04/21/16 – Robert Pape – The Scott Horton Show

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Now introducing Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
And he's the author of quite a few books.
Bombing to Win.
I still want to read that one.
But for our purposes, most importantly, Dying to Win.
The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
And Cutting the Fuse.
The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism.
And How to Stop It.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, of course.
And you should know I'm writing a book and you're in it, obviously.
Nice to hear.
And so I got in a Twitter fight with a guy named Max Abrams, who I know you know well.
And I really like this guy because even though he's really bad on some things, he's really good on Syria.
So I'm always interested in following him.
And even though we disagree on a lot, I respect his point of view on at least a few things.
Anyway, so it was interesting to me.
I got in a little tangle with him about the causes of terrorism, as far as Twitter conversation can go.
But then he sent me a direct message with his phone number and said, you know what?
I'm a good friend of Bob Pape.
I know Bob Pape.
And my work is largely a response to Bob Pape's work.
And so if you call me, I'll tell you 10 things wrong with it.
And so what's funny is I did call him and we had a short conversation there.
And I think actually, you know, I give him credit for a few.
I mean, most of his arguments, I thought, were pretty easy to dismiss.
But I thought, maybe you did have some good points.
And maybe it would be best if I were to have you on to defend your position more than just explain it like I usually have in the past, although we have done one good debate in the past.
But so I guess his first main argument, Bob, was that suicide terrorism doesn't work.
You say it works.
And that's why they use it, that they attack democracies, especially suicide terrorists, because democracies are more likely to bend to the will of the people who say, quit doing whatever you're doing.
That's getting a suicide bombed.
And yet that doesn't really seem to be the reaction.
What happens is when they do suicide attacks is people get really pissed off and they double down or triple down on whatever was, you know, making the people upset in the first place.
And so that must not be it, because it just doesn't seem to work.
If you look at, say, for example, the September 11th attack.
So there is absolutely no doubt that suicide terrorism doesn't work all the time.
There is absolutely no doubt that groups are recognized, the risk of backlash.
However, suicide terrorism works something like 25% of the time.
It's a little hard to put a firm number on it.
And we have numerous prominent cases where that's so.
So in the case of one of the first major suicide attacks, which was the October 1983, Hezbollah suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Marines in Beirut killed 241 U.S. Marines with the death of just one suicide attacker.
That was 10% of our force that was taken out with the death of one attacker.
But that tactical success was overwhelmed by the political success that Hezbollah had.
Four months after that suicide attack, Ronald Reagan, no pacifist, pulled out all American combat forces from Lebanon rather than face the risk of another suicide attack.
This was such an important decision for him, he wrote a chapter on this decision in his memoirs.
So this is not just a casual conclusion on my part.
In detail, Reagan explained in his memoirs that our purpose in going to Lebanon was a humanitarian purpose, a stability purpose, and it just wasn't worth the risk of another suicide attack.
Well, that major concession on the part of the United States was a lesson that numerous suicide attack organizations later learned.
Hamas leaders followed this very carefully later when they were studying other operations.
The Tamil Tigers picked up on this.
And then what you see in the 1990s are numerous instances of Hamas suicide attacks in Tel Aviv in order to compel Israel to abide by terms of the Oslo Peace Accords that it was evading at the time.
So there were agreements by Israel, for instance, to withdraw from Gaza in 1994.
And then they found reasons on their own, without any agreement by the Palestinian Authority, not to follow through.
Hamas then started to launch suicide attacks in Tel Aviv.
And then shortly thereafter, Israel changed its mind and withdrew from Gaza.
That happened again with a portion of the West Bank.
I'm sorry to interrupt, Bob, but you said 90s, but I believe you meant to say 2004 or something like that.
No, it happened again in 2004.
No, there was an original withdrawal.
There was another.
Yep.
Scott, there are so many concessions that suicide terrorism has produced.
I guess I just wasn't aware of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the 90s.
Then they went back again.
Then they went back again.
OK, so what's happening with these events, these territorial concessions, is that they last for a few years, often three, four years.
But then they can be reversed, in which case, then you get more suicide terrorism to try to reverse them yet again.
Yeah.
Well, and there's the real obvious example of our more or less recent history, I think, would be the Spain attacks, which caused them to withdraw very quickly from the war in Iraq.
Yeah.
So the Spain attacks in March 2004, the Spanish government had troops in Iraq and Al Qaeda did a series of attacks, killing 200 people in Madrid.
And that was just two days before, several days before elections in Spain.
Those attacks flipped the elections.
