Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer, will present findings on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that argue that the majority of suicide terrorism around the world since 1980 has had a common cause: military occupation.



Pape and his team of researchers draw on data produced by a six-year study of suicide terrorist attacks around the world that was partially funded by the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency. They have compiled the terrorism statistics in a publicly available database comprising some 10,000 records on some 2,200 suicide terrorism attacks, dating back to the first suicide terrorism attack of modern times — the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 241 U.S. Marines.



"We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns, ... and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100 percent of the terrorist campaign," Pape said in an interview last week on his findings.



Pape said there has been a dramatic spike in suicide bombings in Afghanistan since U.S. forces began to expand their presence to the south and east of the country in 2006. While there were a total of 12 suicide attacks from 2001 to 2005 in Afghanistan when the U.S. had a relatively limited troop presence of a few thousand troops mostly in Kabul, since 2006 there have been more than 450 suicide attacks in Afghanistan — and they are growing more lethal, Pape said.

Deaths due to suicide attacks in Afghanistan have gone up by a third in the year since President Barack Obama added 30,000 more U.S. troops. "It is not making it any better," Pape said.



Pape believes his findings have important implications even for countries where the U.S. does not have a significant direct military presence but is perceived by the population to be indirectly occupying.



For instance, across the border from Afghanistan, suicide terrorism exploded in Pakistan in 2006 as the U.S. put pressure on then-Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf "to divert 100,000 Pakistani army troops from their [perceived] main threat [India] to western Pakistan," Pape said.



Based on his findings, Pape does not advocate a "cut and run," precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan but what he calls "off-shore balancing." In Afghanistan, he recommends a two-to-three-year plan, that

would in the first year freeze the number of U.S. forces in the country while intensifying political and economic development efforts, in particular, in Afghanistan's Pashtun south and east, followed by a U.S. military drawdown over two to three years — similar to the strategy in Iraq.



Pape and his colleagues will give an all-day presentation Tuesday at the Capitol Hill Visitor Center Congressional Auditorium, in an event co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and the New America Foundation (Pape speaks at 10:15 a.m., and the event will be streamed at Steve Clemons's blog, The Washington Note.). His findings are also coming out in a book, co-authored with James Feldman, called "Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It," published this month by the University of Chicago.

UPDATE: More from Wired's Spencer Ackerman about Pape's off-shore balancing recommendation and how it is embraced by the head of the U.S. Navy, Adm. Gary Roughead.

comments closed

permalink