04/02/10 – Robert Pape – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Robert Pape.
I'm very happy to welcome Robert Pape back to the show.
He is a political scientist from the University of Chicago and is the head of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism.
And listen, y'all, I know how it is when people recommend you books.
I know how it is when people recommend me books.
You get recommended a book, and it goes on your list of books that you've been recommended that you never get or read.
And I know how that goes.
But this is one that I really think you should go and check out, at least from the library for free, right?
Or at everybody else's expense.
Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you?
I'm great.
Thanks for having me on again.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us.
I'm sorry about the delay there and everything.
Oh, no problem at all.
Now, I'll tell people this, too.
If you're too lazy to go to Amazon.com and order a copy of Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, you can learn a lot about what's in that book by simply going to wikipedia.org and searching for Dying to Win or for Robert Pape there.
And there's an excellent synopsis of the book there.
And you know what?
We've just come out with a new website.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
It is cpost, for Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, cpost.uchicago.edu.
And you can go there and see the 20 people who work for me.
You can see our searchable database of suicide terrorist attacks.
You can interact with it.
You can actually see the names of lots of the suicide bombers, find out lots about their demographic profiles.
And you can find out more information.
All of our op-eds, for instance, are there.
There's information about our books there.
And so you can actually just find a tremendous amount if you just go to the website.
And it's only been up for a little over a month.
And already it's getting thousands and thousands of hits.
So your folks might want to know about that.
Yeah, that's great.
I can't wait to take a look at that.
And, well, you kind of refer to the story here that people need to understand.
This searchable database of suicide terrorists, this is what you base your work on is actual facts rather than selective quotations and anecdotes, huh?
That's exactly right.
So for the last seven years and about seven years ago, I compiled the first complete database of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world.
I know it may come as a surprise we didn't have such a database before.
It kind of surprised me that we didn't.
But the fact is not only didn't think tanks or academics have it, but governments didn't have that either.
And it may come as a bit of a surprise, but our Pentagon has funded this work numerous times, even though it often runs directly counter to a lot of Pentagon policies.
And the big reason for that is simply because of the quality of the data.
So we don't use anonymous Internet chat room data.
When you folks go to the Web now, you'll be able to actually see the actual sources and the content of the actual sources so that you can really get a lot of confidence in the data.
Well, that's actually what the government has actually found so valuable for the past number of years.
And I think that this should, by putting our data now on the Web for the first time, should substantially improve the quality of our public discussions.
Yeah, well, it's been since 2005, and your work has certainly improved the quality of the discussion on this show.
And I cite your work all the time, as a lot of other great people have done.
And, well, if I can remember back to that first interview in 2005, Bob, I think you said that the first thing you did after 9-11 was crack open a Quran to try to figure out how the hell we got to do this.
That's right, just like almost everybody.
I thought suicide attacks must be driven by Islam.
The 9-11 hijackers were Muslim.
Osama bin Laden is definitely an Islamic fundamentalist.
So I just naturally jumped to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with Islam.
And then, as I was doing various interviews, folks kept pushing for more and more.
So I found myself trying to find out more and more information about suicide attacks.
And lo and behold, as I was collecting this information, some facts just jumped right out at me.
I could not ignore them.
It turned out about half of all suicide attacks from 1980 to 2003 were not driven, were not committed by Islamic fundamentalists.
The world leader during that period was the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
They're a Marxist group, a secular group, a Hindu group.
They're anything but an Islamic fundamentalist group.
They're not interested in the afterlife.
They're interested in this life.
And then it turned out a third of Muslim suicide attacks were committed by groups like the PKK in Turkey, which is another Marxist group that's interested in this life, not the next life.
And in fact, the PKK in Turkey is still alive and active as we speak.
Last May, I went to Bill Kent University in Ankara to give a talk.
And the day before my talk, in the very room over from where I was speaking, was an attempted suicide assassination by a PKK woman of a Turkish government official.
And so it's just the case that I had to start looking around.
Well, gee, if it's not religion, what's really driving this?
And it turns out over 95% of all suicide attacks around the world are driven by a specific strategic purpose, which is to compel a democratic state to withdraw combat forces.
I don't mean advisers with sidearms.
I mean tanks, fighter aircraft, and armored vehicles from territory that terrorists prize.
And once I sort of came to that conclusion, I could say, oh, my gosh, if we go and invade Iraq, we should get a gigantic suicide terrorist campaign.
