dying to win

I recently finished reading Robert Pape's book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Pape is a professor at the University of Chicago and the director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, which compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack between 1983 and 2003. An earlier and shorter presentation of his findings can be found in his article, Dying to Kill Us. He describes the database:

This database is the first complete universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide. I have amassed and independently verified all the relevant information that could be found in English and other languages (for example, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and Tamil) in print and on-line. The information is drawn from suicide terrorist groups themselves, from the main organizations that collect such data in target countries, and from news media around the world. More than a "list of lists", this database probably represents the most comprehensive and reliable survey of suicide terrorist attacks that is now available.

Some of his findings:

• the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion
• of the 315 separate attacks in the database, 301 (95%) could have their roots traced to large, coherent political or military campaigns
• of the 384 (out of 462 total) attackers whose religious or ideological affiliation could be determined, 218 (57%) were secular and 166 (43%) were religious
• of the 381 attackers whose sex could be determined, 59 (15%) were women

The book is divided into three major sections: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, The Social Logic of Suicide Terrorism, and The Individual Logic of Suicide Terrorism. In each section he presents a thesis, which he then analyzes and presents evidence for. He argues that suicide terrorism is an effective strategy for a militarily weak group to compel a democracy to withdraw military forces from territory the terrorists consider as their homeland, that it is most common when there is a religious difference between the occupiers and the occupied, which sharpens differences between the communities, and that suicide terrorists see themselves like soldiers, giving their lives to further the goals of their community. In each section he brings up alternate theories then uses the data from his database to refute or disprove them. His conclusion:

Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than the product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the United States and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism. Since the root cause of suicide terrorism does not lie in an ideology, even among Muslims, spreading democracy across the Persian Gulf is not likely to be a panacea so long as foreign combat troops remain on the Arabian Peninsula.

As BostonJoe at Daily Kos noted, Pape's work is a reality-based criticism of every word that Bush says about terrorism. See also Pape's discussion of the July 7 bombings in London, Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs.