Killing to make a killing.

• Author: Pham, J. Peter
• Position: Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism - Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism - Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism - Book Review

Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Columbia University, 2005), 280 pp., $24.95.

Timothy Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (New York: Basic, 2005), 415 pp., $26.

Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House), 352 pp., $25.95.

SUICIDE OPERATIONS are not only one of the most prominent features of contemporary terrorism, but they are also increasingly the phenomenon's primary manifestation. At a time when terrorist incidents of all kinds have declined by nearly half--from a peak of 666 in 1987 to 348 in 2001, according to University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape's count--suicide attacks have escalated sharply from an average of three per year in the 1980s to nearly fifty in 2003. Over that same period, suicide terrorism has established itself as terrorism's most lethal form: While accounting for only 3 percent of all terrorist incidents from 1980 through 2003, it was responsible for 48 percent of all victims killed by terrorists, even if the immense casualties of September 11, 2001, are not counted. Despite its significance, the phenomenon of suicide is poorly understood--at least by its intended targets.

The very nature of the problem contributes a great deal to the confusion. By definition, suicide terrorism is a more extreme form than other terrorist actions aimed at garnering publicity, mobilizing support or coercing opponents, precisely because it presupposes that to achieve these ends the perpetrator must adopt a modus operandi--whether wearing a vest packed with explosives, driving a car bomb or piloting an airplane--that requires his or her death in order to carry out a successful attack against the chosen target. This characteristic of the phenomenon has led to all manner of explanations. Some have focused on the premeditated certainty of death of the individual suicide bombers and proceeded to describe them as idealists whose willingness to sacrifice themselves must be born from an innate justice of their cause or hopelessness of their circumstances. Others have focused on what they perceive as the phenomenon's fanatical Muslim religious dimension. (At one point in the 1980s, it was even described by the experts du jour as specifically endogenous to the Shi'a community.) While varying considerably in both their diagnoses and in the consequent practical prescriptions, these explanations share the common presumption that suicide terrorists somehow constitute a radical discontinuity in the international arena and that only an equally abrupt shift in political approach--whether through a wholesale transformation of Muslim societies (and those in other troubled places around the globe) or by somehow magically redressing the injustice, oppression and other "root causes" that feature prominently in terrorists' complaints and demands--is adequate to the challenge.

The Logic of Suicide Operations

IN HIS new book, however, Pape begs to differ with the latter analyses, which have to a certain extent been received by the policy mainstream as conventional wisdom. Expanding on research he initially presented in the August 2003 issue of the American Political Science Review, Pape compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980-2003--some 315 in all--in which the terrorist killed himself or herself while attempting to kill others. Pape's data show that there is little direct causal connection between suicide terrorism and any single religious tradition or religion at all: Religious fanaticism, after all, cannot explain why the leading perpetrators of suicide attacks, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, who carried out 76 of the 315 incidents studied, are Marxist-Leninists whose members hail from Hindu families but are now militantly anti-religious. Religion, according to Pape, is more likely to be instrumentalized by terrorist organizations than to be their root cause. Likewise, popular early explanations that played off the psychological dispositions that might drive individuals to become suicide bombers have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds from which known perpetrators have hailed.

Pape's analysis of the data leads him to the conclusion that even if many suicide attackers are irrational or fanatical, the organizations that recruit, train and dispatch them are not. The evidence that emerges is that suicide terrorism, instead of being impenetrable to conventional political...