Suicide Terrorism, Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of Dying to Win

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1 Studies in Conflict & Terrorism ISSN: X (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: Suicide Terrorism, Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of Dying to Win Assaf Moghadam To cite this article: Assaf Moghadam (2006) Suicide Terrorism, Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of Dying to Win, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 29:8, , DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 23 Nov Submit your article to this journal Article views: 9817 View related articles Citing articles: 30 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [ ] Date: 05 February 2017, At: 12:43

2 Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 29: , 2006 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: X print / online DOI: / Suicide Terrorism, Occupation, and the Globalization of Martyrdom: A Critique of Dying to Win ASSAF MOGHADAM John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA This article offers a three-pronged critique of Robert A. Pape s book Dying to Win. The first section of the article highlights problems related to the book s definition of key concepts, its assessment of existing research on suicide terrorism, and its presentation of data. The next section challenges the book s argument that suicide attacks have a high success rate of 54 percent. The alternative analysis offered here arrives at a significantly lower success rate of 24 percent. The last section argues that Pape exaggerates the link between occupation and suicide terrorism, especially with regard to the case of Al Qaeda. In this context, a distinction between traditional (localized) and contemporary (globalized) patterns of suicide attacks is introduced. It is argued that the occupation thesis may help explain the traditional (localized) pattern of suicide attacks, but falls short of illuminating the causes of the contemporary globalization of martyrdom. The growing interest in suicide terrorism in recent years, and particularly since 11 September 2001, has generated a steep rise in the number of books that address a topic that is inherently fascinating a mode of operations that requires the death of its perpetrator to ensure its success. Since 2001, when the first book on suicide terrorism was published, 1 journalists, terrorism experts, and political scientists have examined this phenomenon from a variety of angles, including in-depth interviews with suicide bombers, comparative studies, historical accounts, or a combination of those. 2 Notable in nearly all of these studies was the absence of statistical data a problem that terrorism analysts have long decried. In Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, 3 Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, demonstrates that it is indeed possible to assemble statistical data about terrorist incidents, and that empiricism can help shed new light on the study of the etiology of terrorism, and specifically suicide terrorism. Pape, who also directs the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, offers a series of provocative arguments that address the origins of suicide terrorism. Some of his findings Received 27 December 2005; accepted 27 December The author is indebted to Bruce Hoffman, Sean Lynn-Jones and Monica Duffy Toft for their helpful comments. Address correspondence to Assaf Moghadam, Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. assafm@ hotmail.com 707

3 708 A. Moghadam deviate from the more conventional explanations scholars of this subject have enounced to date. Pape s key conclusion is that religion is rarely the root cause of suicide terrorism, and that the main goal of suicide terrorist attacks is to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland (4). Pape s main findings are supported by three general patterns he finds in an extensive database he compiled and that he describes as the first complete universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide (3). The first pattern is that suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of organized campaigns; second, democratic states are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists; and third, these campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective, namely to establish or maintain political self-determination. Even Al Qaeda, Pape argues, fits this pattern. He adds that the increase in suicide terrorism in recent years is due to the fact that terrorists have learned that the tactic works. In collecting the largest dataset of suicide attacks available at the time of the publication of Dying to Win 4 a total of 315 attacks and in gathering sociological data on the 462 suicide attackers, Pape has done an immense service to students of suicide terrorism. His data also provides some important insights into the context of this modus operandi. Pape shows, for example, that countries that have been plagued by suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2001 are far from being the poorest in the world. Many are middle income societies with life expectancies not significantly lower than those in the United States (18). Poverty remains a poor indicator of suicide terrorism, (19) he notes, thus confirming the findings of several other studies conducted on the correlation between poverty and terrorism in general. 5 Some of the strengths of the book lie in the methodical way in which Pape goes about conducting social scientific inquiry. Pape lays out his hypotheses clearly, then identifies observable implications to test these hypotheses, and finally examines the data against his initial assumptions. Dying to Win, in fact, is a textbook case of how social science methods can be applied to the study of terrorism while remaining accessible to the general readership. DyingtoWinis also strong in many of its case studies, most of which are well written and well researched. The description of suicide terrorist acts conducted by Hizballah ( ), for example, is an enlightening overview in which Pape shows that the majority of suicide attackers in South Lebanon were not Islamic fundamentalists, but rather communists and Christians. Here, as in most other parts of his book, he bases his findings on his dataset, which is included as an appendix to the book. Another excellent case study conducted by Pape is that of the Sikh independence movement, a genuinely understudied topic within the study of suicide terrorism ( ). Yet, despite the availability of this large dataset, which is sure to benefit many current and future students of suicide terrorism, and despite offering a number of illuminating arguments, Dying to Win suffers from a number of shortcomings. The aim of this review article is to highlight some of the main weaknesses of Dying to Win. The review is structured as follows. The first part addresses several problems related to how some key concepts are defined in Dying to Win, as well as related problems concerning Pape s data-collection. It argues that a more rigorous definition of key terms and concepts could have resulted in a radically different interpretation of Pape s key findings. This section will also examine the fairness of Pape s description of the overall state of the study of suicide terrorism. The second part of the article offers a critique of Pape s contention that there has been an increase in the use of suicide attacks mainly because terrorists have learned that the tactic works. It argues that Pape has exaggerated the success of suicide terrorism, and that

