BY ROBERT A. PAPE | OCTOBER 18, 2010
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/18/it_s_the_occupation_stupid
October 22, 2010 "Foreign
Policy" -- -Although no
one wants to talk about it, 9/11 is still hurting America. That terrible day
inflicted a wound of public fear that easily reopens with the smallest
provocation, and it continues to bleed the United States of money, lives, and
goodwill around the world. Indeed, America's response to its fear has, in turn,
made Americans less safe and has inspired more threats and attacks.
In the decade since 9/11, the United States has conquered and occupied two large
Muslim countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), compelled a huge Muslim army to root
out a terrorist sanctuary (Pakistan), deployed thousands of Special Forces
troops to numerous Muslim countries (Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, etc.), imprisoned
hundreds of Muslims without recourse, and waged a massive war of ideas involving
Muslim clerics to denounce violence and new institutions to bring Western norms
to Muslim countries. Yet Americans still seem strangely mystified as to why some
Muslims might be angry about this situation.
In a narrow sense, America is safer today than on 9/11. There has not been
another attack on the same scale. U.S. defenses regarding immigration controls,
airport security, and the disruption of potentially devastating domestic plots
have all improved.
But in a broader sense, America has become perilously unsafe. Each month, there
are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their allies in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001
combined. From 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world,
and at most 10 percent were anti-American inspired. Since 2004, there have been
more than 2,000, over 91 percent against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and other countries.
Yes, these attacks are overseas and mostly focused on military and diplomatic
targets. So too, however, were the anti-American suicide attacks before 2001. It
is important to remember that the 1995 and 1996 bombings of U.S. troops in Saudi
Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the
2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen were the crucial dots that showed the
threat was rising prior to 9/11. Today, such dots are occurring by the dozens
every month. So why is nobody connecting them?
U.S. military policies have not stopped the rising wave of extremism in the
Muslim world. The reason has not been lack of effort, or lack of bipartisan
support for aggressive military policies, or lack of funding, or lack of genuine
patriotism.
No. Something else is creating the mismatch between America's effort and the
results.
For nearly a decade, Americans have been waging a long war against terrorism
without much serious public debate about what is truly motivating terrorists to
kill them. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, this was perfectly
explicable -- the need to destroy al Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan was too urgent
to await sober analyses of root causes.
But, the absence of public debate did not stop the great need to know or,
perhaps better to say, to "understand" the events of that terrible day. In the
years before 9/11, few Americans gave much thought to what drives terrorism -- a
subject long relegated to the fringes of the media, government, and
universities. And few were willing to wait for new studies, the collection of
facts, and the dispassionate assessment of alternative causes. Terrorism
produces fear and anger, and these emotions are not patient.
A simple narrative was readily available, and a powerful conventional wisdom
began to exert its grip. Because the 9/11 hijackers were all Muslims, it was
easy to presume that Islamic fundamentalism was the central motivating force
driving the 19 hijackers to kill themselves in order to kill Americans. Within
weeks after the 9/11 attacks, surveys of American attitudes show that this
presumption was fast congealing into a hard reality in the public mind.
Americans immediately wondered, "Why do they hate us?" and almost as immediately
came to the conclusion that it was because of "who we are, not what we do." As
President George W. Bush said in his first address to Congress after the 9/11
attacks: "They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of
speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."
Thus was unleashed the "war on terror."
The narrative of Islamic fundamentalism did more than explain why America was
attacked and encourage war against Iraq. It also pointed toward a simple, grand
solution. If Islamic fundamentalism was driving the threat and if its roots grew
from the culture of the Arab world, then America had a clear mission: To
transform Arab societies -- with Western political institutions and social norms
as the ultimate antidote to the virus of Islamic extremism.
This narrative had a powerful effect on support for the invasion of Iraq.
Opinion polls show that for years before the invasion, more than 90 percent of
the U.S. public believed that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass
destruction (WMD). But this belief alone was not enough to push significant
numbers to support war.