The party that was going to lose won as a result of those attacks.
And that new government withdrew all the combat forces of Spain out of Iraq.
So basically, Scott, what I'm doing is I'm giving you some chapter and verse examples, point by point by point.
These are historical facts.
They are concessions.
And so it is not the case that suicide terrorism produces concessions in every single time.
Sometimes it does produce blowback and backlash.
That's absolutely the case.
But for these weak groups that have no other way to get a concession from these major states, 25% success, that's pretty big.
They've got no better way to get this success.
So the reason suicide terrorism pays is not because it's the best success rate on the planet compared to using an army or using a major air force.
It's just quite a successful tactic for groups that don't have an army and don't have an air force.
Well, listen, I think possibly if you were to say this, people would say, well, you're just being too cute by half and and trying to, you know, broaden your definitions or something like that.
But I think it's fair to point out that we're Bin Laden.
And, you know, I talked about this with Michael Shoyer from the CIA's Bin Laden unit.
This isn't crunching numbers, social science.
This is more direct experience in dealing with it.
That it's true that Bin Laden himself had cited Beirut and had cited America turn and tail to leave from Somalia and said maybe it'll be easy to get them to turn around and run.
On the other hand, he also said time and again, over and over and over again, like he was quoting Rambo three, that his goal was to give us our own Vietnam again, basically, as Bamford puts it, with Bin Laden in the role of Ho Chi Minh, give us another Vietnam just as we had helped them to do to the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
In other words, provoke an overreaction and then bleed them to bankruptcy.
Anand Gopal actually even has a letter that Bin Laden had written to the Taliban after America invaded in 2001 saying, geez, guys, I'm sorry that the response was this bad.
I didn't think they'd bomb us this hard.
But trust me, just wait in 10 years when the empire's bankrupt and they go home with their tail between their legs, then it'll all have been worth it.
His son told Rolling Stone magazine that that was the plan all along.
So it would make sense to me.
And Shoyer says, yes, it is.
It's one and the other.
Geez, we would prefer it if you would say, wow, that really hurts.
I guess that's how you feel when we bomb you, huh?
Maybe we should stop.
But on the other hand, if you want to double down, then we welcome that, too.
But Scott, you're exactly right.
The doubling down often where the response is we respond with a ground force presence often helps the terrorist groups to recruit still more.
This frustrates democracies, which is why then democracies after doubling down often then pull back.
So we have we've seen this pattern or this movie over and over again where the attack sometimes provokes a backlash where the target state doubled down only to discover that that doubling down by sending in the ground army in the in the medium and long term just produces more terrorists than it kills.
And then that is what terrorist groups are also taking advantage of.
But I'd like to say just one thing, because you haven't had a chance to read some of I realize why, of course, you focus so much on my work on terrorism.
But let me just say a word about standards of evidence.
So my work before terrorism was all about coercion.
That is for getting an actor to produce concessions.
That book Bombing to Win is all about whether air power can produce concessions on the part of a target state and under what condition.
I also produced a number of numerous articles on economic sanctions.
I'm one of our key people on economic sanctions, which is all about whether they produce concessions.
So the standards that I'm using to judge whether or not suicide terrorism is coercively effective are not just kind of picked out of thin air somehow.
They're exactly the same standards I use in work on bombing, work on air power, work on economic sanctions, which you should know have stood the test of peer review numerous, numerous times.
In part, that's why I'm at the University of Chicago.
And so this is these standards.
I just I'm just a scholar.
I apply the same standards.
In fact, I was shocked myself when I made these discoveries about just how coercively effective suicide terrorism was.
It's not as effective as an economic thing.
It's not.
I mean, it's not.
I don't want to tell you it's as effective, but it is more effective than the conventional wisdom would have you believe.
All right now, and do you differentiate between suicide attacks on soldiers versus suicide terrorism against civilians?
No, no, because the groups don't know and neither does the public.
So when I just laid out for you the first major suicide attack by Hezbollah in October 1983, that was against 200, 241 U.S.
Marines.
Nobody at that point said, oh, yeah, we don't really care about the death of those American Marines because they're Marines.
They're somehow supposed to be able to be killed.
No, in this situation where you have such weak actors, very often, not always, but very often those forces are being attacked because they essentially represent the United States in this case.
They represent citizens of the target country, even though they're wearing uniforms.
And the terrorist groups simply are not, you know, kind of, you know, picking, you know, they're not operating on this basis.
They attack civilians.