4 A Critique of Dying to Win 709 a closer look at past and ongoing campaigns significantly reduces the 50-percent success rate Pape ascribes to this tactic. The third part of the review article examines Pape s insistence that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation. Although a correlation between occupation and suicide attacks indeed exists, Pape exaggerates the link between the two. The case of Al Qaeda in particular does not fit Pape s occupation theory as well as he maintains, partly because he fails to appreciate the importance of religion as a driving force of Al Qaeda. Pape s insistence that occupation is the main cause of suicide terrorism if it was ever the case is increasingly losing its relevance. Pape fails to acknowledge that the pattern of suicide attacks has changed from a predominantly localized to a predominantly globalized one, with important implications as to the causes of this tactic. Pape s book provides some important insights into the traditional form of suicide attacks, but it fails to provide a convincing explanation of what may be termed the globalization of martyrdom. 6 Suicide Terrorism, Suicide Attacks, and the Conventional Wisdom on Suicide Terrorism Research How Conventional is the Conventional Wisdom? At the outset of Dying to Win, Pape cites what he calls the conventional wisdom on suicide terrorism, a phenomenon he believes with little basis in the opinion of this reviewer to be significantly different (9) from non-suicidal terrorism. 7 Pape writes that the small number of studies that explicitly address suicide terrorism tend to focus on the irrationality of the act of suicide from the perspective of the individual attacker (16). This argument was baseless when it first appeared in article format in 2003 in the prestigious American Political Science Review (APSR) that formed the foundation for Dying to Win, 8 and it was flawed in 2005, the year of the book s publication. To support his claim that the few studies on suicide terrorism focus on the irrationality of the act, Pape cites three works of which none, upon closer inspection, solidifies his case. 9 At the same time, he fails to refer to a large and growing body of work on suicide terrorism that explicitly rejects the notion that suicide terrorists are irrational. 10 The first work cited by Pape in support of his argument is Martin Kramer s The Moral Logic of Hizbullah. 11 As Kramer himself, however, pointed out in a response to Pape s APSR article, Kramer argues precisely the opposite of what Pape ascribes to him, namely that suicide attacks are indeed a rational choice of the organization. These attacks, Kramer writes in The Moral Logic of Hizballah, enjoyed such stunning success that leading Shi te clerics were prepared to bend their interpretation of Islamic law to sanction it. 12 The second article Pape cites to support his claim that the conventional wisdom in the study of suicide terrorism focuses on the irrationality of the act is The Readiness to Kill and Die by Ariel Merari, a leading expert on terrorist psychology and a longtime observer of suicide terrorism. 13 In that article, Merari indeed labeled suicide terrorism as an irrational act. However, since that article s first publication in 1990, Merari has fundamentally changed that initial conclusion. In numerous speeches and papers Merari has delivered since, he stressed that suicide terrorism is not an individual, but instead an organizational, phenomenon. Pape does not cite these latter studies. 14 The third and last article cited by Pape with regard to the conventional wisdom is an article by Jerrold Post entitled Terrorist Psycho-Logic. 15 Post, a leading political psychologist, indeed argues in that article that terrorists are driven to violence as a product of psychological forces. The

5 710 A. Moghadam subject of Post s article, however, are terrorists in general, not suicide terrorists, which he does not mention even once. Given that Pape views terrorism as significantly different from suicide terrorism, it is puzzling why he would cite an article on non-suicidal terrorism to support his view of the conventional wisdom of suicide terrorism. Pape s failure to provide evidence that suicide terrorism researchers emphasize the irrationality element of this tactic is not surprising. The reason is that the vast majority of researchers have gone to great lengths to stress that suicide terrorists are not irrational, as an exhaustive summary of research conducted on suicide terrorism by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security researcher has shown. 16 Of the 47 articles cited in that compilation, not a single one refers to suicide terrorism as an outcome of irrational behavior. Pape is thus clearly mistaken that the conventional wisdom on suicide terrorism research focuses on the irrationality of the act. Needless to say, this does not mean that the study of suicide terrorism has reached theoretical and analytical saturation. Neither does it mean that Pape s work is not a serious contribution to the study of suicide terrorism, which it most certainly is. However, in attempting to set his mark in the field, and by placing his own research in the larger context of the study of suicide terrorism, it is unfortunate that Pape has not provided a fairer, more accurate, and more respectful account of the current state of research on suicide terrorism. What Constitutes Suicide Terrorism? One of the terms more commonly used to describe the modus operandi of suicide attacks is suicide terrorism, a label adopted by Pape throughout his book. 17 Pape s choice of the term suicide terrorism, rather than suicide attacks, suicide missions, or suicide operations, has important implications. In fact, several of his conclusions depend on his particular definition of suicide terrorism. Pape does not abide by the most common and most widely accepted definition of suicide terrorism. Had Pape done so, then the important role he ascribes to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and thus to secular suicide terrorist organizations in general would be called into question. Given that Pape describes the LTTE as a secular organization, this, in turn, would have undermined his argument that the role of religion in suicide terrorism is marginal. The reason why Pape s use of the term suicide terrorism is problematic is that terrorism is frequently understood as attacks against noncombatants, 18 whereas many suicide attacks listed in Pape s database are attacks against military targets. He labels the 315 suicide attacks he identified between 1980 and 2003 as suicide terrorist attacks even though many of these attacks have been targeted against uniformed soldiers that were on duty at the time the attacks took place. 19 Bombings, shootings, kidnappings, and other attacks employed against armed and uniformed personnel, however, are generally labeled acts of guerrilla warfare, insurgency, or low-intensity warfare if they are directed against uniformed men and women on duty. One of the arguments Pape uses to support his thesis that there is little correlation between suicide terrorism and religion is that the LTTE a secular group, according to Pape 20 is the organization that has staged most suicide terrorist attacks. Of the 75 suicide attacks carried out by the LTTE identified by Pape, however, half were conducted against military targets. Only 37 attacks listed by Pape are suicide terrorist attacks if one applies the most widely accepted definition of terrorism a number that heavily reduces the relative weight of attacks by LTTE versus other organizations, and thus of secular organizations versus religious organizations.