I sent letters to Paul Wolfowitz.
I sent letters to the folks in the Pentagon.
And at that time, in fall of 2002 and early 2003, all the terrorism experts were kind of poo-pooing the whole idea of much terrorism in Iraq, because after all, Saddam was not an Islamic fundamentalist.
He had kind of gotten rid of the Islam from Iraq.
So it would be kind of a cakewalk to deal with Iraq.
But it turned out, perhaps, you know, very unfortunate, well, not perhaps, unfortunately for the world, that our invasion did generate a huge suicide terrorist campaign.
And so the more we've occupied, the more we've gotten suicide terrorism, and the more the threat to our homeland has just continued.
Well, this is kind of, I guess, beyond your expertise or what have you, but still, I think, an interesting point of discussion.
I'm amazed that there have not been mass casualty attacks in the United States, really, since September 11th.
There have been a few attempts, and there, Lord knows, have been a lot of bogus cases drummed up by the FBI.
But real al-Qaeda has not come here and killed masses of people.
And it seems like they must either really just not exist, Bob, no matter how many people we kill over there, none of them seem to want to come here to do it.
Or, what, the border security is so good, isn't it kind of strange?
I've got a bad feeling that we're overdue for something here.
Well, I'm afraid we may be just a matter of luck.
So we have to remember that for years before 9-11, al-Qaeda was carrying out attacks overseas, killing our troops.
So it's not like there was this mad rush of sort of attempts to do 9-11 before 9-11 itself occurred.
Al-Qaeda's first suicide attacks occurred in 1995 in Saudi Arabia, then again in 1996 in Saudi Arabia, then in 1998, Kenya and Tanzania, where they attack U.S. embassies, and then in 2000, the U.S. cull.
Well, those are the dots that we were not connecting overseas to see that this march toward our homeland was actually on al-Qaeda's radar screen.
What's been happening in the last few years is those dots have been occurring by the dozens almost every month, and that's really quite worrisome.
Now, on the other side of this, we are safer today in the narrow sense that our defenses are better.
One of the things that is an unfortunate kind of reality of what we have to live with is, which is so long as we're going to have combat forces over there, then it's going to be important to have really tight immigration controls blocking, essentially, the people coming from certain Muslim countries where we are stationed in combat forces.
So if you live in Saudi Arabia, for instance, it's just unbelievable to try to get a visa to come into the United States.
That wasn't true before 9-11, and 15 of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudis who got visas.
They didn't enter illegally.
They didn't kind of secret themselves in.
They just came through the normal immigration, and there's a good reason that that happens, which is that what al-Qaeda is interested in doing is not just kind of an effort to kind of produce an attack for show, flood a handful of people to come into the United States who will kill themselves or get picked up by authorities.
What they're really interested in is killing large numbers of people.
That's been their pattern.
That's how their attacks have gone on overseas, and I think that those immigration controls have been actually quite helpful.
That's not to say that we should kind of sit back and say, oh, gosh, there can never be another attack, but I don't think that we should be thinking, oh, the next attack is like a Code Red or something.
I'm afraid as long as we have these combat forces overseas, the risk is just a steady state of medium.
It's not really going up very much or down very much.
Well, now, it's interesting that, well, for example, if you look back, you can find Paul Wolfowitz explaining that, yeah, we had to get our troops out of Saudi Arabia because that was one of bin Laden's best recruiting sticks that he would use.
Well, and, Scott, he sort of read that, yeah, and I'd like to, you know, parts of me would like to say, yes, that's Wolfowitz reading the memo I sent him, but another part of me says, and if you look at some of the way I've responded to that in print, I think it's the wrong reading because it's a particularly narrow conception of what it meant to be on the Arabian Peninsula.
My work never said that, oh, they care about a certain line in the sand between Yemen and Saudi Arabia or between Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
No, in fact, the populations on the Arabian Peninsula, not just bin Laden, but 95% of the folks on the Arabian Peninsula think those lines are illegitimate, drawn by the British after World War I.
And so what they see themselves as is a people of the Arabian Peninsula, not so much kind of adhering to a nationality that was drawn for them by Westerners.
So I think that the fact is that Wolfowitz was kind of technically, was just too narrow.
So, yes, it's true, we did pull forces out of Saudi Arabia.
At the exact same time, we increased to over 100,000 the combat forces all on the Arabian Peninsula, on other countries on the rim, and then in Iraq itself.
