Weeks 5-7 LR

Box 3.1. Living, and Dying, with Suicide Bombers - Ralph Peters

After spending trillions of dollars on high-tech armaments, the United States finds itself confounded by a dirt-cheap weapon of genius: the suicide bomber. The ultimate precision weapon and genuine "smart bomb," the suicide bomber is hard to deter and exasperatingly difficult to defeat. This is the "poor man's nuke." For a few hundred dollars (or less) and a human life, a suicide bomber can achieve strategic effects the U.S. Air Force can only envy. For all of the claims that technology would dominate the twenty-first century - and not only in the realm of warfare - we find that impassioned faith still trumps microchips. Armed with a fervent belief in his god's appetite for blood, the suicide bomber can dominate headlines around the world with a few pounds of explosives. A paradox of the Information Age is that it's simultaneously the new age of superstition. As calcified social orders collapse under the pressures of global change, those who feel most threatened flee into debased, occult religion. Increasingly, fanaticism finds outlet in shedding the blood not only of unbelievers but also of co-religionists whose beliefs are seen as imperfect. The suicide bomber views himself (more rarely, herself) as fulfilling a divine mission whose execution will be rewarded in paradise. How do we discourage an enemy who regards death as a promotion? How do we identify the religious madman among the masses in time to stop him from killing? On a practical level, defeating the increasing numbers of suicide bombers is our most difficult security mission.