6 A Critique of Dying to Win 711 Table 1 Number of suicide attacks by LTTE and Palestinian groups by target Campaign Date Military Civilian 4: LTTE vs. Sri Lanka Jul 90 Oct : LTTE vs. Sri Lanka Apr 95 Oct : Hamas vs. Israel April : Hamas/PIJ vs. Israel Oct 94 Aug : Hamas vs. Israel Feb 96 Mar : Hamas vs. Israel Mar 97 Sep : LTTE vs. Sri Lanka Jul 01 Nov : Hamas / PIJ vs. Israel Oct 00 (ongoing) Source: Robert Pape, Dying to Win. Under a strict definition of terrorism as attacks against noncombatant targets, however, Pape s argument no longer holds. If the suicide attacks perpetrated by the LTTE are juxtaposed with those of the Palestinian group Hamas, and these groups attacks are sorted according to military and civilian targets, 21 it becomes clear that Hamas (a predominantly religious organization) is responsible for more suicide terrorist attacks than the LTTE, if terrorism is defined as attacks against civilians. Whereas the LTTE is responsible for 37 suicide attacks against civilians in its three campaigns against Sri Lanka identified by Pape (see Table 1), Hamas has planned and executed 48 suicide attacks against civilians 22 (see Table 2). It is of course not argued here that suicide attacks against military, or combatant, targets are irrelevant, nor that the LTTE is an organization that does not merit a great deal of scholarly attention. On the contrary, and as Pape correctly points out, the LTTE is among the most sophisticated terrorist and insurgent organizations, and the effectiveness of its suicide cadres, the Black Tigers, is second to none. Rather, the point in making the differentiation between military and civilian targets of suicide attacks is to highlight the importance of terminology and definitions applied, particularly when social scientists use large amounts of data to reach important conclusions. Pape could have easily evaded this definitional pitfall by labeling the attacks in his database in more neutral terms like suicide attacks or suicide missions, rather than using the term suicide terrorism. 23 What Constitutes a Suicide Attack? Pape s understanding of what constitutes a suicide attack is another example of how his particular definition of a key concept has a direct bearing on his interpretation of Table 2 Summary of suicide attacks by LTTE and Hamas by target Organizations (all campaigns) Military targets Civilian targets LTTE Hamas 6 48 Source: Robert Pape, Dying to Win.

7 712 A. Moghadam data, and thus on some of his main arguments. The following section will show how a slightly different and arguably more accurate understanding of what constitutes a suicide attack could affect Pape s data, and could thus have altered the conclusions he reaches. Suicide attacks are traditionally defined as attacks whose success is contingent upon the death of the perpetrator. 24 According to Schweitzer, for example, a suicide attack is a politically motivated violent attack perpetrated by a self-aware individual (or individuals) who actively and purposely causes his own death through blowing himself up along with his chosen target. The perpetrator s ensured death is a precondition for the success of his mission. 25 Boaz Ganor adds that the terrorist is fully aware that if he does not kill himself, the planned attack will not be implemented. 26 What this classic definition of suicide attacks suggests and Pape himself adopts this definition in Dying to Win 27 is that a suicide attack should be counted as a single attack if an individual bomber killed him or herself along with the target. By the same token, suicide attacks should be counted as multiple attacks if multiple individuals killed themselves along with their chosen target. Nevertheless, Pape lists as single attacks even those suicide attacks that were perpetrated by multiple individuals or against several targets, if they took place nearly simultaneously. 28 The 16 May 2003 attacks in Casablanca, for instance, were aimed at a total of five targets, including two restaurants, a cemetery, a hotel, and a community center. Rather than to count the Casablanca bombings as five separate attacks, however, Pape lists them as one. He also counts the four separate attacks conducted on 11 September 2001 as a single attack, as he does with the dual bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on 7 August 1998 even though the embassy bombings took place in two separate countries. A better description for multiple, simultaneous attacks occurring at the same place would have been to label them as an incident. 29 For example, labeling the 9/11 attacks as one incident consisting of four separate attacks would have been a more precise labeling of the data. A closer look at the attacks claimed by Al Qaeda, which often uses multiple suicide bombings as its signature modus operandi, shows that the 21 attacks claimed by Al Qaeda according to Pape s database are in fact 21 incidents consisting of 39 separate attacks, as Table 3 summarizes. 30 Here too, the way in which Pape counts his data could potentially impact his interpretation of it. If, for example, religious organizations frequently use multiple suicide bombers as their signature mode of attack which, in fact, is the case with Al Qaeda then the relative weight of Al Qaeda s attacks, as well as those of religious groups more generally, could be downplayed by counting multiple attacks as one attack. This would be particularly grave if terrorist incidents by secular organizations would rarely consist of multiple suicide attacks. This, however, is not the case because the LTTE frequently employs multiple suicide bombers for its incidents as well. 33 To conclude this section, it is important to note that in order to arrive at the most accurate count, and especially for the purposes of cross-data comparison among terrorism researchers, it is important for scholars to be as meticulous in their counts as possible. Pape has certainly done an impressive job in collecting a wealth of data on suicide terrorism in his database, but by grouping several independent attacks (such as the four 9/11 attacks) as single attacks, he does not provide the most accurate picture of the numbers of suicide attacks, and the relative weight between attacks by religious and secular organizations. Future terrorism scholars who will collect data on suicide terrorism datasets that will likely integrate Pape s data would be wise to compartmentalize the data to the largest extent possible in order to provide the most accurate snapshot of suicide attack incidents.