Right.
Yeah, we'll just move them a little bit to the east and the north of here, and we're pretty sure everything, all our problems will go away.
But at least the point is that he was recognizing the principle here.
You know, the first Dick Cheney interview after September 11th, he was on Tim Russert's show that Sunday, and he said, Bin Laden's goal, obviously, is to try to get us to withdraw our military from that part of the world.
And then I guess somebody sent him the memo that said, No, remember, we're saying that they hate us because we're good and free.
That's all.
And that was it.
But so Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney knew from the very beginning, they recognized, as well as any rational person in this society can recognize, that history didn't begin on September 11th.
History began long before that.
And America has been, well, basically taking the place of the British in the Middle East for 60 years.
Leading up to this, we've been bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia for 12 years, leading up to the attack of September 11th.
And you'd have to be, you'd have to put your fingers in your ears and start singing Mary Had a Little Lamb at the top of your lungs to not understand the obvious fact that you've gone now and shown with numbers here.
That's exactly right.
And the thing that's really quite worrisome is that we've now had to relearn this lesson again in Afghanistan.
So up until 2006 in Afghanistan, we actually had relatively modest numbers of suicide attacks in that country, one or two a year.
And the reason was because we had just a tiny number of forces in the country.
It's true we did topple the Taliban, we did install Karzai, but we had tiny forces in the country all centered around Kabul.
And then what started to happen, especially in 2004 and 2005, is we started to spread our forces, adding more, first going to the north of the country, then to the west of the country.
Well, those were our friends, the Northern Alliance.
But then in late 2005 and early 2006, we started to take even more troops and put them in the south and the east.
That's the Pashtun homelands, Kandahar, et cetera.
And when we did that, we dramatically increased the level of suicide terrorism tenfold, and it's been near 100 attacks or more every single year since we've done that.
And the people committing those attacks, 90% of them are Pashtuns.
And so what we've seen is that, again, as we have occupied and increased in occupation, we have triggered, again, one of the largest suicide terrorist campaigns in history.
And, in fact, in Afghanistan, if this goes on long enough, it will, within just a couple of years, eclipse the suicide terrorist campaign that we let rage for years in Iraq.
You know, that always is what tripped me out about the social sciences.
I mean, I'm a community college dropout, but I remember tripping out in social psychology, for example, where they kind of show that what you would intuit, or at least if somebody explained it to you, you would think, yeah, that makes sense that people would behave this way or that way or whatever.
But then when you run so many experiments in a row, it really is almost science, and it really is that easy to predict with a chart how many suicide attacks there are going to be in Afghanistan.
Once you have your premises straight, you can really graph this stuff out, huh?
Well, suicide terrorism is like the lung cancer of terrorism.
Suicide terrorism is just one form of terrorism, but it's the most deadly form.
That form kills more people than all other types of terrorism combined.
It has specific risk factors associated with it, much like lung cancer.
People who smoke get lung cancer just a fantastically higher rate than people that don't smoke.
And what you're seeing with suicide terrorism is that occupation is that trigger that causes both religious and secular folks to resist that occupation using suicide attack.
And it's very important to try to discuss this because we also live in a world like we did with smoking in the 1940s and 50s, where you might remember the days with Humphrey Bogart smoking cigarettes and so forth.
Well, this was a day when we didn't have a strong understanding that smoking is what caused lung cancer.
And it took 20 years for that information to really permeate through, not just the kind of narrow academic community and technical communities, but the public at large.
So America's kind of an idiot like me who keeps smoking anyway.
Well, there may be some, yeah, it's an addiction.
There's an addictive quality to it.
I think that that may be true, and maybe we're hooked on...
Smoking and empire building.
And we may be hooked on occupation, but it will certainly be helpful to bring it to the fore that the more we occupy Muslim countries, the more we're producing anti-American suicide terrorism, and the more we're producing those dots year after year after year that look a lot like those dots before 9-11.
You know, there's a great documentary called The Power of Nightmares, and it's about the kind of mirror image that the Al-Qaeda jihadists and the neoconservatives make for each other and how they continually sort of prove each other's case, and all the rest of us are caught in the middle of it.
So where Osama bin Laden needs to be able to tell his people that what's really going on here is they're at war against Islam, and they're occupying these lands because they're Islamic lands, and we must fight them to defend Islamic lands from them, and that kind of thing.