They also attack off-duty military and they attack on-duty military, and they're trying to kill the maximum number of their target country.
Well, now, might Max Abrams complain that you skew your numbers then if you want to count all the kamikaze attacks on the U.S.
Navy, that that's not the same as suicide terrorism against civilians?
Well, that criticism would have bite if it were the case that by dealing with the smaller subset of only counter civilian suicide terrorism, we got a different result.
But that's not the case.
You see, this is, imagine you have data and you have 300 data points.
And then imagine you look inside and you divide the data so that you'll say, I'm going to divide it two-thirds, one-third.
Well, does the two-thirds lead to a different conclusion than the one-third?
That's very important for us social scientists to find out, not just with this debate, but with any debate, because we don't want to have a small part of the data set driving the results, in which case we're missing the whole big picture, Scott.
So what we do is we call it partitioning the data.
And this happens in all kinds of work that we do, social science work in general and statistical work in particular.
And we want to know, is the data uniformly producing these results or is it a result of some small subset?
And the truth is the counter civilian, narrowly understood as purely civilian attacks, produces those concessions.
The Israeli attacks, I ticked off for you several Israeli concessions in the 1990s.
Hamas was killing civilians on buses in downtown Tel Aviv.
These are not attacks on military forts or military bases.
These are attacks on pizza parlors, downtown Tel Aviv, and generally scaring Israeli society quite a lot.
And that is producing the same result of the concession.
And it's interesting, too, that in the case of Palestine, hardly anyone ever tries to say that, oh, see, it's radical Islamic extremism, because everybody knows that the Palestinians are really much more westernized.
And whatever Al-Qaeda or Islamic State type groups ever tried to pop up their heads in the Gaza Strip, Hamas immediately killed them.
And they stand for election.
They participate in the game.
That's why Al-Qaeda hates Hamas so much.
And the young people doing the knife attacks on the West Bank right now are clearly not a bunch of young ISIS acolytes.
You know, they're clearly fighting over occupation and colonization.
Simple as that.
They have their own interests.
This is a lot like any alliance, Scott, that happens around the world.
A lot of states form what they call alliances.
But they're really not war-fighting military alliances like the Britain and the United States in World War II.
They're much more political.
They're much more about sharing maybe some information or sharing some tactics than they are sharing fighters or one group devoting a set of attacks to help the other.
What you see with terrorist groups is not very often these tight war-fighting alliances that are global around the world that you sometimes hear in the news.
That's just not what you see.
What you see is that sometimes there's information sharing.
Sometimes a terrorist group in the West Bank will pick up an idea from a terrorist group in Sri Lanka.
The first person ever to use a suicide vest, a belt bomb, so to speak, wasn't a Palestinian, although Palestinians were often credited with that.
It was actually the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka in 1991.
They invented it, and they killed Rajiv Gandhi with it.
It was one of the most prominent assassinations ever to this day, and other terrorist groups picked up on that.
So there can be these linkages, but they're typically not these deep war-fighting alliances the way they're often portrayed.
And when you bring up the Tamils there, the point being that they're nominally Hindu, Marxist, atheist, nothing to do with Mohammed whatsoever, and as you write in the book, they're the leaders of suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003 when something happened in 2003.
Yep, that's exactly right, and that's why it's so important to really collect the data, Scott.
So what I'm doing is collecting data, and the folks that have helped me do it are the Pentagon, and they've given me the resources to collect all the information in the world on suicide attacks and attackers in all the major languages.
So this isn't just me sitting at a computer by myself regurgitating some other data.
I have 40 people who work for me now, 40, and we double verify, triple verify.
We put enormous amounts of this on the web, on our database, which people can access for free.
There's no subscription fee, and you can actually see not just the attacks and the data, but we put on the actual hard source verification for each and every attack.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Do you have an easy-to-say web address for that that people can find?
It's just CPOST.
If they will simply Google CPOST.
I'm the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, CPOST, C-P-O-S-T.
You go to CPOST, and you'll see you can go right to the suicide attack database.
This is a pretty easy-to-use database.
I modeled it after the IMF, the International Monetary Fund's database.
It was built for me by Argonne National Laboratories.
This is not just cribbing together or Xeroxing a few things and putting them on the web as a PDF.
Yeah, this is really something.
And it is really, really something.
And so it allows you to partition the data yourself rather than just trust what I'm saying.
And this information was so valuable.
This was funded, even though a lot of my policy conclusions that come out of the data go against the Iraq War, occupying countries.
Well, this was originally funded in 2004 by the Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz Defense Department.