8 A Critique of Dying to Win 713 Table 3 Attacks by Al Qaeda against the United States Date Description of attack Incident 31 Actual attacks 11/13/1995 U.S. Military base, Riyadh 1 1 6/25/1996 U.S. Military base, Dhahran 1 1 8/7/1998 U.S. Embassies Kenya/Tanzania /12/2000 U.S.S. Cole, Yemen /9/2001 Ahmed Shah Massoud, Afghanistan 1 2 9/11/2001 9/11 attacks, United States 1 4 4/11/2001 Synagogue, Djerba, Tunisia 1 1 5/8/2002 Car bomb, Sheraton, Karachi 1 1 6/16/2002 Car bomb, US consulate, Karachi /6/2002 French oil tanker, Yemen /12/2002 Bali nightclub bombing /28/2002 Paradise hotel, Mombasa 1 3 5/12/2003 Car bombs, Riyadh 1 4 5/16/2003 Casablanca bombings 1 5 6/7/2003 German military bus, Kabul 1 1 8/5/2003 Car bomb, Jakarta /8/2003 Car bomb, Riyadh /15/2003 Synagogue bombings, Istanbul /20/2003 Istanbul bombings /25/2003 PM Musharraf, Rawalpindi /28/2003 Car bomb, Kabul Airport 1 1 Total number of attacks Source: MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base. The Strategic Illogic of Suicide Terrorism Of all the arguments put forward in Dying to Win, Pape s insistence that the main reason that suicide terrorism is growing is that terrorists have learned that it works (61) is the most problematic. This part calls into question Pape s notion that suicide terrorism works. By including ongoing campaigns left out in Pape s count, and by challenging Pape s assessment of three particular cases of suicide terrorist campaigns, I will argue that Pape s claim of a 54-percent success rate of suicide terrorism is exaggerated. By providing an extensive contextual description and alternative explanation, this part of the critique will argue that suicide terrorism has been successful in only 24-percent of the cases. Contrary to Pape s contention, suicide attacks more often have resulted in failure than in success. To begin with, of the 18 suicide terrorist campaigns since 1981 identified by Pape, he analyzes the success or failure of only those 13 campaigns that he describes as completed by December Pape omits from his examination of success or failure five suicide terrorist campaigns that he describes as ongoing at the time of the book s writing. 34 Yet, it seems particularly arbitrary on Pape s part to exclude ongoing campaigns, especially given that their duration is, on average, three times longer than that of completed campaigns. 35 In measuring the success (or failure) of suicide terrorist campaigns, it would appear to be fair to include at least those ongoing campaigns in the count that, on average, have lasted longer

