The evolution of suicide terrorism
Michael Horowitz
There are two important questions to consider in studying suicide
terrorism. First, why has suicide terrorism emerged in the last few
decades as such a potent weapon? Second, why is it that some terrorist
groups use suicide terrorism, while others have not?
Suicide terrorism has emerged as a very powerful weapon over the last
several years, with 9/11, car bombings in Iraq, in the West Bank, in Sri
Lanka and elsewhere. It has captivated the public. As a tactic, it has
infiltrated our national consciousness.
However, we need to stop viewing suicide terrorism as something
exotic and incomprehensible, which only leads to confusion. It makes
more sense to think of it as an example of a military innovation for
non-state actors and to apply some of the analytical tools we use to
analyze the spread, or diffusion, of nuclear weapons, carrier warfare or
blitzkrieg warfare.
Many argue that suicide terrorism is more effective than other kinds
of terrorist attacks. In Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide
Terrorism (2005), Robert Pape of the University of Chicago found that,
excluding 9/11, from 1980-2003, suicide attacks represented three
percent of all terrorist incidents, but 48 percent of the casualties.
This means that the bang for the buck in the average suicide attack is
extraordinarily high.
However, we tend to view suicide terrorism as something simple for
those who do it - you strap a bomb on and blow yourself up, or you get
in a car that has a bomb and run it into something. In fact, there is a
complicated organizational challenge associated with adopting suicide
terrorism. It is not a costless move for terrorist organizations.
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The abortive suicide attempt on Defence Secretary |
In addition to looking at the organizational decision to use suicide
bombing, we should also focus on suicide terrorism as an example of the
diffusion of innovations. One brief story with repercussions for US
national security illustrates the interconnections among groups and the
importance of understanding how they operate.
In the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden was shifting al-Qaida into
more of a direct operational role, he needed to figure out the best way
to attack an American embassy. He looked at different plans and ideas
other groups had had.
He recalled Hizbollah’s bombing of the US Marines barracks in 1983
and Hizbollah’s other successes with suicide bombings. So, despite
profound theological differences between the Salafist/jihadist views of
al-Qaida and the Shiite Hizbollah, Bin Laden sent his operatives to go
talk to the Hizbollah leadership.
They came back with what were effectively operational blueprints for
how to plan and executive suicide attacks, especially against hard
targets like embassies. The East African embassy attacks resulted in
part from this example of diffusion. In the 1980s, Hizbollah was really
thought of as an innovator, the first mover.
Defining suicide terrorism
It is very difficult to define terrorism in general. Even parts of
the US government cannot agree on a definition. Suicide terrorism is
easier to understand conceptually. It is a violent attack designed to
kill others where the death of the attacker is a necessary part of the
action. This is different from a suicide mission.
In WWII movies, you have the suicide mission where the men get
together and are sent on a mission that they know they will not survive.
The means of destruction in this case, the way they perpetrate the
attack, is the machinegun they fire, the grenade they throw, or the bomb
they drop.
They know they are probably going to die, but it is not their deaths
that cause the mission to succeed. They are simply going to die
accomplishing their mission.
That is very different than a suicide attack where it is through your
death that your mission, the killing of others or destruction of a
target, is accomplished. The mission is accomplished through your death.
We all know about imperial Japan’s use of kamikaze tactics at the end
of WWII. In mid-1944, in response to growing Japanese losses and
especially the large decline in the quality of Japanese pilots, the
Japanese turned to using the planes as weapons themselves, flying them
directly into US ships.
Historians disagree about when exactly this debuted, but most would
cite Leyte Gulf in October 1944 as the first place we saw it en masse.
By the end of the war, the Japanese had sunk between about 34 and 70
ships and killed thousands of Allied soldiers through this tactic. Most
military historians do not consider Japan’s efforts a success, one
reason being that to accomplish this, the Japanese sacrificed almost
5,000 pilots.
The modern era Suicide bombings disappeared until the early 1980s,
the beginning of the suicide terrorism era in Lebanon. In 1982, radical
elements of the Shiite resistance in southern Lebanon joined together in
the Bekka Valley to form Hizbollah.
While not the first suicide attack in the period - that occurred in
1981 - the first known attack by Hizbollah was on 11 November 1982,
against an Israeli military installation.