How could that possibly be?
Because in 2002, in the fall, I sent Paul Wolfowitz an unpublished study that later was published in the American Political Science Review, the flagship journal in political science, showing that the data showed if we invaded and occupied Iraq, we'd trigger the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times.
No other terrorism expert was predicting that.
They were predicting the opposite because they thought that religion, Islamic fundamentalism, drove suicide terrorism and Saddam had killed all the Islamic fundamentalists in his country so we could go in and we wouldn't get any terrorism and certainly no suicide terrorism.
But my data showed the opposite.
Well, then, lo and behold, a year after the invasion, they funded C-Post, which allowed me to start it.
And that's how I first hired a research team, flew in all the key native languages, Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil, Russian, to send people to Cairo, Beirut, Damascus to buy things on the black markets.
So this is really quite an extensive amount of research.
And then over the years, I gave many, many dozens of talks to our intelligence agencies, NSA.
I've been at NSA.
And to really, and it was all about the data.
It was all about the data.
And now I'm sorry, you say you sent this memo to Wolfowitz on what date?
It was in October 2002.
It's not, it wasn't a memo.
It was hand carried by Andrew Marshall.
So Andrew Marshall was the head of net assessment for the Pentagon for decades.
And he came to Chicago and I gave him a copy of my study and asked him to give it to Wolfowitz, which he did.
Wow.
And so what I'm saying here, Scott, is that this is not a simply, you know, a small little effort here on the side.
And this has been growing ever since.
Yeah.
And I really should have made it clear in the introduction.
And I'm sorry that I didn't, that you really have studied every single suicide attacker since 1980.
As you say, you have all these grad students and it sounds like even others.
Is it all grad students or others even?
No, we have now full time people.
We now have full time people.
These are full time professional people.
These are people at the top of the dung heap.
All right.
Now let me ask you more tough questions because I know you're short on time here and I still have a few.
Because I've got to go into a meeting with some of those good people.
Yeah.
Well, tell them to hold their horses.
Here's the thing, though.
Occupations don't always cause suicide terrorism.
And even sometimes when it's a very different society occupying the other one.
And so how do you explain that?
Is it not cheating in social science to say that, well, geez, it sure does explain this, but I don't have to explain it back the other way again.
So it's absolutely right that not all occupations escalate to suicide terrorism.
And to explain that, that's why I wrote a whole book, Dying to Win, which takes on that issue.
Now, it's hard for your listeners to really verify all this for themselves without getting the book.
And I'm sorry about that, listeners.
I'm not.
You know what?
The Wikipedia entry is actually pretty thorough.
If people want a good, you know, short review of what's in there.
It does.
We've done our best to try to get the key paragraphs out there.
But so the bottom line is that what I did is I did a series of tests to find out why occupations escalate to suicide terrorism and others do not.
I didn't go in with any preconceived notion.
I went in like a scientist trying to figure out what's the answer.
And I discovered that it is when there is a pretty firm social difference between the occupied and the local community, not just the linguistic difference.
So I tested for linguistic differences.
That's not strong enough.
The root of suicide terrorism is the fear on the part of the occupied population, not just the leaders, but the population that the occupier is going to socially and even religiously transform their country.
So what about the American Indians?
Do we have any suicide campaigns by American Indian tribes against the whites?
Well, we have quite a few suicide, suicidal, like, you know, wave attacks.
We don't have the kind of detailed history, Scott, that would allow us to really understand whether the Indians, as they're attacking in these human wave attacks to protect their communities as the European settlers are coming in and taking their land.
That is what's happening in the 19th century.
I know it's an embarrassing thing to say for many Americans to hear, but it is true.
As European settlers came, we had to give them land and we gave them a lot of Indian land, and then we had to move the Indians forcibly, and then the Indians fought back forcibly.
And in many of these attacks, 90 percent of the males would be wiped out.
They didn't just wiped out because we didn't just, they wiped out because many of them launched these human wave attacks.
Well, unfortunately, the Indians, we don't have detailed histories of what was motivating them the way that we have with suicide attack organizations.
So, I really can't tell you that they were, quote, suicide attackers in the way that we would have expected today in the classic sense.
I just can't because there is no evidence about that.
But nonetheless, there is circumstantial fit.
You have many tribes that launched massive human wave attacks to protect their communities and territory, and then they were just simply wiped out.
Okay, now I think I can combine my last two questions into one here, and that would be the suicide attackers who actually are not from occupied countries.