9 714 A. Moghadam than the average duration of completed campaigns, which is how this section proceeds. 36 Based on this count, conclusions on the success or failure can be reached about 17 of the 18 campaigns identified by Pape, rather than only about the 13 completed campaigns. Of these 17 campaigns, Pape maintains that seven correlate with significant policy changes by the target state toward the terrorists major political goal (64). As noted earlier, the outcome of 5 campaigns (corresponding to 29 percent of the 17 campaigns) was still to be determined, 37 and their success or failure thus unclear. There was, according to Pape, no change at all in 6 campaigns (35 percent). 38 Pape claims that suicide terrorism has led to a successful outcome in seven cases, 39 but admits that of those seven, three concessions, or arguable concessions, are less clear-cut (65). In fact, not only are those arguable concessions less clear-cut, but calling them a success requires a considerable stretch of the imagination. In the first of the three cases of arguable concessions the release of Hamas spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin 40 Pape makes the rather unconvincing case that it was Hamas s suicide terrorist campaign against Israel from March to September 1997 that led to the release of the wheelchair-bound Yassin. In fact, the Hamas leader s release had little, if anything, to do with suicide terrorism, a possibility that Pape himself acknowledges elsewhere (66). Instead, it was the direct result of the diplomatic embarrassment suffered by the Netanyahu government in the aftermath of Israel s failed attempt on 25 September 1997, to assassinate Khaled Meshal, an exiled leader of Hamas in Jordan. Meshal was attacked by Mossad agents, who failed to kill their target with a lethal injection, and were subsequently captured by Jordanian security officials. Following the botched assassination attempt, an enraged King Hussein of Jordan said that the captured foreign agents would be put on trial unless Israel released Sheikh Yassin along with dozens of Hamas prisoners. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially resisted the Jordanian demand, but the United States pressed for a quick end to the crisis, persuading the Israeli prime minister to release Yassin along with dozens of jailed Hamas militants. 41 Pape s suggestion that Israel released Sheikh Yassin due to the coercive pressure (63) of Palestinan suicide terrorism is entirely unrealistic for at least two reasons. First, as the New York Times reported on 23 September 1997 two days before the assassination attempt Jordan relayed an offer to Israel indicating the Arab monarchy s willingness to mediate between Israel and Hamas to achieve a moratorium on suicide attacks. 42 Had Israel really wanted to put an end to suicide terrorism at all costs including, as Pape s argument suggests, by appeasing Hamas via the release of its leader then Israel would have been expected to at least consider the Jordanian king s offer to mediate such an outcome. Israel, however, rejected the Jordanian offer. Second, and more importantly, it has been Israel s long-standing policy not to acquiesce to terrorist demands. 43 On the contrary, Israel has demonstrated on countless occasions that it is willing to respond forcefully to the use of terror, and one would certainly expect this policy to be upheld by an Israeli prime minister who himself authored a book recommending that Western countries adopt strict non-concessionary strategies in their fight against terror. 44 Furthermore, there is an ironic twist in Pape s claim because the very incident that led to the release of Yassin, namely the attempted elimination of Khaled Meshal, was the very result of Israel s relentless policy of pursuing terrorists wherever they are precisely the opposite of Pape s claim that Israel acquiesced to Hamas s coercive pressure. The reason Israel attempted to eliminate Meshal was his apparent authorization of a terrorist attack in Jerusalem on 30 July Two other suicide terrorist campaigns that Pape labels successful are not only arguable, as he admits, but rather far-fetched (see Campaigns 6 and 7 in Table 4). Pape

10 A Critique of Dying to Win 715 Table 4 Success and failure of the 17 suicide terrorism campaigns Campaign Date Outcome (Pape) Actual outcome 1: Hezbollah vs. U.S., France Apr 83 Sep 84 Success Success 2: Hezbollah vs. Israel Nov 82 Jun 85 Success Success 3: Hezbollah vs. Israel, SLA Jul 85 Nov 86 No change No Change 4: LTTE vs. Sri Lanka Jul 90 Oct 94 Success Success 5: LTTE vs. Sri Lanka Apr 95 Oct 00 No change No Change 6: Hamas vs. Israel April 1994 Success No Change 7: Hamas/PIJ vs. Israel Oct 94 Aug 95 Success No Change 8: BKI vs. India August 1995 No change No Change 9: Hamas vs. Israel Feb 96 Mar 96 No change No Change 10: Hamas vs. Israel Mar 97 Sep 97 Success No Change 11: PKK vs. Turkey Jun 96 Oct 96 No Change No Change 12: PKK vs. Turkey Nov 98 Aug 99 No Change No Change 13: LTTE vs. Sri Lanka Jul 01 Nov 01 Success Success 14: Al Qaeda vs. U.S. Nov 95 Ongoing N/A No Change 15: Chechen Separatists vs. Russia Jun 00 Ongoing N/A No Change 16: Kashmir Separatists vs. India Dec 00 Ongoing N/A No Change 17: Hamas / PIJ vs. Israel Oct 00 Ongoing N/A No Change Total Success Rate 54% 24% claims, for example, that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in May 1994 was accelerated by suicide terrorism campaigns. He writes that there is...a circumstantial case that the attacks [of 6 April and 13 April 1994] coerced the Israelis into being more forthcoming in the withdrawal negotiations (68). Pape s case is weak due to several factors. First, as he himself admits, Israel s partial withdrawals from the Gaza Strip in May 1994 was previously agreed on within the framework of the Oslo Accords. Second, in the week following the withdrawal from Gaza, Israel arrested 400 Hamas militants 46 a step that was sure to provoke Hamas into carrying out more bombings, and was hence unlikely to be taken by a government that attempted to appease Hamas. Third, and most importantly perhaps, Hamas has not traditionally aimed to accelerate Israeli concessions, but instead has attempted to spoil the peace process. 47 It is neither likely that Hamas was interested in an accelerated Israeli withdrawal, nor that it put a moratorium on suicide bombings following the withdrawal from Gaza as a gesture of goodwill. On the contrary, Hamas leaders Abdul Aziz al-rantisi and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin have repeatedly stated their opposition to the Oslo Accords. 48 Out of the seven successes of suicide terrorist campaigns, hence, only four cases may be clear successes the clearest success of them being, as Pape correctly notes, the withdrawal of American and French troops from Lebanon following the 1983 suicide attacks on their military forces. The actual success rate of suicide terrorist campaigns is therefore much lower than the remarkable (65) 54-percent success rate Pape provides. As Table 4 summarizes, only 4 campaigns out of the 17 (past and ongoing) can be said to be successful a much less remarkable success rate of 24 percent. Even if the 1994 and 1995 Israeli withdrawals