And the neocons are trying to push the idea that the problem is Islam, and that the people who want to define it down into more particular circumstances or something like that are missing the point that radical Islam is the terrible danger in the world.
And so, you know, really end up with a situation where last night, for example, a guy from the Claremont Institute at a panel I was at at UC Riverside suggested that, you know, a lot of you good liberals in the college audience out there, you're right, we probably ought to intervene in Darfur to save those poor people there.
Which would simply be, I mean, we're talking about not the south of Sudan, we're talking about Arab, Sunni, Wahhabi Sudan, and spreading this same war of occupation into that part of Africa now.
And this is exactly what would fulfill, if not bin Laden's hopes, at least his predictions about what we're going to do, and of course just turn that bloody situation into a bloody situation, plus Americans and suicide attacks.
There's a lot of truth to that.
And you see, it may well be the case that Osama bin Laden is himself a committed Islamic fundamentalist who would want to do a suicide attack against us regardless of the circumstances, but he's got a problem.
He needs volunteers.
He can't do this but one time himself, right?
So if he really wants a suicide terrorist campaign, which he clearly does, he needs not just one person to come, he needs a stream, and what's clearly the case is that the best thing that mobilizes, that motivates those volunteers to join up to do the suicide attack is the occupation.
Sometimes it's just directly related to the harm that happens from an occupation, as we're seeing in Chechnya.
So I'm sure a lot of your listeners know we just had this major suicide attack in Moscow.
This is originating from the Caucasus region.
Chechnya and some of the other provinces near the region have been under occupation by Russia.
They want to secede.
Certainly Chechnya does.
Others may as well.
And the Russians have been trying to prevent this now for almost two decades.
Well, using military force, not just the legal means.
And we just learned today that one of the two women who blew themselves up in Moscow a few days ago was a widow of one of the militants that was killed by Russian forces last December.
So the occupation is not just kind of like an excuse for the suicide attack.
It's the prime cause of this woman doing a suicide attack.
And so there's just link after link after link in a direct way between the occupation and the threat.
Now, the article, and I'm sorry, I should have mentioned this at the beginning here, but I would like to recommend to everybody who reads, I love the title here, What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?
It's by Robert Pape, Lindsay O'Rourke, and Jenna McDermott.
It's in the New York Times.
And I concluded that these two glaring errors in this article must have just been the fault of the editors at the New York Times.
Because in the second paragraph here, the first one, they say, Yeah, Moscow has tried to portray the Chechen bombers as Islamic extremists.
But this is about occupation, and it differentiates them from the global war on terror, which is about Islamic extremism.
Our fight against Muslims is because of their religion.
But Russia's fight against Muslims is because of their occupation.
I know you didn't write that.
You're right.
You're catching on a slight.
But in fact, just to be clear for your readers, when you read the entire article as a whole, you're right, if you focus just on that tiny little phrase there, you could see that.
But if you look at it as a whole, I don't think that you'll come away thinking that way.
Because we do in the piece make it quite clear that from the West Bank to Lebanon to Kashmir, Iraq, foreign occupation is the main trigger of suicide terrorism around the world.
And that's also true in Chechnya.
So you're quite right to point on that particular little phrase.
And maybe we, you know, if we had had our druthers, you know, sometimes there's little tiny, bitty little changes at the very last second to fit in, honestly, just for space reasons, where they kind of condense a few things.
But really, if you're right, the point is made in the article.
The point is made, but you're also right that that tiny little condensing there could be a little misleading.
Yeah, well, I've read that.
I was like, well, now, wait a minute.
Okay.
I read the book.
I know better.
I talked to the author.
You're right.
You caught it.
You caught it.
It shows you've got an eagle eye, and it also shows that the very – you see the penultimate draft before it's published, but then they have to actually put it on the page.
Right.
Well, not everybody can have Matt Barganier as an editor, poor guy.
Now, I'm sorry, because there was another error in here that I thought was really worthy of discussing, but now as I'm scanning through it, I can't find it.
Well, if you find it later, go ahead and bring it up.
Yeah, I will.
I'm sorry.
But anyway, look, the point is the point, right?
How could it be that Russia's foreign policy creates blowback for them, but our blowback always started it.
We're like the Israelis like that, right?
Whatever the Israelis do in Palestine or in Lebanon is always a retaliation.
They never start anything.
