foremost experts on strategic bombing theory and practice, and formerly taught air strategy at the U.S. Air Force Scool of Advanced Airpower Studies.
For the purposes of this analysis, we define ‘Terrorism’ as "The use of violence by an organization other than a national government to intimidate or frighten a target audience." This definition was formally adopted by the U.S. State Department in 2001. When examining terrorism in general, it can be classified as being in three different forms: demonstrative terrorism, destructive terrorism, and suicide terrorism. The primary purpose of demonstrative terrorism is to garner publicity, which increases recruitment, puts pressure on their opposition, and gets the attention of third parties which can exert greater pressure on their opposition. Ordinary hijackings and hostage takings where the intention is to hold prisoners in exchange for certain terms are examples of this form. Destructive terrorism takes this one step further, seeking to coerce their opposition through the threat of injury or death as well as bring attention to their goals, through direct attacks and assassinations as well as through car and mail bombs. Groups such as the IRA and FARC, as well as the PLO until the Oslo Accords, fall into this category. The final category is suicide terrorism, which attempts to coerce opponents of their goals through mass destruction and death even at the risk of losing support from third parties. Groups such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are prime examples of groups which focus on the coercive impact of mass destruction and death upon opposing populations.
It is appropriate, when considering terrorism, that we focus our attention primarily on suicide terrorism. Suicide terrorism makes up a very small percentage of total terrorist attacks, but are responsible for the overwhelming majority of casualties from terrorist attacks. Further, suicide terrorism has been demonstrated to be far more effective at achieving terrorist goals than other methods of terrorism. This gives us our first major insight into suicide terrorism, and our first major contradiction of the "conventional wisdom" so often shared by politicians and pundits.
Suicide terrorism is not an illogical act.
The most essential question that we need to examine about suicide terrorism is whether it is a logical or illogical strategy. This is of major significance both because it helps us understand which of our candidates and pundits understands suicide terrorism, and because it helps us understand what to anticipate the future actions and reactions of suicide terrorists will be to our policies. Above, I stated that suicide terrorism has been far more effective at achieving terrorist goals than other methods of terrorism. A look at the suicide terrorist campaigns since 1980 illuminates this:
- Hezbollah vs. US/France – complete withdrawal from Lebanon
1983-1985: Hezbollah vs. Israel – partial withdrawal from Lebanon
1985-1986: Hezbollah vs. Israel – no success
1990-1994: LTTE vs. Sri Lanka – negotiations over Tamil independence
1995-2000: LTTE vs. Sri Lanka – no success
- Hamas vs. Israel – partial withdrawal from Gaza
1994-1995: Hamas vs. Israel – partial withdrawal from the West Bank
- BKI vs. India – no success
- Hamas vs. Israel – no success
- Hams vs. Israel – Hamas leader released
- PKK vs. Turkey – no success
- PKK vs. Turkey – no success
- LTTE vs. Sri Lanka – granted limited political autonomy
1996-present: al-Qaeda vs. U.S. – TBD
2000-present: Chechen groups vs. Russia – TBD
2000-present: Kashmiri Muslims vs. India – TBD
2000-present: al-Quds, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, et al vs. Israel – TBD
20003-present: Iraqi groups vs. U.S. – TBD
This discounts 14 isolated suicide terrorist attacks during this period which cannot be identified as being part of an organized campaign. Those 14 attacks represent less than 5% of all suicide terrorist attacks since 1980.
Of the thirteen completed suicide terrorism campaigns, seven of them had at least limited success in achieving their goals. Further, only the BKI (an Indian Punjabi movement) and the PKK (a Kurdish independence movement) have had no success in completed suicide campaigns; Hezbollah, Hamas, and the LTTE have all had successful campaigns, and most importantly their initial campaigns were successful. Finally, we have multiple authoritative accounts of members of the LTTE, Hamas, the PKK and al-Jihad (Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian group before he joined al-Qaeda) training with Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1980s, suggesting that they learned of suicide terrorism and its effectiveness directly from its earliest modern practitioners.
That suicide terrorism is effective establishes one strong piece of evidence that it is logical, goal-oriented behavior. But it is not enough on its own; those successes could be due to the fact that illogical action tends to lead to illogical reaction. For example, the U.S. and France may have withdrawn from Lebanon in error, due to a misunderstanding or an inability to understand the actions of Hezbollah. It is important to see if suicide terrorism has a strong foundation in military theory as well.