Implications for Counterterrorism

As Taylor and Horgan (2006) have argued, a clear implication of thinking about initial involvement as part of a process is that it provides a clear agenda for psychological research on terrorist behavior: an attempt to understand the decisions made by the individual at particular times within a particular social and organizational context. When we frame initial involvement in terrorism within a broader process of involvement and engagement, we can identify a shared characteristic: that a powerful incentive is the sense of reward, however distant to the believer or seemingly intangible to the onlooker. Given this common denominator, what tangible operational strategies can be offered to counterterrorism initiatives? Despite the increased discussions of root causes of terrorism, we can do little in a practical sense to change the "push" factors (i.e., the broad sociopolitical conditions) that give rise to the increased likelihood of the emergence of terrorism. In contrast, counterterrorism programs may be more effective in concentrating on the "pull" factors (or "lures"), since they tend to be narrower, more easily identifiable, and specific to particular groups and contexts. Two examples from Northern Ireland illustrate this point. The first dates from 1987, when British investigative journalist Roger Cook conducted an undercover expose of the racketeering activities of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the largest Loyalist terrorist organization in Northern Ireland. Cook's coinvestigators set up a meeting between one of their team (who posed as a businessman) and a local UDA brigadier, Eddie Sayers. Sayers represented one of the UDA's many "front" security companies. The meeting was covertly filmed, and Sayers was shown attempting to extort money from the supposed businessman. When the program aired, it became a sustained source of extreme embarrassment to the UDA leadership and to Sayers, in particular, who was shown having difficulty with simple arithmetic during his calculation of the extortion demand. As described in Cusack and Taylor's (1993) case study, the documentary proved to be a powerful catalyst (among other factors) that led to massive internal upheaval within the UDA, particularly between those within the UDA who had made concerted efforts to clean up the movement and those heavily engaged in criminality. The internecine feuding that followed led to bitter recriminations and even assassinations, but more damaging in the long term, the UDA's reputation never fully recovered. The second example comes from a series of wide-ranging interviews this author conducted between 2006 and late 2007 with former members of more than a dozen terrorist groups around the world, ranging from nationalist or ideological to jihadist movements. The interviews focused on the relationship between reasons for becoming involved and the ways in which people disengage from, and ultimately end, their involvement. One interview, with a former highranking member of the Provisional IRA, revealed a particular moment when the reality of involvement was brought home The IRA member, who was responsible for the largest Republican area in Northern Ireland, was under competing pressures within the organization to step up attacks as the ceasefire unraveled and, on the other hand, to scale down attacks in an effort to keep the ceasefire in place. During this tumultuous time, he found himself having tea with Kevin McKenna, later the "chief of staff" of the Provisional IRA. When McKenna commented on the recent bombing death of a pregnant policewoman—"we might get two for the price of one"—the IRA member began to gain perspective, asking himself questions about the situation he found himself in. He realized he had been locked in "a very localized, kind of almost a defender situation." Whereas his own goal had been to attack the British Army, his colleagues "wanted to shoot the local [Ulster Defence Regiment] down the road." The interviewee explained how this was one of the defining moments that brought him not only to question his own involvement in the movement but also, subsequently, to inflict damage on the movement by becoming an informer. What the Loyalist and Republican examples have in common is the significant difference between the perceptions and the day-to-day reality associated with terrorism. The significance of this divide is of enormous value and may come to play a potentially critical role for psychological research in counterterrorism operations. Even on a basic level, it can be difficult to overestimate the significance of the media in undermining the positive attractions (particularly the sense of nobility) that involvement in terrorism is deemed to hold for potential recruits. By making the realities of terrorism known, it may be possible to undermine terrorism in ways not considered viable or potentially effective in the past. Unfortunately, little systematic attention has been paid to the potential role that counterpropaganda may have in redirecting or displacing cognitions and behaviors that may otherwise catalyze initial involvement in political violence. The mass media, both journalistic and popular, has an underdeveloped but potentially significant role to play in contributing to the environment in which terrorism thrives and simultaneously in which the attraction to involvement in terrorism may be undermined. Challenges to the myths and lures of terrorism probably can be an effective counterterrorist strategy for both the group and the individual, but they can only be realistic and meaningful if they are directed at specific populations. The effectiveness of any form of counterpropaganda on individuals already involved in clear and unambiguous terrorist activity will necessarily be limited at the outset, primarily when alternate views are identified as belonging to the "enemy" and thus are frequently interpreted as part of a conspiracy. The effectiveness of any propaganda, regardless of context, will rely heavily on the credibility and relevant expertise of the communicator and in particular on perceptions of the communicator's intention. (People generally tend to be more trusting of the communicator if they do not perceive that he or she has something to gain or explicitly intends to persuade.) The perception of expertise on the part of the communicator can be based on factors such as similarity in social background (e.g., similar views, values, and status), although differences in age or leadership may promote the communicator to "expert" status. Thus, counterterrorism (or counterpropaganda) initiatives must identify sources that will be more credible for communicating countermessages. For example, it would be beneficial to encourage those who have disengaged from terrorist activity to become more vocal in dispelling the attractions and lures of involvement in movements. Although it might seem that such counterpropaganda would be ignored by the deeply committed (to paraphrase Hundeide's [2003] term), the messages may have a real impact on those at the initial stages of involvement. There are already some positive developments on this front. Taarnby's (2005) examination of activities in Yemen using moderate Muslim clerics and Boucek's (2007) examination of the "rehabilitation" program in Saudi Arabia suggest that counterpropaganda may effectively challenge the extremist beliefs of imprisoned jihadists and their sympathizers. Although researchers have yet to examine systematically the "de-radicalization" programs developing in a variety of countries, the groundwork for comparative work has already begun (e.g., Bjørgo and Horgan forthcoming)