And I guess the same thing goes for Hezbollah and Hamas, too.
Well, yeah, you make an absolutely fair point.
But just to be fair to The Times, they definitely have published numerous pieces.
This is my 11th piece in The New York Times.
I don't want to say that this is their line, of course.
I mean they publish plenty of pieces that try to make the case that it's religion that's driving this.
But they have been quite generous in terms of trying to – I just think that that particular one is a little funny.
Anyway.
Right.
Well, and I guess I'd like to chime in here a little bit to emphasize what ought to be a very obvious point, which is that you're an academic, and you're not taking the side of the enemy here.
You're simply trying to advise the American government how best to get along in the world and to explain that Osama bin Laden, for example, cannot recruit volunteers unless he points at real grievances, such as American combat forces near their holy sites and in their home countries and neighborhoods, that he won't be able to do so, is not a value judgment at all.
It's simply pseudoscience, right?
Social science.
That's exactly right.
I'm not trying to justify al-Qaeda's murder of our civilians.
I am, however, trying to explain what allows them to recruit the people to do it, because that's something we need to understand, because it's easy to make the problem worse if you don't.
And I'm afraid since 2004, you can see the more we've occupied, the more we've produced suicide terrorism, the more other countries like Russia have occupied, the more they've produced suicide terrorism.
And if we're ever really going to bring an end to this scourge, we're going to have to take seriously that we can't just keep solving every problem by adding another 30,000 combat troops overseas.
Well, now, I know you've got to go, but let me just ask you real quick whether you think that you're making headway in getting this argument outside of policymaking circles and kind of out into the mass consciousness.
Well, you know, there's actually real change that's happened in the last five years.
So I go now to Washington almost every week.
I just was here several times, but not in the old days.
I used to just go to talk to kind of the mid-level of the bureaucracy.
Now, just last week, I went to brief Michael Nacht, our Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Wow, geez, that's really something.
And this is true, and I'm working with New America.
I'm working with much, much more mainstream, and it's because what's been happening over the last five years is that this information that's been out there, well, now people have had a chance to really grapple with it.
They've had a chance to really think about it.
You can challenge it.
Okay, so we've had 2,100 suicide attacks since 1980 all around the world.
Tape claims that 97% are due to foreign occupation.
All right, well, let's find the 500 or the 600 that aren't.
No one's been able to do that.
It's been five years.
That's a long period of time.
So over time, bit by bit by bit, we've been making rather significant progress, and I think that we can continue to do that.
I think we're now at a point where we're finally, after all these years, having a real public discussion about what actually is causing the threat against us.
Well, I guess it remains to be seen whether people can really internalize the lesson there, and maybe we should stop picking fights.
I mean, if we really did start it, it's not like the Arab world took up the British Empire in North America.
It's the other way around here.
You know, just one more little point you might find interesting, and then I've got to go.
Sure.
There was a Zogby poll just at the end of last January, just a few weeks ago, and it asked what's the main reason for 9-11 and the reason the terrorists want to kill us.
This was after the Christmas bomber.
33% of the country said, well, it's Islam wanting to make Islam the world's dominant religion, but 27% said it's resentment against American military power.
Wow.
That is real change.
It's happening because of programs like yours, and that would not have been the same five years ago, and I think you should go look at that Zogby poll.
Yeah, that's great.
You'll find it online, and that's a real significant movement, and what it really shows is the value of getting the real information out.
The website I mentioned, I hope your listeners will go to cpost.uchicago.edu.
I hope you don't mind me mentioning it again.
No, I was just about to.
I think I still will again.
And in September, we're going to have a major new book come out from the University of Chicago Press looking at the last five years of suicide terrorist attacks around the world.
It's called Cutting the Fuse, the Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It, and this, again, is chock full of this data, which we've been giving to the government for years, now available online, which I think will, we hope, substantially help educate the public.
Excellent.
I can't wait for that, and I really do appreciate your time.
I'm sorry I didn't get to ask you about the individual logic of suicide terrorism, which I think is the part that got left out of my very first interview with you.
Well, let's do another one again very, very soon, okay?
Great.
I look forward to it.
Thanks, Bob.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's Robert Pape from the University of Chicago.
He is the head of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism.
The website is cpost.uchicago.edu.
The book is Dying to Win, the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, and I strongly urge you to go and look at the Wikipedia page about Dying to Win, short of getting the book for yourself.