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SPEAKING
FREELY
So you want to stop the suicide
bombers?
By Toni Momiroski
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
Last week's attacks
on London have once again stoked the fires of
debate on the causes of terrorism.
One of
the arguments runs that "terrorists don't hate
what we do as much as who we are". This is
articulated by the neo-conservative Wall Street
Journal and others. In an editorial on Friday,
entitled "7/7/2005", the argument postulates that
to "retreat from battling the Islamists in the
Middle East would only make it easier for them to
take the battle to us at home, as they did
yesterday in London". This is essentially a rehash
of President George W Bush's official position
that contends that we fight them over there so we
don't have to fight them "at home".
The
second argument asserts, "We're being attacked for
what we do in the Islamic world, not for who we
are or what we believe in or how we live." This
view is best articulated by Michael Scheuer, a
retired US Central Intelligence Agency officer who
led the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the late
1990s, and who conveyed it this way to CNN last
Thursday. This is essentially a cause and effect
argument - we occupy and harm them, and they
strike us where and how they can.
Perhaps
there is a third position, one that argues that
terror, whose origins used to be in Afghanistan,
is now located in Iraq. And it's by looking to
Iraq that we should find the location and causes
of terrorism. This option can help justify the
"war on terror" in Iraq, but misses the underlying
reasons for it. This, too, is the official
position of Bush and company, who have expressed
this view in the "axis of evil" argument.
We might also make a case that there is
yet another explanation, which seeks to make no
differentiation whatsoever between innocents in
London and New York and those in Iraq, Afghanistan
or anywhere else for that matter. This view
contends that innocent victims of war occur and
that there is no difference between innocent
victims of "smart bombs" and acts of terrorism.
Recently, an important study was conducted
to locate the causes of terrorism, focusing on
suicide bombings in particular, and it does a
better job than the above arguments. It is a book
called Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of
Suicide Terrorism, by Robert Pape, a
University of Chicago political scientist, and it
presents some compelling explanations for acts of
terrorist violence.
While commentators and
social interpreters would argue that Pape's
findings tend to articulate the view that al-Qaeda
and those who identify with it are "driven by
political goals", I would suggest that the
findings argue not so much in terms of political
goals, but that the violence itself is a means of
articulating a position that seeks to influence
political choices available to politicians. While
the means of articulating a political position are
different, the goals bear many resemblances to
democratic countries' lobby and interest groups
that seek to influence governmental decisions.
Pape's study looks at 462
suicide-terrorist attacks between 1980 and early
2004 world-wide. The research finds that in over
95% of the cases the "central objective" of this
form of terrorism was the eviction of foreign
troops from occupied countries or regions that
were considered by the terrorist groups to be
occupied. Therefore, perceptions were a crucial
indicator of reality articulated in acts of
terror. What this means is that since suicide
terrorism is mainly a response to foreign
occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism, "the
use of heavy military force to transform societies
over there ... is only likely to increase the
number of suicide terrorists coming at us".
Some of the chief findings that Pape
reached include:
The terrorists are often quite proud of what
they do in their local communities, and they
produce albums and all kinds of other information
that can be very helpful to understand
suicide-terrorist attacks.
The central fact is that overwhelmingly
suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by
religion as much as they are by a clear strategic
objective: to compel modern democracies to
withdraw military forces from the territories that
the terrorists view as their homelands.
Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response
to foreign occupation and not Islamic
fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to
transform Muslim societies "over there" is only
likely to increase the number of suicide
terrorists "coming at us".
It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it
is driven by the presence of foreign forces in the
territory that the terrorists view as their
homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated
suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism
a new lease on life.
Two-thirds of Al-Qaeda suicide terrorists from
1995 to early 2004 were from countries where the
US had stationed combat troops since 1990.
Before the US invasion, Iraq had never had a
suicide-terrorist attack. Since the invasion,
suicide terrorism has escalated rapidly, with 20
attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004 and over 50 in just
the first five months of 2005. Every year that the
US has stationed combat troops in Iraq, suicide
terrorism has doubled.
Of the terrorists since 1980 who completed the
mission (actually killed themselves) most were
walk-in volunteers. Very few were criminals, and
few were longtime members of a terrorist group.
For most suicide terrorists, their first
experience with violence is their very own
suicide-terrorist attack.
There is no evidence that any
suicide-terrorist organizations were lying in wait
in Iraq before the US invasion - the suicide
terrorists have been produced by the invasion.
Al-Qaeda certainly has demonstrated the
capacity to attack, and in fact it has made over
15 suicide-terrorist attacks since 2002, more than
all the years before September 11 combined.
Al-Qaeda is not weaker now, it's stronger.
Not every foreign occupation has produced
suicide terrorism. This is where religion matters,
but not quite in the way most people think. In
virtually every instance where an occupation has
produced a suicide-terrorist campaign, there has
been a religious difference between the occupier
and the occupied community.
When there is a religious difference between
the occupier and the occupied, this enables
terrorist leaders to demonize the occupier in
especially vicious ways.
Once the occupying forces withdraw from the
homeland territory of the terrorists, they often
stop - and often on a dime.
The purpose of a suicide-terrorist attack is
not so much to die as to kill, to inflict the
maximum number of casualties on the target society
to compel that target to put pressure on its
government to change policy.
If the government is already changing policy,
then the whole point of suicide terrorism, at
least the way it has been used for the past 25
years, doesn't come up.
The reasons for the target selection of
suicide terrorists appear to be much more based on
operational rather than normative criteria. They
appear to be looking for targets where they can
maximize the number of casualties.
What
does all this mean? Acts of terrorism and suicide
are not random acts, but have clear strategic
objectives. They can be political, but they are
political only in terms of seeking to influence
governments with respect of strategic interests
related to occupation. While lobby and interest
groups seek to influence democratic governments by
words and electoral power, terrorists seek to do
this through the only political means available to
them. In their acts of violence, they seek to
redress a power imbalance, that is, if the
occupation ends, then so does terrorism.
Pape's findings point to the succinct view
that the occupiers should get out of Iraq and
Afghanistan, and quickly. Their presence invites
more violence. More violence leads to additional
violence from all sides. This provides the perfect
conditions for "a new kind of war" - an "endless"
war. If Scheuer is right that "al-Qaeda is
mutating into a global insurgency, a possible
prototype for other 21st-century movements,
technologically astute, almost leaderless", then
we need to buckle up, it's going to be a long and
hard ride ahead.
But others argue that to
give in to terrorism is to appease violence. The
facts, certainly as presented by Pape, and to a
certain extent by Scheuer, do not necessarily
point to the validity of this view. It's time
others were allowed to paint their world-view in
theory, and in their own personal colors in
practice. The Western powers' palette clearly does
not meet the needs of all people.
Toni Momiroski is associate
professor at Jiaotong University, China.
(Copyright 2005 Toni Momiroski)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing. |
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