11 716 A. Moghadam from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are included successes that are far-fetched at best there is only a success rate of 35 percent, if ongoing campaigns are included, and 46 percent if only past campaigns are counted. In the four suicide terrorist campaigns that can be reasonably deemed successful, the number of actual suicide attacks perpetrated was 37, or 12 percent out of all suicide attacks included in Pape s universe of suicide terrorist attacks. This 12 percent actual success rate of suicide attacks perpetrated between 1980 and 2003 paints a different picture than that drawn by Pape when it comes to the success of suicide attacks. Suicide Terrorism and Occupation Pape s bottom line, as he writes, is that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation (23), which he defines as one in which a foreign power has the ability to control the local government independent of the wishes of the local community (46). Looking at suicide attacks between 1980 and 2003, Pape makes a strong case backed by his impressive collection of data that most such suicide attacks were used as part of campaigns against states that are occupying parts of the territory associated with the terrorist or insurgent organization. His argument seems particularly valid in the cases of the Israeli Lebanese and Israeli Palestinian conflicts, although his emphasis on foreign occupation is more problematic in the cases of Sri Lanka and Chechnya. It is at least debatable whether the Sri Lankan and Russian governments unwelcome as their presence may be in the Tamil and Chechen heartlands can be called foreign occupiers. 49 Pape also shows that the number of suicide attacks in a given campaign is not closely correlated to severity of occupation. His findings are summarized in an interesting table (59) that shows that suicide terrorism is not necessarily most salient where occupation results in the highest number of deaths among the occupied population. In the West Bank and Gaza, for instance, there are 121 suicide terrorists per every 1,000 deaths of Palestinians. In Sri Lanka, there are 10 suicide terrorists per every 1,000 deaths. Pape s plausible conclusion is that severity of occupation alone does not account for the genesis of suicide terrorism, and other factors must be taken into consideration. Occupation versus Religion: The Case of Al Qaeda Although Pape deserves credit for providing some evidence of a correlation between occupation and suicide terrorism he is the first researcher to formalize this argument his attempt to fit the case of Al Qaeda into his occupation thesis is far less convincing. By adopting a narrow and parsimonious view of Al Qaeda as an entity engaged primarily in a struggle to end foreign occupation, Pape fails to take account of the fundamentally religious long-term mission of the group to wage a cosmic struggle against an unholy alliance of Christians and Jews, which prevents the entity from establishing an Islamic caliphate over as large a territory as possible. In Dying to Win, Pape argues that every suicide campaign between 1980 and 2003 had as a major objective the coercion of a foreign government to take its forces out of what the terrorist organization regards as its homeland. Even al-qaeda fits this pattern (4), Pape claims, because one of Al Qaeda s major goals is the expulsion of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia. The problem with this argument is that hardly any U.S. forces are left in Saudi Arabia. According to the authoritative Jane s Information Group, out of the bases the United States has closed, the most high profile move has been the closure of bases in Saudi Arabia, with operations moving to a variety of bases in the region including Qatar,

12 A Critique of Dying to Win 717 Bahrain and the UAE, as well as Iraq. 50 Similarly, Stephen Walt observed that the United States has removed most of its forces from Saudi Arabia, thereby acceding to one of bin Laden s original demands. 51 Even Pape himself notes that the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia is no more, and as a result his argument appears contradictory: Although Saudi Arabia is not under military occupation, at least from the perspective of the United States, he writes, and although the terrorists have political objectives against the Saudi regime and others, one major objective of al-qaeda is the expulsion of U.S. troops from the country (42). One cannot help but wonder exactly which troops Al Qaeda wants to expel from the desert kingdom. Pape acknowledges that Al Qaeda s goals are not only local (to rid the Arabian peninsula of U.S. forces), but also transnational. The targets that bin Laden s terror network has chosen suggest that al-qaeda s principal motive is to end foreign military occupation of the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim regions, he writes (51). His main thesis that suicide terrorism is primarily a response to foreign occupation, however, leads him to argue that Al Qaeda s principal focus is on the Arabian peninsula. Yet, the evidence he musters to make this case leaves much to be desired. He emphasizes, for instance, that Al Qaeda has never attacked Israel and has rarely attacked Jewish targets elsewhere (47). This, however, is hardly the case. On 28 November 2002, Al Qaeda staged a suicide car bombing against the Israeli-owned Paradise hotel and attempted to down an Israeli charter airliner in Mombasa, Kenya. As a matter of fact, using Pape s own numbers, 4 out of the 21 attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda as part of its campaign against the United States have been directed at Jewish or Israeli targets 52 no less than 19 percent of all of Al Qaeda s suicide attacks listed by Pape. 53 Additional signs that the struggle against Israel is part and parcel of Al Qaeda s long-term project are abundant. Osama bin Laden himself said in an interview in 1998 that the enmity between us and the Jews goes far back in time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between the two of us is inevitable. 54 That a grand battle with Israel is high on Al Qaeda s future agenda has most recently been confirmed by Al Qaeda s No. 2, Ayman al-zawahiri who, in a letter to Abu Musab al-zarqawi Al Qaeda s viceregent in Iraq described a future clash with Israel as a long-term goal of the movement. 55 Zawahiri s letter, which is dated 9 July 2005, and was intercepted by American forces in Iraq, raises question marks over Pape s insistence first expressed in his article in APSR published in that religion, and specifically the Salafi-Jihadist ideology associated with Al Qaeda, plays a relatively minor role in explaining suicide terrorism, including suicide attacks claimed by Al Qaeda. In Dying to Win, Pape writes that Al-Qaeda is less a transnational network of like-minded ideologues brought together from across the globe via the Internet than a cross-national military alliance of national liberation movements working together against what they see as a common imperial threat (104). He adds that [f]or al-qaeda, religion matters, but mainly in the context of national resistance to foreign occupation (104). Al Qaeda s mission, in other words, is political more than it is religious. Is Pape s argument supported by evidence? A closer reading of statements issued by Al Qaeda leaders suggests that the answer is no. Their remarks point instead at the centrality religion plays in Al Qaeda s ideology and mission. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are engaged in a defensive jihad against the Crusader Zionist alliance because they believe that the United States has made a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims, to quote bin Laden. 57 In a statement aired on the satellite television channel Al Jazeera in November 2001, bin Laden stated that this war is fundamentally religious....under no circumstances should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For, the enmity is based on creed. 58 In another message dated October 2002, bin Laden went as far as urging Americans to convert to Islam: A message to the American people: Peace be upon

