A Scholarly Look at Terror Sees Bootprints In the Sand

This information did not lead Pape to where he thought he was going.

"The prevailing wisdom is that suicide terrorism is largely a function of Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, myself, right after 9/11, I went and grabbed the Koran because I wanted to know what's wrong with Islam that this is driving people to do suicide terrorism," he says in the recent interview.

"Well, I was actually surprised" to discover that "what over 95 percent of all suicide attacks around the world since 1980 until today have in common is not religion, but a clear, strategic objective: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland."

So we weren't attacked on 9/11 by Islamic radicals because they hate our freedom?

Negative, says Pape: Fifteen of the 19 suicide hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, where nearly 5,000 U.S. combat troops were stationed at the time, with 7,000 more billeted elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula.

Although the largest U.S. military presence is now in Iraq, these troops are seen as a threat by some Muslims because of the Americans' overwhelming superiority and ability to quickly redeploy. Osama bin Laden, who has often spoken of the "American occupation of the Arabian Peninsula," said in 1996 that American troops are "going to conquer Iraq," says Pape. "Now fast-forward to 2005. How are you going to persuade somebody that bin Laden's wrong?"

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.

"No matter how you slice it," he says, "it's American policy that's underneath this, not Islamic fundamentalism."