What really changed after 9/11 was the fear that anti-American Muslims
desperately wanted to kill Americans and so any risk that such extremists would
get weapons of mass destruction suddenly seemed too great. Although few
Americans feared Islam before 9/11, by the spring of 2003, a near majority -- 49
percent -- strongly perceived that half or more of the world's 1.4 billion
Muslims were deeply anti-American, and a similar fraction also believed that
Islam itself promoted violence. No wonder there was little demand by
congressional committees or the public at large for a detailed review of
intelligence on Iraq's WMD prior to the invasion.
The goal of transforming Arab societies into true Western democracies had
powerful effects on U.S. commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Constitutions had
to be written; elections held; national armies built; entire economies
restructured. Traditional barriers against women had to be torn down. Most
important, all these changes also required domestic security, which meant
maintaining approximately 150,000 U.S. and coalition ground troops in Iraq for
many years and increasing the number of U.S. and Western troops in Afghanistan
each year from 2003 on.
Put differently, adopting the goal of transforming Muslim countries is what
created the long-term military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, the
United States would almost surely have sought to create a stable order after
toppling the regimes in these countries in any case. However, in both, America's
plans quickly went far beyond merely changing leaders or ruling parties; only by
creating Western-style democracies in the Muslim world could Americans defeat
terrorism once and for all.
There's just one problem: We now know that this narrative is not true.
New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of
9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic
fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance.
Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new
data presents a powerful picture.
More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign
occupation, according to extensive research that we conducted at the University
of Chicago's Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of
the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day. As
the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined
population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen
dramatically -- from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009.
Further, over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American. The
vast majority of suicide terrorists hail from the local region threatened by
foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are
Afghans.
Israelis have their own narrative about terrorism, which holds that Arab
fanatics seek to destroy the Jewish state because of what it is, not what it
does. But since Israel withdrew its army from Lebanon in May 2000, there has not
been a single Lebanese suicide attack. Similarly, since Israel withdrew from
Gaza and large parts of the West Bank, Palestinian suicide attacks are down over
90 percent.
Some have disputed the causal link between foreign occupation and suicide
terrorism, pointing out that some occupations by foreign powers have not
resulted in suicide bombings -- for example, critics often cite post-World War
II Japan and Germany. Our research provides sufficient evidence to address these
criticisms by outlining the two factors that determine the likelihood of suicide
terrorism being employed against an occupying force.
The first factor is social distance between the occupier and occupied. The wider
the social distance, the more the occupied community may fear losing its way of
life. Although other differences may matter, research shows that resistance to
occupations is especially likely to escalate to suicide terrorism when there is
a difference between the predominant religion of the occupier and the
predominant religion of the occupied.
Religious difference matters not because some religions are predisposed to
suicide attacks. Indeed, there are religious differences even in purely secular
suicide attack campaigns, such as the LTTE (Hindu) against the Sinhalese
(Buddhists).
Rather, religious difference matters because it enables terrorist leaders to
claim that the occupier is motivated by a religious agenda that can scare both
secular and religious members of a local community -- this is why Osama bin
Laden never misses an opportunity to describe U.S. occupiers as "crusaders"
motivated by a Christian agenda to convert Muslims, steal their resources, and
change the local population's way of life.
The second factor is prior rebellion. Suicide terrorism is typically a strategy
of last resort, often used by weak actors when other, non-suicidal methods of
resistance to occupation fail. This is why we see suicide attack campaigns so
often evolve from ordinary terrorist or guerrilla campaigns, as in the cases of
Israel and Palestine, the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey, or the LTTE in Sri Lanka.
One of the most important findings from our research is that empowering local
groups can reduce suicide terrorism. In Iraq, the surge's success was not the
result of increased U.S. military control of Anbar province, but the empowerment
of Sunni tribes, commonly called the Anbar Awakening, which enabled Iraqis to
provide for their own security. On the other hand, taking power away from local
groups can escalate suicide terrorism. In Afghanistan, U.S. and Western forces
began to exert more control over the country's Pashtun regions starting in early
2006, and suicide attacks dramatically escalated from this point on.