13 718 A. Moghadam those who follow the right path....i urge you to become Muslims, for Islam calls for the principle of there is no God but Allah. 59 Al Qaeda s desire to end foreign occupation is only the first step in the grand vision that unites all adherents of Salafi-Jihadism, namely to reverse the decadence of Islam and recapture the grandeur of the religion s past. According to Salafism, restoring Islam s golden age hinges on Muslims return to the ancient religious faith and practices of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. 60 Pape is correct in pointing out that foreign occupation is a key grievance reiterated by Al Qaeda s leaders on numerous occasions, but fails to differentiate between actual and perceived occupation. For Al Qaeda, occupation by the Zionist Crusader alliance is not merely a function of the presence of military troops, although it is an important element. Occupation, in Al Qaeda s vocabulary, is a much more loosely defined concept it is a laundry list of historically accrued injustices currently manifested in the military, religious, political, economic, and cultural influence that the West is perceived to exert on the larger Muslim world, thereby humiliating it. In terms of its larger goals, for Al Qaeda, ridding all Muslim lands of the humiliating presence of the Crusader Zionist alliance is only a first step on the way towards creating a Caliphate the traditional form of government in Islam in which the Caliph, the successor of the Prophet Muhammad, holds spiritual and temporal authority over all Muslims. The boundaries of that Caliphate extend well beyond the Arabian peninsula and the core Middle Eastern states to all lands that have been under Muslim control at one point in time. Most recently, Ayman al-zawahiri indicated in his July 2005 letter that the borders of the future Caliphate should be extended as far as possible, in the manner of the Prophet. Describing Al Qaeda s long-term goal, he writes that the movement intends to [e]stablish an Islamic authority or amirate, then develop it and support it until it achieves the level of a caliphate over as much territory as you can Bin Laden, too, has provided ample evidence for Al Qaeda s transnational, religious aspirations. For instance, he expressed his full support of jihadist movements even outside the Middle East. Asked by an interviewer whether he would like to convey a message to jihadist groups in Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, and the Horn of Africa, bin Laden answered, [t]ell the Muslims everywhere that the vanguards of the warriors who are fighting the enemies of Islam belong to them and the young fighters are their sons. Tell them that the nation is bent on fighting the enemies of Islam. 62 There is no indication in these statements that the jihad and suicide attacks as one of its main tools would come to an end in the absence of real or perceived occupation. On the contrary, all signs indicate that Al Qaeda views the struggle as a protracted, third world war of cosmic proportions. The war, in bin Laden s own words, consists of two adversaries; the Islamic nation, on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. It is either victory and glory or misery and humiliation. 63 This description by bin Laden is a long shot from Pape s assertion that the ambitions of terrorist leaders are realistic (43). Pape it must be concluded, strips Al Qaeda s goal of ending foreign occupation of much of its religious significance. To regard Al Qaeda s mission as mostly a political project, however, is to fundamentally misunderstand the raison d être of the global jihad movement. Dying to Win also fails to explain why most suicide attacks are perpetrated by religious organizations, whereas attacks by secular organizations have declined in recent years. Pape correctly notes that modern suicide terrorism is not limited to Islamic fundamentalism (16), but he fails to acknowledge that nevertheless, most suicide attacks are perpetrated by radical Islamist groups. Citing data from the RAND Terrorism Incident Database, Bruce Hoffman notes that 78 percent of all suicide attacks since 1968 have occurred since the 9/11

