Fighting terrorism by rethinking our national policies

By Max Castro
Special Correspondent
Posted September 25 2005

On 9-11, suicide terrorism entered our consciousness in one searing moment. Seizing on the American people's understandable desire to strike back -- and a tide of support for the commander-in-chief -- the Bush administration mounted a "war on terror." It has included, among other things, the invasion of two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Things have not gone as the architects of the policy had hoped, and that has brought mounting criticism and numerous attempts to explain what went wrong. What makes Robert A. Pape's book more than just another work in this vein is that the author has done his homework -- a vast amount of it -- and he has the numbers.

Pape, a political science professor and the director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, has looked at the phenomenon of suicide terrorism globally and compiled data on 460 individual attackers. The question is what drives the apparent increase in suicide terrorism. The author's short answer: Suicide terrorism works. Thus "the strategic logic of suicide terrorism."

This seems paradoxical. What do successful suicide terrorists win? And isn't self-preservation the strongest and most primordial instinct? The answer that the conventional wisdom gives to the paradox usually involves the promise of a paradise featuring virgins for the taking.

Pape, on the basis of comparative data and numerous case studies, disagrees. He cites, for example, the fact that the leading practitioners of suicide terrorism are not Islamic fundamentalists but the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, whose motives are secular and political rather than religious. Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism accounts for only about half of suicide terrorism worldwide, according to the author.

Pape argues that suicide terrorism is largely a purposeful political act with a clear objective: to drive out those who the terrorists see as occupying their homeland. While the homelands are places such as Chechnya, Palestine, the heavily Tamil areas of Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq, the actual terrorism can take place anywhere, including Bali, Moscow, Madrid, London or New York.

The author's most telling statistic in support of his controversial argument is that fundamentalist Islamic countries where there is a heavy American military presence have produced 70 times more suicide terrorists relative to their populations than fundamentalist Islamic countries with little or no U.S. military presence.

Individual suicide terrorists are not, Pape asserts, deranged losers, loners mired in poverty, marginal extremists isolated from their communities. Instead, they derive significant support from communities who see them as acting in the cause of national liberation.

Pape uses a classic categorization of suicide developed by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, and argues that suicide terrorism is not the product of social disorganization but of too much social integration. The terrorists are not deviants from the standpoint of their close-knit communities but rather individuals who make the ultimate sacrifice for the group's cause. In Durkeim's typology, this makes their suicides "altruistic" (for the cause) rather than "egoistic" (for those virgins).

This will strike some conservatives as an exercise in excusing terrorism or providing the terrorists with therapy. But Pape is a pragmatist rather than a liberal or an idealist. He argues that the United States must defeat terrorism but cannot do it by brute force alone or by proceeding from the wrong premises.

If terrorists are motivated by the desire to drive out foreign invaders, then occupying more of their land is exactly the wrong policy. In order to win, the United States must ensure that the use of force to defeat today's generation of terrorists is not so indiscriminate or brutal that it ends up breeding a larger and more deadly generation of killers.

Pape thinks that the United States must protect its strategic interests in the Middle East, but he equates these with oil rather than the spread of democracy. To this end he calls for a policy of "offshore balancing," by which he means working through alliances with local governments and intervening only in extraordinary situations involving vital U.S. strategic interests.

The president has the right and, through his bully pulpit, the ability to try to persuade us as to our national policies. The citizen has the right -- and the obligation -- to consider coherent counter-arguments such as those that Pape has laid out in this volume.

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