Like, for example, all the foreign fighters who traveled to Iraq to fight, who traveled to Syria to fight in that war, and even, what, three or four of the September 11th hijackers.
I saw Peter Bergen say that, well, yeah, but one of them was from the UAE, and another was from Lebanon, and another was from Egypt.
So, how does that count?
So, in Cutting the Fuse, which is my 2010 book, I write a whole chapter on this.
It's chapter two.
So, this is something I'm not just a little familiar with, and I studied.
So, what most people think is that suicide attackers are overwhelmingly these transnational attackers.
It turns out that only a small fraction are.
Most are national from the local community under the occupation, but it is true that there are sometimes 10%, sometimes 20% of the attackers are these transnationals, and those are the ones who many people are afraid of.
And so, I studied what it is about those transnationals, and I made some rather major discoveries that our FBI has been using quite a bit.
So, this is not just done in a book.
This is stuff that I routinely give briefings to our FBI about.
So, I studied the 9-11 Hamburg cell, which are the groups you're talking about.
I studied the July 2005 London bombers, the four people who did those attacks, and also five Moroccans who left Morocco to do suicide attacks in Iraq.
And what I discovered was some very important patterns.
These folks were friends first, or family first, and terrorists later.
They were not sort of incubated, so to speak, by some terrorist group in some madrasa or in a mosque.
That's not what was happening.
And that's very important to know for our FBI, because that means that's why if you surveil all the mosques, you're never going to discover these folks, for instance.
But then, what is holding them together is a deep – they are Muslims.
They are not all good Muslims, by the way, but they are Muslims.
They are Muslims.
And what's holding them together in these friendship groups is deep anger at the occupations that are happening to their kindred.
So, there is – the way to think about it, the way I think about it is smoking is the number one cause of lung cancer.
This is kind of like secondhand smoke.
These folks are getting angry.
They're getting angry in small little cliques.
They're not being deeply brainwashed by terrorist groups.
They're basically radicalizing themselves in tiny little cliques.
Hey, am I cheating if I say that – well, look at the size of the United States of America.
Why would we assume that the average Egyptian thinks of the average Palestinian as some kind of alien?
Isn't that the same as somebody from Louisiana to a Texan?
We're all Americans here, that kind of thing.
You got boys from Texas went and fought after an attack on New York and D.C.
Why is it different when you have Saudis and Egyptians go and fight in Iraq?
For the most part, it is the same, Scott.
And that's why – so, the study that I – again, Cutting the Fuse, Chapter 2.
This is a detailed study.
This is not a thin thing to talk about.
This is explaining why these transnationals are black swans in a sea of white swans.
You see, what a lot of folks think when they hear, oh, global jihad, transnational, they're expecting wave after wave after wave of homegrown Muslims to come and kill them and attack them, which is partly why our politicians start to argue about – say those things.
But that's not what we experience.
We see teeny, teeny, tiny numbers of these homegrown, if you would, suicide attackers.
And so, what we need to explain are why there's a few black swans.
See, one out of a hundred swans are black.
So, if you try to pretend that all swans are black, you're just going to miss explaining the phenomenon.
So, what I have done is – that's why it's important to understand what fraction we're talking about, because explaining a black swan phenomenon is just very different, and that's what my book does.
And what it shows is that there are just these very unusual circumstances, which is why you end up with not hundreds and thousands of radical suicide attackers storming London or storming New York, but just these really super teeny, tiny.
And what's special about them is they're radicalizing in these very unusual friendship groups.
They're actually quite – I don't have time to go into it, but they're very different than the usual friendship groups, and all I can do is just encourage people to read the details of the study.
But this is what I give, like, hour and a half long presentations on to our FBI, because they find it helpful in trying to catch the bad guys.
Yeah.
Well, that's good.
I'm very happy to hear that.
I mean, in fact, just on its own, I don't think that speaks very well of your work, because so often what we hear is the FBI are being trained and indoctrinated by absolute loons.
In fact, someone sent me a note this morning that Waleed Fares is giving a talk to some national security officials, I guess at the Pentagon, explaining that radical Islam makes them do it.
So, I hope they're listening close to you, Bob, when you come by.
Thank you very much, Scott, and I appreciate you having me on.
Thanks very much for doing it.
I appreciate you, too.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That is Robert A. Pape, University of Chicago.
The books are Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, and Cutting the Fuse, The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.
And I didn't get to ask my Belgium question.
Thanks very much, y'all, for listening.
Stop by scotthorton.org to sign up for the podcast feed and support the show.scotthorton.org slash donate.
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