The research suggests that U.S. interests would be better served through a
policy of offshore balancing. Some scholars have taken issue with this approach,
arguing that keeping boots on the ground in South Asia is essential for U.S.
national security. Proponents of this strategy fail to realize how U.S. ground
forces often inadvertently produce more anti-American terrorists than they kill.
In 2000, before the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, there were 20 suicide
attacks around the world, and only one (against the USS Cole) was directed
against Americans. In the last 12 months, by comparison, 300 suicide attacks
have occurred, and over 270 were anti-American. We simply must face the reality
that, no matter how well-intentioned, the current war on terror is not serving
U.S. interests.
The United States has been great in large part because it respects understanding
and discussion of important ideas and concepts, and because it is free to change
course. Intelligent decisions require putting all the facts before us and
considering new approaches. The first step is recognizing that occupations in
the Muslim world don't make Americans any safer -- in fact, they are at the
heart of the problem.
Robert A. Pape teaches at the University of Chicago and is co-author, with James K. Feldman, of Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.
Comments:
capt jim
More propaganda--WE WERE NEVER ATTACKED BY ANYONE BUT OUR OWN MURDERING WAR MONGERS UNDER THE ZIONIST PLAN TO GET AMERICA TO KILL AND ROB PEOPLE OF SOVEREIGN NATIONS, IN WHICH AMERICAN-JEWS and THEIR AGENT FROM ISRAEL PLAYED A MAJOR PART--all the rest is hog wash--and I won't touch pig.
Real Deal
This is a completely accurate
analysis, accurate conclusion. Thank you Mr Pape for the courage.
In America it still takes great courage to go against the powerful elites
especially those of the neocon persuasion. There is still an overwhelming
mindset across all spectrum of society that America is the exception of the
world, superior in every aspect, able to conduct policies around the world as it
pleases. Foremost in the right to use its massive military forces to support an
imperial economic and trade agenda. Those on the other side obviously see it
differently. Occupation of foreign lands have increased after 9/11 - an
indication of an America continue to enjoy its grand superpower status after
WW2, and not willing to give it up without a fight to the death.
There are 3 root causes behind 9/11: a) secure foreign oil supply using military
bases, b) secure the US dollar as a global oil currency, thus enhancing its
reserve status, 3) secure and control the entire region for long term strategic
interests. The benefits are very great. But the cost is getting so high, its an
break-even. But I fear financial break-even, a few thousand military deaths, are
not enough to change US policy. If history is any guide, it takes collapse of
empire from within.
drmnys
Are you Westerners all retarded.
Why does it take you extensive "RESEARCH" to arrive at an obvious conclusion.
And why cant you get it through your thick heads and stone cold hearts, the
people whom you are callously referring to as "Suicide Terrorists" are brave and
courageous resistance fighters. Its disgusting how even so called anti-war
westerners use the very offensive and meaningless word "Terrorist". The very
mention of this word discredits whatever this author has to say. The only real
"Terrorists" are the USA and her allies, and their pathological desire to rule
and oppress the world should be subject of scrutiny and study not the motivating
factors of Muslims (aka "Islamic Fundamentalists" as the author refers to them),
who are merely defending themselves against a vastly more powerful and
diabolical foe who wishes to utterly destroy them and their way of life.
Mr.Pape like many others also conveniently forgets history and the crimes of his
nation when he proclaims 9/11 to be starting point of the West vs Muslim wars.
The aggression and injustices perpetrated by the west against the Muslims
predates 9/11 by decades, namely the creation of the illegitimate state of
Israel at the expense of the Palestinians or the genocide of 500000 Iraqis
through starvation by a decade of blockade and sanctions or the constant anti-muslim
propaganda and covert programs to undermine Muslims and their way of life, to
name a few.
The US and her allies are the problem here, not the "suicide terrorists". The US
poses a threat to the entire world and must be severely dealt with by all free
and justice loving people of the world. So rather than forming think-tanks and
wasting everyones time conducting research on how to stop 'Suicide Terrorists',
perhaps Mr. Pape and others like him would do better by researching the cause of
America's insatiable appetite to rule and tyrannize the world and ways to curb
and contain it. A breakthrough in this field would be a blessing to everyone.
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