Qualities of Continued Involvement

Cordes (1987) and Taylor and Quayle (2004) identified common themes in terrorists' self-perception that have relevance to understanding the development of involvement in terrorism, reflecting the importance of both the language terrorists use as well as how they use it. Taylor and Quayle reported that terrorists, whatever the exact nature of their groups, unanimously view their involvement in violence as a provoked reaction requiring defense against an enemy. It is difficult to ascertain the effect these types of verbal explanations would have in the absence of exposure to some of the effects and qualities of membership, and life as part of a terrorist movement more generally. In other words, the reason given for involvement may be a direct reflection of an ideological learning process that comes from being part of the group. We may essentially be discovering potent qualities of what Hundeide (2003) termed the "community of practice" associated with counterculture groups of committed insiders. The recruit may have learned to interpret his initial movement into the group to heighten the positive image of the group as well as to confirm the ideological commitment that the group has now solidified over this recruit. For this reason, we may need to be mindful of a particular distinction for asking questions of former terrorists. Asking someone, "Why did you become involved?" as opposed to "How did you become involved?" may reveal a very different kind of answer. Often when asking the why question, a terrorist's stated motivation for involvement and justification for violence, Cordes (1987) suggested, may reveal more about the organization's internal use of propaganda and ideological control than anything conclusive about the personal account. That is, self-accounts of involvement in terrorism may derive from the individual's own sense of truth or some sort of commonly shared or acquired truth that is ritualistically enshrined through the community of practice. While it may be plausible to assume that "fraternalistic over egoistic" (Burgess, Ferguson, and Hollywood forthcoming) goals are genuine features of individual accounts, it is more likely that they reflect a learning quality incurred from continued involvement and increasing commitment. Accounts that convey a sense of the external forces that provide the push into terrorism tend to ignore the supportive qualities (or "pull" factors) that influence individuals. The terrorist may be either reluctant or unintentionally forgetful to mention such lures in an interview situation or autobiographical account. The significance of each particular kind of lure will vary for the individual. The degree of acquired ideological control and "self"-propaganda that might exist for a person could be measured as a function of how little that terrorist acknowledges the existence of real and imagined rewards for joining the terrorist group. The true significance of particular assumed or self-identified catalyst events must thus be considered with caution, particularly in the absence of any acknowledgement of the supposed positive qualities of involvement gained (or expected via continued commitment) by the individual. Their true significance is likely to be more potent to those already participating in a peripheral activity, such as a peaceful protest. In fact, the overall significance of pushing catalyst events as triggering factors (as former terrorists often do, especially in autobiographies) can only be appreciated in the context of other qualities of the descriptions given by activists. Particularly in those terrorists interviewed by Taylor and Quayle (1994), the notion that there was simply "no other choice" was a commonly offered explanation of initial involvement in a terrorist movement. Frequent references to violence being an inevitable response, a form of self-defense in fact, to broader conditions are common in all terrorist groups, and such explanations reflect heavily conspiratorial dimensions (legitimized usually with clear references to the victimized group or community) in jihadist groups in particular. Closely related to the notion of positive qualities (or expected positive qualities) of continued involvement is an appreciation of the community context. Hassan (2001), who interviewed many militants in the region, described how, in Palestinian neighborhoods the suicide bombers' green birds appear on posters, and in graffiti—the language of the street. Calendars are illustrated with the "martyr of the month." Paintings glorify the dead bombers in Paradise, triumphant beneath a flock of green birds. This symbol is based on a saying of the Prophet Muhammad that the soul of a martyr is carried to Allah in the bosom of the green birds of Paradise. (P. 3) Post, Sprinzak, and Denny (2003) interviewed incarcerated members of Hamas and its armed wing Izz ad-Din al Qassam, Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad, and others from secular movements and discovered similarities between the supportive qualities that shaped individual pathways into terrorism, despite the wide variety in participants' backgrounds and histories: The boyhood heroes for the Islamist terrorists were religious figures, such as the Prophet, or the radical Wahabi Islamist, Abdullah Azzam; for the secular terrorists, revolutionary heroes such as Che Guevara or Fidel Castro were identified. Most had some high school, and some had education beyond high school. The majority of the subjects reported that their families were respected in the community. The families were experienced as being uniformly supportive of their commitment to the cause. (P. 172)

Who Are They?

Deplore his act though we rightly do, the suicide bomber who imagines himself a defender of his threatened faith and humiliated people is the extremist equivalent of the soldier we revere for throwing himself on a grenade to save his comrades' lives. Our rules for self-sacrifice are different, but the psychology is uncomfortably familiar. The results may differ terribly, but the motivation has filial roots. We see only the indiscriminate carnage, the apparent madness. Until we recognize his crazed valor, we cannot understand the suicide bomber. And it's much harder to defeat an enemy you don't understand. Suicide bombers are recruited from the ranks of troubled souls, from those who find mundane reality overwhelming and terrifying. The suicide bomber longs for release from the insecurities of his daily experience. He is fleeing from life every bit as much as he's rushing toward paradise. We have faced enemies more dangerous, but none so implacable. The world's great strategic struggle of this century is between those who believe in a generous, loving god - in any religion - and those who serve a punitive, merciless deity. The suicide bomber has chosen his side

