After 9/11, Robert Pape was asked to comment. He did within his several areas of expertise and in the process came to realize that the subject of suicide bombing had not been studied sufficiently. "This is a little bit like studying lung cancer. We not only want to know who gets cancer, we want to know who doesn't get cancer," he says. He has analyzed every known case of suicide terrorism worldwide from 1980 to early 2004: 315 campaigns and 462 individuals.
Are they all Arabs? All Muslims? From large movements or small groups? What are their goals? How large a part does religion play? What do the targets have in common? Is there an aspect of nationalism which might justify use of the concept `fascism'?
One common factor is this specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw combat forces from territory that the terrorists prize. The purpose is not death but, for lack of modern weaponry, to use the person's body as a weapon of last resort.
Are suicide terrorists all Arabs or Muslims?
...[O]ne of the most striking things about those 462, over half are secular. The world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. They're a Marxist group, a secular group, a Hindu group. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka have done more suicide terrorist attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Further, about 30 percent of all Muslim suicide attacks are carried out by secular suicide terrorist groups, such as the PKK in Turkey. ... What this means is that over half of all suicide terrorist attacks, all around the world since 1980, pretty much since they've begun in the modern period, are not associated with Islamic fundamentalism.
Are they from large movements or small groups? Pape found that these groups
don't look like what we might think, which is a cult -- thirty people sitting in a room at the feet of a leader. ... That's not what suicide terrorist organizations look like. They're very large, and in fact, the suicide terrorists themselves are typically walk-in volunteers and not long-time members of the group.
... in general, suicide terrorist groups have [and depend upon] very broad support from their local societies, and it's crucial because suicide terrorists are walk-in volunteers who overwhelmingly have little experience with the terrorist organization, which means they have to meet up with recruiters. The recruiters must be somewhat visible in that local community, or else these walk-ins couldn't find them.
But, of course, not every foreign occupation by a democracy has escalated to suicide terrorism, and Pape has written about "the social logic" behind behind the escalation or lack of it.
How large a part does religion play? Pape argues that what drives suicide terrorism is not primarily religion. The key factor is "a deep anger over the presence of foreign combat forces on territory that the terrorists prize greatly. Absent that core condition, we rarely see suicide terrorism."
When Osama gives motivating speeches, they're often forty or fifty pages long and they often follow a fairly standard pattern. In '96, for instance, one of the most famous was entitled, "The American Occupation of the Arabian Peninsula." ... We had, in his view, a crusader logic where we were following a Christian agenda to weaken Islam, perhaps convert Muslims, and possibly help Israel expand so that both Christians and Jews could extend control over Jerusalem.
Interestingly, in this speech he went further and he said, given the crusader design of the American forces, they would soon conquer Iraq, break it into three pieces and then do the same to the rest of the Arabian Peninsula. ... [Bin Laden's] argument, the core argument, is yes, religion is important, and yes, he does want Islam to respond, but where religion begins is in the goals of the Americans ...
[Emphasis added to illustrate bin Laden's prescience]
Pape points out that the USA did not station combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula before 1990, "even going back to World War II."
Religion is often used as a recruitment tool and as motivation. In some cases it can quite easily be conflated with love of the homeland, but neither religion nor political considerations are more important than the territorial aspects. However:
When we look over time at all the cases where democracies have put combat forces on other territories since 1980, about fifty-eight, what we find is there's a certain key commonality about the small sub-set that have produced suicide terrorism, and it's a religious difference.
What do the targets of suicide terrorism have in common?
Every one of the suicide terrorist campaigns that's kicked off since 1980 has been targeted against a democracy. It's important to recognize that, rightly or wrongly, democracies are viewed as soft, especially vulnerable to coercive punishment....
What is the goal; why suicide terrorism?
From Lebanon, to Chechnya, to Sri Lanka, to Kashmir, to the West Bank, every suicide terrorism campaign since 1980 has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw combat forces from territory that the terrorists prize.
Target societies know that if there were one attacker or a group of attackers willing to give their lives to kill them, there could be many more. The fear or terror created is meant to pressure the target society to put pressure on its government to change military policies.
Is there an aspect of nationalism which might justify use of the concept `fascism'? Pape does not, as far as I have seen, use the word fascism in these discussions. However, people on DailyKos and elsewhere argue that the word `fascism' must not be used in this connection, because terrorist organizations sometimes are virtually stateless. Pape says that a nationalist commitment to the liberation of the territory that's at issue, is the core driving force behind suicide terrorism. He argues that it is "an extreme strategy for national liberation." Thus one could argue that at least one aspect of fascism is present. If the fight is not to expand territory necessarily, it is a fight for territorial integrity.
And what do we still not understand about Hizbollah in Lebanon?
Evidence of the broad nature of Hizbollah's resistance to Israeli occupation can be seen in the identity of its suicide attackers. Hizbollah conducted a broad campaign of suicide bombings against American, French and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether, these attacks, which included the infamous bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, involved 41 suicide terrorists. ...
Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. We were shocked to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a female secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon.
What these suicide attackers - and their heirs today - shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation.
The so-called War on Terror cannot be won, nor indeed fought, by spreading democracy as long as foreign troops remain nor as long as suicide terrorism is seen to be a product of Islamic fundamentalism.
Previous analyses of suicide terrorism have not had the benefit of a complete survey of all suicide terrorist attacks worldwide. The lack of complete data, together with the fact that many such attacks, including all those against Americans, have been committed by Muslims, has led many in the US to assume that Islamic fundamentalism must be the underlying main cause.
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Robert Pape is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of, among other books, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
My sources have been
--the Wikipedia article about him,
--an interview with him by Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley (16 February 2006) and
--the Observer article What we still don't understand about Hizbollah (06 August 2006)