The success of that attack prompted Hezbollah to continue, which led
to the worst terrorist attack overseas against US assets, the Marine
barracks bombing that killed over 200 Americans. Clerics justified
suicide bombings for two reasons: the genuine devotion of the martyr and
the practical utility of the attack.
The Tigers in Sri Lanka became a non-Muslim and non-Middle Eastern
early adopter in 1987. The Tigers came out of a resistance movement in
Sri Lanka that sought independence and autonomy. In 1987, they began a
suicide campaign that spanned multiple decades.
Before 9/11 and the ensuing spate of suicide bombings in places like
Afghanistan and Iraq, the Tigers were actually the most prolific adopter
of suicide terrorism in the world, credited with over 150 attacks; 191
is one estimate.
The LTTE is very interesting from a targeting perspective. We tend to
conceptualize suicide terrorism as being about attacking civilians.
While Hizbollah did not necessarily focus on attacking civilians, groups
like Hamas or al-Qaida (and affiliates) have caused the association of
suicide bombings with civilian targeting.
Alternatively, the LTTE, especially at the outset, conceptualized
suicide attacks very differently. They used suicide bombing more as a
substitute for military operations they could not complete with
conventional means, making them asymmetric but closer to the traditional
military sense of the term.
The Tamils thought about suicide bombing more for hard targets and
assassinations, not necessarily targeting civilians, though civilians
often died in their attacks.
Theories
Suicide campaigns increased steadily from the early 1980s to 2001 and
beyond. The number of suicide attacks worldwide between 2001 and 2005
shows a more than secular increase in the number of attacks. Why?
One explanation revolves around individual-level factors -
individuals who had grievances against a government or group who sought
to demonstrate their anger or fury through a suicide attack. Other
explanations postulated psychological weaknesses or proclivity to
suicide. Few scholars still accept those sorts of arguments.
Research by Alan Krueger and others seems to suggest there is not a
strong link between economic weakness and suicide terrorism, either at
the national or individual level. Two recent theories, however, have met
with some acceptance.
One, by Robert Pape, has to do with occupation. He finds that when
groups are or feel occupied, they are much more likely to resort to a
tactic like suicide terrorism.
Pape’s argument has intuitive appeal given the actions of a group
like Hamas, which feels occupied so arguably turned to suicide terrorism
to make a splash, get media attention, and try to demonstrate to their
occupier, Israel, the true cost of their actions.
However, one problem with Pape’s argument is that many occupied
groups have not used suicide terrorism. Consider the Provisional Irish
Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, a violent terrorist group
whose members had no problem dying for the cause but which never adopted
suicide terrorism. So, while occupation can explain some cases of
suicide bombing, it cannot explain non-adoption by prominent groups.
Another explanation, by Mia Bloom of the University of Georgia, has
to do with what she calls “outbidding.” Bloom held in Dying to Kill: The
Allure of Suicide Terror (2005) that if you want to understand suicide
terrorism, you have to understand the competition for control that often
happens in insurgency situations.
Multiple groups committed to a cause try to demonstrate their
commitment to the broader public, and there is no better way to do that
than to show the absolute willingness of group members to give up their
lives for the cause.
If the public is supportive, the competition proves which groups
“legitimately” represent the interests of its people. This drives the
escalation to suicide terrorism.
While parts of the outbidding explanation are persuasive, one problem
is that while it actually does a reasonable job of explaining some of
the behaviour in the Palestinian territories, it does not explain
suicide campaigns where there are not elite competitions for control.
For example, the struggle for influence among Tamil resistance groups
was over before the Tamil Tigers’ suicide terror campaign began.
A third theory has to do with the combination of religion and
globalization. In The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi
Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Johns Hopkins University
Press, forthcoming November 2008), Assaf Moghadam of the Combating
Terrorism Center at West Point argues that the increase in suicide
terrorism over time is really driven by the Salafists/jihadists.
Explaining suicide terrorism requires viewing it as a military
innovation and better understanding the organizational requirements
needed for its adoption.
The Provisional IRA was a non-adopter of suicide terrorism despite
being one of the most successful terrorist groups of the 1970s and
1980s. It had complicated training manuals and almost a mini-state-like
bureaucracy.
It focused first and foremost on the survival of their volunteers,
the term they used for group members. How do you square that with
something like suicide terrorism?
Organizational theorists like James Q Wilson have identified
something called “critical task focus,” which refers to the way an
organization defines its goals and objectives.
The Provisional IRA’s focus on the survival of its volunteers as part
of its goal led to the conflation of its critical task focus with the
way it conducted its operations, confusing means and ends. Since the
group built into its reason for existing the survival of its members,
how do you tell them to go kill themselves?
What do you do with a terror group that has built up expertise in
something like remote bombing or attacking military bases? For those
groups, adoption of suicide terrorism is very difficult because they are
embedded in the ways they have always done business.
Cost generally does not govern whether or not a group is going to
adopt suicide terrorism.. A suicide terrorism attack costs only about
US$ 150, so money is not the obstacle. The organizational element is the
real obstacle.
Therefore, which groups should be more likely to adopt and which
should be more likely to pass on suicide bombing even if that tactic, on
the surface, could help them achieve their goals?
It should be easier for the younger groups that do not have embedded
ways of doing business to adopt suicide terrorism and harder for those
more established groups.
How do we test this idea? I studied over 800 terrorist groups from
1968 onwards, the universe of terrorist groups during that period
according to the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism,
looking at whether or not they used suicide terrorism.
Using statistical analysis to control for numerous factors, such as
whether a group was affiliated with al-Qaida, whether it was involved in
the Arab-Israeli conflict, or whether the group felt it was occupied, I
assessed whether the probability that a group will adopt suicide
terrorism relates to how long the group has existed, or its
organizational age.
The results strongly support the idea that there is something about
organizational dynamics that helps drive the suicide bombing process.
For groups that are religiously affiliated, who claim the reason they
exist has something to do with their religious beliefs, the probability
of adoption is very high at the beginning. Groups that have more
established ways of doing business are significantly less likely to
adopt.
A good example of these dynamics comes from Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s
organization in the Palestinian Territories.
They eventually adopted suicide terrorism in 2000 in the Second
Intifada, years after Hamas and Islamic Jihad. One explanation for their
delay is the way prestige was locked up with particular people and
within the organization.
You received credit and priority in the organization based on
hijackings, kidnappings, and remote attacks. It made suicide terrorism
something very complicated for them to deal with organizationally. It
took them a long time to figure out how to adopt it.
For non-religiously motivated groups, how long they exist does not
have as strong an affect on the probability of adopting suicide
terrorism. Looking at all known suicide terrorism groups from 1983 to
2006, we see many direct connections and also indirect connections (the
LTTE invented the suicide vest, which Middle Eastern groups like Hamas
and others then modeled).
Adding together the direct and indirect links among groups, almost
every suicide terrorism adopter is linked together in one way or
another.
In the 1980s, Hizbollah was the hub from which suicide tactics spread
to the Palestinians and other groups. In the 1990s and beyond, al-Qaida
became the hub. Rather than focusing just on individual groups, the
phenomenon is best understood as part of a diffusion process.
Over the last few years, Afghanistan and Iraq have become the centres
of suicide bombing activity. From March 2003 to February 2006, between
former Baathist ideologues and Zarqawi and al-Qaida in Iraq, there were
more than 400 suicide attacks against US-led forces, Iraqi civilians,
and other groups.
Suicide terrorism in general has become more normalized over the last
decade. Bloom recently presented a paper at the annual meeting of the
International Studies Association on this point. She has noticed a
normalization and regularization in the past couple of years.
We can best make sense of it if we think of it as a military
innovation, not as something exotic, and if we study it from a diffusion
perspective. Instead of wondering why a group is doing this grotesque
thing, we need to wonder why they are but others are not.
The evidence suggests the importance of organizational factors in
driving the adoption or non-adoption of suicide terrorism, as well as
the existence of a diffusion process where the innovation spreads among
groups.
Therefore, we should study suicide terrorism in a serious fashion,
looking at the big picture and the key variables that explain behaviour,
rather than in an emotional manner.
(Excerpted from a recent presentation by Michael Horowitz, Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania to the
Foreign Policy Research Institute, US.) |