A Scholarly Look at Terror Sees Bootprints In the Sand

washingtonpost.com > Arts & Living By Caryle Murphy: "Sageman faults Pape for putting al Qaeda in the same basket as such secular organizations as Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers and Palestinian groups in Lebanon. "He may be right about the other two," which are a "more traditional form of insurgency," says Sageman, but "he misunderstands al Qaeda. . . . This is not about occupation; it's about [al Qaeda] establishing an Islamic state in a core Arab region."

Sageman also notes that the lead hijacker on 9/11, Mohamed Atta, was Egyptian -- and "to my knowledge, I don't think we are occupying Egypt."

Al Qaeda expert Peter Bergen, author of "Holy War Inc." and a fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit public policy group, calls Pape's theory "kind of brilliant."

Pape "is part of a wave that includes Sageman who are looking at the data, and [as a result] all our conventional wisdom goes out the window," Bergen says. "It's comforting to think that a bunch of Islamic nut cases fresh out of madrassas are attacking us, but it turns out that a group of rational political actors who are as well educated as most Americans are attacking us."

Still, Bergen notes that Pape's ideas do not fit all cases. The Basques' fight against Spain, the Irish Republican Army's battle with Britain and, most notably, the Afghans' revolt against their Soviet occupiers never spawned suicide terrorists, though all involved perceived occupation. Also, says Bergen, martyrdom and the "powerful mythology around Islamic terrorism . . . can't be ignored."

Religion did play a role in 9/11 and other suicide attacks, he says, but not as great a one as many Americans believe.

When Pape looked at the beliefs of 384 of the 462 suicide attackers, he found that 43 percent were religious and 57 percent secular. If those whose ideology he could not determine are all assumed to be religiously motivated, it brings the religious group to 52 percent. Also, 301 of the 315 suicide terrorist attacks perpetrated in the years studied were part of what Pape calls strategic campaigns designed "for specific political, mainly secular goals."

After presenting preliminary data in the summer 2003 edition of the American Political Science Review, Pape got financing to set up the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, which he now directs. Funded by Carnegie Corp., the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory, the project collected data on conflicts in Lebanon, Kashmir, Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Israel, among others. Pape calls it "the most reliable and comprehensive survey on suicide terrorists that I'm aware of."

Although terrorist attacks of all kinds are falling, suicide attacks, which Pape regards as the most lethal threat to this country, are climbing. For example, since 9/11 al Qaeda has carried out 15 suicide attacks, killing 439 people. Before 9/11, it had killed 262 people in five attacks.

Pape found out the nationalities of 67 of the 71 al Qaeda suicide attackers. Two-thirds came from countries (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates) that had a U.S. combat presence before the attackers became suicide terrorists. The other third came from countries whose governments are heavily backed by the United States (Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco), Pape found."