Wednesday, August 10, 2005

The logic of Suicide Terrorism

Yes, this comes from an unlikely source, The American Conservative Magazine. However, I recommend reading it. It's an interview with Associate Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, who wrote a book on this subject called Dying to Win.

What the article contains might surprise you, such as this:

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pape is right that suicide terrorism is driven by fairly well defined political objectives but if you're implying that that means that Islamic terrorists can be negotiated with, I'm afraid you're wrong. The political objectives are almost invariably broader than a simple demand for troop withdrawal. Shamil Basaev may want Russian troops out of Chechnya but he also wants Chechnya to united with neighbouring Dagestan and to impose Sharia law.

Unknown said...

Kimmitt, I'm not implying anything, except for I thought it was an interesting article that presented a point of view not often heard.

I do that from time to time when I find something I think is worth sharing. I don't have to necessarily agree with all of it, typically it's something I believe most of us have not seen.

Sometimes I even present something I don't agree with if it makes me think or think some of the regular readers here might enjoy it, there is a pretty diverse group that comments/reads here.

Anonymous said...

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