ODD SORT OF SUCCESS:

Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs (ROBERT A. PAPE, 7/09/05, NY Times)

WHILE we don't yet know who organized the terrorist attacks in London on Thursday, it seems likely that they were the latest in a series of bombings, most of them suicide attacks, over the past several years by Al Qaeda and its supporters. Although many Americans had hoped that Al Qaeda has been badly weakened by American counterterrorism efforts since Sept. 11, 2001, the facts indicate otherwise. Since 2002, Al Qaeda has been involved in at least 17 bombings that killed more than 700 people - more attacks and victims than in all the years before 9/11 combined.

To make sense of this campaign, I compiled data on the 71 terrorists who killed themselves between 1995 and 2004 in carrying out attacks sponsored by Osama bin Laden's network. I was able to collect the names, nationalities and detailed demographic information on 67 of these bombers, data that provides insight into the underlying causes of Al Qaeda's suicide terrorism and how the group's strategy has evolved since 2001.

Most important, the figures show that Al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries. [...]

The bottom line, then, is that the terrorists have not been fundamentally weakened but have changed course and achieved significant success. The London attacks will only encourage Osama bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders in the belief that they will succeed in their ultimate aim: causing America and its allies to withdraw forces from the Muslim world.

Except that thanks to al Qaeda bombings there are now Western troops and military operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, etc.. Pro-Western or Western-allied governments have been voted into power in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Libya gave up its quest for the Islamic bomb and turned Westwards, and so forth and so on. Meanwhile, only Spain pulled out of Iraq.

We should certainly draw down our presence in Iraq, but we can precisely because we've won. We don't have to because we're losing.

MORE (via M Ali Choudhury):
Demystify It: How to defeat suicide terrorism. (Adam Wolfson, 9/16/03, National Review)

One of Pape's most important findings is that suicide terrorism is guided by clearly identifiable strategic goals. It is not a mere act of wanton cruelty, though it is certainly that. Nor is it an act of desperation by the dispossessed. Rather, suicide -attacks are nearly always carefully calibrated to accomplish the political goals of nationalists groups. Of the 188 suicide-terrorist strikes from 1980 to 2001, a whopping 95 percent were undertaken as part of an organized political campaign; that is, only 9 of the 188 attacks were unplanned.

These statistics give us a clearer picture of what we're up against. The vast majority of suicide attacks are not the work of psychos; they are not the random and unpredictable acts of fanatics. We're not in the realm of trying to divine the dark psychology of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Rather, suicide terrorism occurs, as Pape describes, in "clusters." And it is nearly always deployed as part of a larger political-military campaign. The psychology of an individual suicide terrorist might indeed be incomprehensible, but this is not the case of those who recruit, train, and outfit him. A suicide terrorist's handlers are not so eager to die, and there is little reason to believe that deterrence — if forcefully and consistently applied — will not prove effective against them.

Pape uncovers another startling and vitally important pattern: Every suicide attack in the period under study was launched against a democracy. Hezbollah used this weapon to force the United States and France from Lebanon in 1983; Hezbollah and Hamas have used it repeatedly to force concessions from Israel; Tamil terrorists have used it against the Sri Lankan government; the Kurds against Turkey; the Chechen rebels against Russia; the Kashmir rebels against India; and perhaps most infamously, on September 11, al Qaeda launched its suicide -terrorist attacks against America.

This is an extraordinarily important finding. Clearly, the terrorists have reached certain conclusions about our own "regime." They think we are "soft," and they surmise that democracies in particular are vulnerable to nihilistic coercion.

And in this regard, the terrorists are, sadly, not entirely wrong.

-The Logic of Suicide Terrorism: It’s the occupation, not the fundamentalism (Scott McConnell, 7/18/05, American Conservative)

Last month, Scott McConnell caught up with Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, whose book on suicide terrorism, Dying to Win, is beginning to receive wide notice. Pape has found that the most common American perceptions about who the terrorists are and what motivates them are off by a wide margin. In his office is the world’s largest database of information about suicide terrorists, rows and rows of manila folders containing articles and biographical snippets in dozens of languages compiled by Pape and teams of graduate students, a trove of data that has been sorted and analyzed and which underscores the great need for reappraising the Bush administration’s current strategy. Below are excerpts from a conversation with the man who knows more about suicide terrorists than any other American.

The American Conservative: Your new book, Dying to Win, has a subtitle: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Can you just tell us generally on what the book is based, what kind of research went into it, and what your findings were?

Robert Pape: Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004. This research is conducted not only in English but also in native-language sources—Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil, and others—so that we can gather information not only from newspapers but also from products from the terrorist community. 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.

This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.

TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?

RP: 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 territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

-Troop drawdown seen in Iraq (Chicago Sun-Times, July 12, 2005)

The Pentagon is eager to pull some of its 135,000 troops out of Iraq in 2006, partly because the counterinsurgency is stretching forces thin and partly because officials believe the presence of a large U.S. force is generating hostility.

Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment directly on a leaked British assessment that raises the possibility of sharply cutting the overall number of troops by the middle of next year.

He said U.S. officials have said repeatedly that their goal is to begin reductions in 2006 if conditions permit.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 12, 2005 6:19 AM