D. Strain and Deprivation Theories

First cousins of Durkheim's theory of anomie and normlessness are theories about the effects of strain and deprivation on behavior. According to the strain-deprivation theories of criminology, people are more inclined to commit crime when they feel poor, socially stigmatized, or otherwise frustrated with their situation. The frustration derives typically from an awareness that they are not as well off as people in higher social and economic classes in the society and that pulling themselves up from poverty to a satisfactory status, if at all possible through legitimate pursuits, would involve considerably more struggle and further frustration than are bearable. Strain theory grows out of the ancient idea that, in the words of Aristotle, "poverty engenders rebellion and crime" (quoted by Quinney, 1970). It emanates more directly from Merton's 1930s theory of anomie and its emphasis on widely shared goals combined with unequal opportunities. This theory was developed more fully in the 1950s and '60s, with the idea that individual hostilities become mutually enforced and stimulated through associations with like-minded peers, especially in areas with limited opportunities for legitimate alternatives to participation in criminal activities Has poverty, in fact, been found to be associated with terrorism? The evidence is mixed. On the one hand, al Qaeda's well-documented recruitment of poor young men from throughout the Middle East to blow up people in Shi'ite mosques and public places in Iraq in the name of holy war certainly provides ample support to the theory that poverty is behind terrorism. On the other hand, the fact that the nineteen terrorists who participated in the 9/11 attack were predominantly from middle-class families stands as compelling anecdotal counterevidence. More generally, the vast majority of known terrorists are from poor countries, but impoverished, illiterate, and disease-ridden nations have produced relatively few terrorists. Several studies provide more systematic evidence suggesting that suicide bombers tend to be among the more well off and better educated members of the populations from which they come (Barro, 2002; Krueger, 2007). Pape's (2005) study of more than 450 suicide terrorists indicates that terrorists are significantly more likely to come from middle- and upper-class families. Evidence consistent with Pape's findings has been reported by Alberto Abadie (2004), who finds that terrorism is driven primarily by a country's level of political freedom rather than by its level of poverty. Similarly, Sageman's (2004) study of 172 jihadist terrorists provides support for the idea that alienation is behind terrorism, but that much of the alienation is experienced by educated middle- and upper-class people, predominantly men, deriving from their inability to get the sort of jobs they feel they deserve, and is encouraged primarily by the social bonds created with other middle-class alienated young men. Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova's (2003) study of 129 members of Hezbollah who died in action in the Middle East from 1982 to 1994 found that the terrorists were better educated and less impoverished than Lebanese of comparable age and regional origin. Charles Russell and Bowman Miller (1983) studied eighteen non-Muslim revolutionary groups, including the Japanese Red Army, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang, and Italy's Red Brigades, and found the vast majority to be well educated, with about two-thirds having some university education and coming from the middle or upper classes in their respective homelands. And Victor Davis Hanson (2005b) notes that oil money from Saudi Arabia has been used to finance Wahhabi mosques and madrassas all over the world, as has oil money from Iran to prop up Hezbollah and from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to support mayhem in Iraq and elsewhere in the region mayhem in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. French scholar Gilles Kepel concludes that today's militant global jihadis are not so much poor Third Worlders as they are "the privileged children of an unlikely marriage between Wahhabism and Silicon Valley, which alZawahiri visited in the 1990s. They were heirs not only to jihad and the ummah but also to the electronic revolution and American-style globalization (Kepel, 2005, p. 112)."2 The evidence, in short, suggests that the most serious acts of terrorism tend to be committed by people who have access to resources that are not readily available to other terrorists, and they are conducted in places that are inaccessible to others. Terrorist acts carried out in the Middle East and other poor places may be committed predominantly by poor young men, but even in those cases there is little evidence that they are poorer than the mainstream of young people in the region This does not mean that poverty cannot be a motivator for the alienation that leads to terrorism. Nor does it mean that strain, regardless of whether it is related to poverty, is not a source of terrorism. Strain theory was originally conceived as an explanation for crime related to frustration arising primarily from poverty, but a general strain theory (GST) has evolved that focuses on crime that arises from stressors that may have nothing to do with poverty. Robert Agnew, a leading proponent of GST, argues that people engage in crime and delinquency primarily because of negative treatment by others, and the effect of that negative treatment tends to be cumulative. They become upset and experience a range of emotions from frustration to anger and depression. Criminal acts serve as a coping mechanism that reduces or provides an escape from the strains Agnew elaborates by describing three types of strain: strain associated with the loss of something valued (property or a loved one), strain associated with disrespect or physical abuse, and strain associated with the blockage of valued goals or thwarting of intentions (Agnew, 1992, p. 50; 2005, p. 26). Each of these three sources of strain may apply as well to an individual's terrorist acts, and one may be a more common source than the other two in particular circumstances. Many suicide bombings have been accompanied by videotapes of the bombers explaining their acts beforehand, and these explanations often include stories of the loss of a loved one or loved ones at the hands of people associated, however loosely, with those about to be attacked. The bombers often characterize their acts as "revenge killings," but it may be more precise and valid to describe them as the product of a mixture of stress and anger associated with loss, perhaps accompanied by other motives such as martyrdom and loyalty. Agnew goes on to say that, although the strains are typically experienced directly, they may instead be either vicarious or anticipated. The crimes that result are a manifestation of the individual's mechanism for coping with the strain. They provide temporary relief through a medium more accessible than legitimate activity, giving a momentary feeling of power and the opportunity to express rage, release built-up negative emotion, and exact revenge Strain theory has been validated empirically as arising from stresses on both the communal and personal levels, such as stressful personal events and events occurring in the community, failures to achieve important personal goals or specific obstacles blocking the attainment of those valued goals, and the presence of despised people, extremely unpleasant circumstances, or conflict (Aseltine, Gore and Gordon, 2000; Mazerolle and Piquero, 1998; Paternoster and Mazerolle, 1994). Although this research has focused on conventional crimes, these stresses can quite clearly be the source of episodes of terrorism.

