Killer instincts

What inspires young men and women to become suicide bombers? Religious fanaticism? Nationalism? Alienation? Or some toxic mix of all three?

By Laura Miller

Jul 26, 2005 | The announcement that four British citizens set off the July 7 explosions that killed 52 people on London's transport system sent a shiver down the collective spine of the Western world. It was followed by another, when we learned that the attacks were suicide missions. Those two tremors were distant relatives of the earlier one, after Sept. 11, when it was revealed that the 19 hijackers had spent quite some time living in the U.S. before the attacks, shopping at Wal-Mart and eating takeout pizzas.

Back then, some of us clung to the belief that America's consumer culture was so darn seductive that no one exposed to it for any duration could resist, especially if the alternative was not only puritanical but literally life-denying. Later, we blamed the oppression, hopelessness and political frustration in the terrorists' homelands for their willingness to sacrifice themselves for their cause. But the bombers who blew up three tube trains and one bus in London on July 7 were not only the first suicide bombers to strike London, they were the first Western-born suicide bombers ever. The deadliest terrorist tactic has spread to the West, and now the ideology that champions it has infected the West's citizens, too.

Historians, journalists and social scientists have been trying to explain suicide bombings for years, and the job just got a lot harder. The latest expert to make the media rounds is Robert A. Pape, author of "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," and he's been in great demand -- despite the fact that the London attacks could have been custom-made to invalidate his argument.

The constant refrain of "Dying to Win" blames "the root cause of suicide terrorism" on "foreign occupation and the threat that foreign military presence poses to the local community's way of life." As someone who agrees with Pape that stationing American troops in Muslim countries is a really bad idea, even I can see some pretty big holes in this theory. The book's success among vigorous critics of the Bush administration's occupation of Iraq isn't surprising, but its flaws make it a wobbly prop for their arguments.

Pape is keen to advance the idea that "suicide campaigns are primarily nationalistic, not religious, nor are they particularly Islamic." To demonstrate this, he presents many charts and diagrams, produced by collecting and manipulating the demographic information pertaining to the 315 suicide terrorist attacks carried out worldwide between 1980 and 2003. The numbers, and the crunching of them, look impressive, but the statistical sample is far too small to merit the kind of certainty Pape indulges in. When you're trying to milk significance out of ratios like two suicide attackers per 2 million in population (in the case of citizens of the United Arab Emirates), you're using the wrong tools.

It's obvious even before you look at Pape's figures that nationalist struggles are a major -- probably the major -- cause of suicide terrorism campaigns around the world. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, as he points out, are responsible for more suicide attacks than any other group, and they are largely secular. The Palestinians' call for the return of their homeland primarily tapped into nationalist yearnings when the movement began -- it was only later that religious ones became more compelling.

But those conflicts, and the pieces of land they are fought over, seem far away to most Americans. It is the suicide attacks of al-Qaida and al-Qaida-related groups that most scare and baffle us and about which we have the most questions. And in their case, Pape's formula is an awkward fit. Although he tries mightily to squeeze al-Qaida into the Procrustean bed of his theory about nationalism being the real cause of all suicide terrorism, he has to bend and stretch the truth to do it.

Here's an example: Pape would have us believe that al-Qaida is primarily an organization trying to end the "occupation" of Saudi Arabia by U.S. troops. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether the U.S. can really be said to be occupying that nation, he supports this belief about al-Qaida's motivations by pointing out that the majority of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis. Because that single day accounts for nearly half of all the suicide attackers used by al-Qaida, Saudis also make up the majority of the total number of "martyrs" the group has deployed. These figures, Pape maintains, support his claim that al-Qaida fits his formula; it's at heart a movement of Saudis trying to get U.S. troops out of their country.

Terry McDermott's "Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It," an impressive work of reporting originating in a series of articles for the Los Angeles Times, offers an interesting corrective to this interpretation. "At least half a dozen men selected for the mission never made it into the United States," McDermott writes of the Sept. 11 conspiracy. Several would-be hijackers couldn't get visas because they were suspected of being economically motivated immigrants, a particular problem for those from Yemen. Yemen, a backward, political mess of a country in which the U.S. has little oil interest and no troops, has a history of contributing many enthusiastic jihadists to the cause. McDermott notes that Osama bin Laden, whose father was born there, has "demonstrated a tendency to use Yemenis in his plots."

Next Page: A "typical path" to al-Qaida membership

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