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University of Chicago Professor Pape: Foreign Occupation is the Driving Force of Suicide Terrorism |
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Sunday, 3 May 2009INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT A. PAPE
* University of Chicago Professor Robert A. Pape refutes the common myth that suicide bombers are young, uneducated and easily led misfits who are inspired by religious fervor and driven by poverty and alienation.
Rather, he says they tend to be educated, socially integrated and highly capable people who would live a good life if foreign occupation of their territories had not turned them into suicide bombers.
* Pape lists community prestige, revenge and religious feelings as three motivations behind suicide terrorism, but he says these are effective only in the presence of a foreign occupation.
* "Ninety-five percent of all suicide attacks in the world are driven by foreign military occupation," says Pape.
* He thinks that the sudden increase in suicide attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2005 can only be explained by the fact that in that year NATO powers began their occupation of Kandahar and eastern Afghanistan. He recalls that as soon as Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000, Hezbullah stopped all its suicide attacks. Pape is critical of Western leaders who keep calling on Muslim clerics to defeat the extremists and "be good Muslims."
* According to Pape, the solution to suicide terrorism is for foreign occupying forces to pull out their ground troops, while all Muslim leaders need to do is cooperate with Western leaders who will do that.
Kerim Balci from Sunday's Zaman, Istanbul weekly, spoke with Professor Pape, who has compiled the largest database of suicide bombings in the world, with about 2,000 cases analyzed in detail. He published his groundbreaking book "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism" in 2005, and his database has continued to grow since then. We asked Pape, who traveled to Turkey to participate in a NATO conference on fighting suicide terrorism, about his earlier work on air-bombing strategies and concepts he has developed, such as "coercion by punishment" and "off-shore balancing."
- Is anyone who carries a bomb and blows it up a suicide terrorist?
RP: "Well, first of all, I use the term "suicide terrorist" not for political reasons. If someone wants to call them "self-martyrs," I have no problem with that whatsoever. I am using this term simply because it is readily more understandable to Western readers and listeners. In defining what a suicide terrorist is, I have two criteria: One is that they have to kill themselves, and second, it has to be on a mission to kill others. We don't count someone who kills himself or herself to avoid capture."
- In your book you refute the commonly accepted "suicide terrorist stereotype." Why is that?
RP: "Our study shows that suicide terrorists are overwhelmingly deeply integrated into their local communities. They are not isolated. Out of over 2,000 we have in our database, only a handful could be called depressed. It is not that they are marginalized, isolated people thrown into depression; these are people who are politically active, reasonably well educated. They are people who would go on [to have] a productive life had they not become deeply angered at the presence of foreign combat forces threatening the territory that they value."
- So you claim that foreign occupation is one major reason why reasonable, rational people are turning into suicide bombers?
RP: "Ninety-five percent of all suicide attacks in the world are driven by foreign military occupation. Just take the example of Afghanistan. There was no suicide terrorism before the American forces were deployed in Afghanistan. The numbers were reasonably low up until 2005. Then something happened in that year that caused suicide terrorism to increase. There is a very similar pattern in Pakistan. These are Afghan nationals hitting NATO military targets. Why?
For the first couple of years of our occupation of Afghanistan, we were not occupying the country. We only stayed in Kabul. Then in October 2003, the UN gave NATO a mandate to occupy the rest of the country. NATO developed a plan to occupy the country in stages. By late 2005, when we started to occupy southern and eastern Afghanistan, we created this surge in suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Seventy-five percent of all the Afghan and Pakistani suicide bombings happen in this border zone.
The key thing here is to see that US combat operations are driving suicide terrorism around the world. What is happening is not that you are getting a global jihad. What is happening is that you are getting local opposition to a military presence. Because of these findings, I am concerned about sending new troops to Afghanistan.
I used to think that suicide bombers have personal revenge issues. I know only the Palestinian cases, of course.
We have found that there are three incentives: One is prestige; they want to be heroes. To that end, they are making martyrdom videos. Second is revenge, I mean, revenge for atrocities directed against family members or friends. And the third is religion. But what is really important is an additional mixed motive: anger at the presence of foreign military on the territories or threatening those territories. If you take that additional motive away, those other three don't seem to produce suicide terrorism.
Let me give you an example. Lebanon is a very interesting case by means of having no suicide bombings recently. Most people study suicide terrorism when it does happen but not when it doesn't. I do both. In Lebanon, there was no suicide terrorism before 1982, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon. In 2000, Israel leaves and suicide terrorism goes to zero. I mean the Hezbullah terrorism does not follow Israel to Tel Aviv. That not only means that this isn't about religious fanatics looking for an excuse to get a quick trip to heaven, but it also means that only revenge is not enough to become suicide bombers. There were a lot of people who had been abused by those 18 years of occupation, but they didn't run after the Israelis for revenge."
- Why do people think that suicide bombers are drug-taking religious fanatics with all kinds of psychological illnesses?