14 A Critique of Dying to Win 719 attacks. Of these, 81 percent have been executed by Islamic groups. Moreover, 31 of the 35 groups that have employed suicide operations are Islamic. 64 Both facts remain completely unexplained in Pape s book. Attacks by the LTTE, meanwhile, have decreased drastically. Since the 9/11 attacks, the Tamil Tigers have perpetrated merely four suicide attacks. However relevant the LTTE has been in the pre 11 September era, therefore, the group s significance in the post-9/11 era pales in comparison to Islamic groups. 65 Overall, Pape calculates, Islamic fundamentalism is associated with about half of the suicide terrorist attacks that have occurred from 1980 to 2003 (17). Not included in Pape s count, however, is the high tally of the suicide attacks that have occurred in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March If one were to add that number to Pape s, the picture of non-islamic versus Islamic suicide attacks would look radically different. According to U.S. defense officials cited by the Washington Post, roughly 500 suicide attacks have been perpetrated in Iraq between March 2003 and July The majority of those attacks have been perpetrated by religious groups, especially foreign jihadis associated most often with Abu Musab al-zarqawi s jihadist organization known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, 67 but also with other jihadi organizations such as Ansar al-islam and Ansar al-sunnah. Finally, Pape s contention that radical Islamism is less responsible in producing suicide bombers than commonly assumed is also flawed from the point of view of Pape s research design. In order to test whether Salafi-influenced individuals flock to Al Qaeda for religious or political reasons he looks at whether Al Qaeda suicide bombers stem from Muslim countries with large Salafi-influenced populations (108). There are three major problems with this particularly poor choice of an observable implication in support of an hypothesis: First, any attempt to measure the Salafi-influenced percentage of a population is bound to be riddled with problems, especially in a region notorious for the unreliability of its statistics. Second, Pape s research design ignores jihadis that may stem from countries that are not largely Salafi-influenced including countries in Western Europe who may then move to a country Pape labels largely Salafi-influenced. Third, and by far most important, Pape s approach does not account for remote indoctrination via the Internet, which crystallizes increasingly as the predominant way in which young Muslims can and do join the new, globalized form of jihad, as discussed below. The Globalization of Martyrdom and the Limits of the Occupation Thesis Pape s thesis that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation cannot be rejected out of hand. On the contrary, in many cases of suicide terrorism from Hamas to the PKK, and from the LTTE to Hizballah occupation seems to play at least a partial role, and Pape is to be commended for stressing the correlation between occupation and suicide terrorism. Occupation, however, hardly explains suicide terrorism by itself, 68 and neither does its role seem to be dominant. More importantly, occupation does not provide a satisfying explanation in an increasing number of cases of suicide terrorist attacks. The principal problem with Dying to Win, therefore, is not that the explanation it provides is wrong, but rather that its explanatory power is weakening as a new pattern of suicide attacks has emerged. The reason for the dwindling ability of occupation to account for suicide terrorism is threefold. First, suicide attacks increasingly occur where there is no discernible occupation. Bangladesh, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan are some of the countries that suffered such attacks in recent years that are not occupied by foreign armies. Second, in those countries where there is an occupation, the attacks are not always

15 720 A. Moghadam directed at the occupiers themselves who, one would think, would be the most obvious target. Many suicide bombings in occupied Iraq, for example, have not been targeted at the occupiers that is, the coalition forces but instead at Shias, Kurds, and Sufis, in an apparent effort to stir ethnic tensions in Iraq. Iraqi suicide bombers have also been exported to target other countries not directly involved in the occupation of Iraq, as has happened in the attacks on three hotels in Amman, Jordan, on 9 November 2005, which were perpetrated by Iraqis. Third, many suicide attacks, even if they do target the occupation forces, are not carried out by those individuals who, theoretically, should be most affected by the occupation. In Iraq, most attacks that do target occupation forces are carried out not by Iraqis, but instead by Saudi Arabian, Syrian, Kuwaiti, North African, and other foreign jihadists. 69 Similarly, the suicide attacks conducted against the United States homeland on September , may be explained as a response to occupation, as Pape would surely do, but the perpetrators were from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates rather than from countries under physical U.S. occupation. Dying to Win s obvious limitations are due to the fact that in recent years, the traditional pattern of suicide attacks that of a tactic used predominantly in the context of a localized conflict has been joined by a new pattern of suicide attacks that are used in the context of a global struggle. DyingtoWinsheds little light on this new pattern of suicide attacks, which may be termed the globalization of martyrdom 70 the internationalization of suicide attacks that best characterizes the current state of affairs, and that is challenging the traditional, localized pattern of suicide attacks as the most dangerous contemporary manifestation of suicide bombings. This fundamental distinction between localized and globalized suicide attacks must be elaborated on. Since 1981, when the modern phenomenon of suicide bombings began, the overwhelming majority of suicide attacks have occurred in relatively localized settings. Suicide bombings in this context are planned and executed by sub-national terrorist or insurgent actors such as Hizballah, the LTTE, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), or the PKK. These localized suicide operations are geographically concentrated in the region where a readily identifiable political, ethnic, and/or religious conflict is raging Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Israel and the Occupied Territories, and Turkey, respectively. In these instances, suicide bombings are a tactic used by one or several subnational organizations against another actor (generally a state) in order to advance limited and well-defined political goals for the community that the terrorist or insurgent organization purports to represent. Such political goals may include those described in Dying to Win, namely an end to foreign occupation or military presence, increased regional autonomy, and self-determination, but are likely more complex. 71 These localized occurrences of suicide bombings tend to have the following additional characteristics: First, the terrorist or insurgent organizations have their strongest presence in the conflict area proper. Unlike Al Qaeda, which is truly a transnational movement, traditional groups employing suicide terrorism operate within a clearly identified zone of conflict, whether it is Hamas or PIJ in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; the LTTE in Sri Lanka; or the PKK in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. Second, organizations in those localized suicide bombing campaigns recruit and train suicide bombers mostly in the conflict area proper, and rarely abroad. Unlike modern suicide bombers, who oftentimes migrate to blow themselves up in a country that is not their home, traditional suicide bombers are largely residents of the area of conflict. Over 99 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers, for example, are from the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper. 72 Third, organizations such as Hamas, LTTE, PKK, or Hizballah have traditionally targeted people and assets of the enemy state in the conflict area proper, or in close proximity thereof, while by and large refraining from targeting assets of their enemies