The theoretical basis for suicide terrorism is a hybrid of two earlier military theories, both of which emerged in the explosion of theoretical military thought after World War One. The first theory is Douhetian strategic bombing theory (a previous diary by me on Douhet and strategic bombing theory can be read here), with the second being the theory of guerrilla warfare originated by Mao Tse-Tung. Suicide terrorism attempts to take advantage of the savings in capital (both human and wealth) and time through strategic bombing of the enemy. The logic of Douhetian strategy is that it has a lower cost in both lives and expenditure to bomb the enemy strategically, meaning to bomb opposing civilians who will then attempt to force their government to change policy. The logic of guerrilla strategy is that a weak actor can overcome a strong actor by the tactical advantage of concealment within a sympathetic population and the choice to only confront the opponent in scenarios where you have the advantage. Ergo, a suicide terrorist group conceals its bombers within a sympathetic population, and only deploys them in circumstances giving them a high probability of success against "soft" (meaning relatively poorly defended) targets.
Among the major findings of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism are that suicide terrorism occurs exclusively against nations with democratic governments who are occupying populations with religious and linguistic differences. While nominal exceptions to the religious and linguistic differences exist, there are no examples of suicide terrorist campaigns against non-democratic nations. This is confirmation of the application of Douetian coercive strategy with rational modifiers, since coercion against non-democratic governments has been proven completely ineffective due to the lack of effect public suffering has upon the decision-making process of the nation.
The identification of both practical and theoretical evidence for the validity of suicide terrorism as a strategy for a non-national power is conclusive evidence that suicide terrorism is a logical act. The significance of this in dismissing many ‘conventional wisdoms’ about suicide terrorism is great: it is conclusive proof that suicide terrorism is not caused by desperation, financial or otherwise, or due to a particular sort of religious fanaticism. Whatever the motivations may be of individual terrorists, we must recognize that their strategy is one developed as a rational means to achieve particular goals.
Coercion Theory gives us a sound basis to analyze both the level of threat and the likely outcome
Because the method of warfare employed by suicide terrorists is Douhetian coercion, we have a sound basis to answer certain questions from the outset. While those answers will not be absolute due to the sheer scale of variables, historical use of strategic coercion by various actors and the amount of research on coercion during the Cold War gives us answers that have a high probability of being right.
The history of coercion in warfare suggests that coercion can only succeed when there is a significant imbalance of the importance of the dispute (almost invariably territory) between actors. Vietnamese independence was of very high importance to the Viet Cong and South Vietnamese sovereignty was of moderate importance to the United States, so American attempts to coerce the VC and North Vietnam into surrender failed. The success and failure of suicide terrorist campaigns follows the same equation. Lebanon was of low importance to the U.S. and France, which led to rapid victory against them for Hezbollah. It was of significantly higher importance to Israel, which meant that Hezbollah’s victory against Israel took significantly longer and was not complete. Preventing Kurdish independence is of high priority to Turkey, so the PKK was unable to score any significant coercive victory against them.
Given this equation, we can therefore predict with a high level of probability the outcome of the ongoing suicide terrorist campaigns. We can say fairly easily, for example, that the Iraqi insurgents will succeed in coercing the United States into withdrawal from Iraq – the importance of this is very high for the insurgents, while the national interest of the U.S. in Iraq is relatively low. We can also say that the various campaigns against Israel by Palestinian groups will only have limited success, since Israel has a moderate national interest in some parts of the West Bank and Gaza but an extremely high national interest in Jerusalem and the east bank of the Kinneret Sea. Finally, we can observe that the conflict between al-Qaeda and the U.S. is highly unlikely to be resolvable via coercion, since the U.S. has an extremely high national interest, as does its allies, in the preservation of cooperative governments in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, due to the worldwide financial import of their oil production and the Suez Canal.
With that in mind, we should begin our analysis of both Sen. Obama’s foreign policy speech and the policy positions of other candidates with two basic questions in mind:
Given the high probability that coercion will succeed against the United States in Iraq, how do we mitigate the negative consequences of that towards the U.S.?
Given the high probability that the United States will not be coerced by al-Qaeda, what is the best method(s) for us to protect ourselves and our interests from their further attempts?