RP: "There are several reasons. Before 9/11, there wasn't much serious study of terrorism. It was studied by governments, and these studies were not subjected to peer review. On 9/11, I was not a terrorism expert. I was studying air forces. So the day after 9/11, I went and bought a Quran because I wanted to know what is wrong with Islam. But then, as I studied the data, I came to realize that the phenomenon was not rooted in religion at all.
The second explanation is related to the natural human tendency that treats our villains as monsters. It is a great way to come to grips with evil. When there are awful acts being committed, it makes us more uncomfortable when we realize that they were done by ordinary people. Look at the Holocaust, for example. This is one of the most villainous events in human history, but it was perpetrated by ordinary Germans. They were not really strange, indoctrinated, brainwashed people. They were not Frankenstein-like monsters. They were just ordinary people caught up in a certain ugly time. This makes it even more unbearable."
- The first Palestinian suicide bombing came after 20 years of occupation. The first Iraqi suicide bombing came on the third day of the American occupation. How do you explain this?
RP: "It is becoming more popular because it has the reputation of being politically successful. I don't think that the issue is that it is becoming tactically easier or that we have more religious fanatics today than 20 years ago. In October 1983, there was a truck bombing in the marine barracks in Beirut that killed 231 marines. As a result of that attack, just two months later Ronald Reagan decided to pull all the American soldiers out of Lebanon. That same day the French did the same. That event congealed the conventional wisdom that suicide terrorism produces powerful effects. When the Tamil Tigers organized their first suicide attack in 1987, they actually carbon copied what happened in 1983.
In the Palestinian case, if you look at the trajectory of the settlements year by year, you will see that an increase in settlement activity corresponds amazingly to the violence. I think the reason that the suicide attacks have slowed down recently is precisely because the geographic reach of the settlements has been reduced. Settlements are growing still, but they are growing vertically, not horizontally."
- Are you saying that the only solution is to end the occupation?
RP: "I am. Pull out the ground troops, but not immediately and not all at once. The US has to adopt strategies that pursue American interests but that do not rely on ground forces. I think that our strategy should be what I call offshore balancing. The US and the West have to withdraw their ground forces over a period of three to four years from Iraq and the rest of the peninsula and rely on navy forces and air forces offshore. We don't need to micro-manage the domestic politics of countries; we don't need to be picking the prime minister of Iraq every single time."
- What can the Muslim intellectuals do to help?
RP: "Political action… I think it was a mistake for the West to encourage Muslim clerics to beat the radicals among them and be better Muslims. We need the Muslim leaders to push forward political solutions to problems. That means supporting political leaders in other countries who look for diplomatic solutions. This summer there is a crucial election in Afghanistan. This election has to be free and open. It should not be an instance where we are giving people an opportunity to vote for [Hamid] Karzai, who needs to win. I think that is something the Muslims all around the world should cry out for. They should ask for true, real democratic elections in Afghanistan. They should want that it should be monitored by international organizations. If it turns out that the elections are biased in favor of simply keeping Karzai in power, the situation there could become even worse."
- Some experts claim that we will see nuclear or chemical suicide terrorism in the future.
RP: "If the terrorist organizations acquire nuclear weapons, you will certainly find suicide bombers around it. They won't be able to set up nuclear plants and produce more than one or two nuclear weapons. They won't just risk being noticed by the security forces.
By means of chemical weapons, we have to worry about a prolonged occupation in Iraq or Afghanistan. The occupation is not only creating more suicide attacks, but it is also encouraging scientists to become part of the terrorist groups. A 20-year-old college kid can be a good suicide bomber, but he won't produce sarin gas. But a 35-year-old biochemist can do that."
- In "Bombing to Win" you developed the concepts of "coercion by punishment" and "coercion by denial." Can you evaluate the failure of the Israeli forces in Lebanon with these concepts?
RP: "They apparently didn't read the book. With the coming of airplanes, people started to think that they can simply bomb civilian populations and have a coercive effect on the people and on the governments without having to beat the military forces. That logic sounds very reasonable. But this has been tried now -- throughout the entire 20th century -- about 40 times, and we have almost no cases of success.
In 2006, the Israeli strategy was to weaken Hezbullah. They believed that they could weaken Hezbullah both by killing Hezbullah fighters and by weakening the political support Hezbullah is taking from the community. That is why they hit some of the bridges and road networks around southern Beirut. They were trying to separate southern Beirut from the electric power grid. But this also had a big effect on the people. This strategy not only failed, but it actually produced a backlash, where [Hassan] Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbullah, was able to organize a rally a month after the operation in Martyrs' Square in Beirut, and something like a half million Shiites showed up. It went from having the support of a few thousand people to almost every Shiite in the country. When the Israeli soldiers were kidnapped, Hezbullah was being criticized in Egypt, Turkey and Jordan. What happened six weeks later? Hezbullah became the hero. This was as much of a failure, a disaster that could be possible for everyone but especially for Israel."
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Sunday, 3 May 2009
Source: Kerim Balcı, TZ
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