F. Gangs, Territory, and Honor

If a routine activities approach to prevention is to succeed, it must recognize that many, if not most, acts of terrorism are committed by terrorists operating in small cells. In settings in which these cells resemble gangs, gang intervention strategies become increasingly relevant to the prevention of terrorism. One has only to compare photographs of members of Hamas or Hezbollah with those of ethnic urban gangs in the United States to see obvious parallels: young males with menacing glares in hostile poses, holding weapons, invoking ritual symbols, and so on. The similarities extend beyond what is apparent in these photographs to include secrecy, a deep sense of honor and loyalty, severe punishments for violations of group codes, engagement in criminal activities to provide support, flaunting of formal and informal civil authority, alienation from elders, and hostility with rival groups, among others. The tendency for young men to bond through aggressive activity in order to establish social legitimacy has been well established by anthropologists (Peterson and Wrangham, 1997; Tiger, 1969). One of the seductions offered by both gangs and terrorist cells is the personal validation that often derives from the intense camaraderie generated by such involvements. These bonds tend to be particularly close in the most dangerous and elusive terrorist groups. The most lethal acts of terrorism require unconditional loyalty among the members and tenacious commitment to a cause, if the terrorists are to evade detection and ensure success of the mission. Suicide bombers need associates to receive training and supplies, but it is their zeal, typically fueled by comrades, that induces them to strap on suicide vests or drive cars on suicide missions. Lone-wolf suicide bombers are fairly rare (Pape, 2005; Stern, 2003). Effective gang intervention strategies vary depending on the nature of the gang. Entrepreneurial gangs tend to be smaller and more hierarchical, calling for intervention strategies that focus on disruption of the markets in which the gangs operate, intensive surveillance, and disruption of the gang hierarchies. Strategies for ending waves of crimes caused by territorial gangs include bridge-building to informal social control agents and networks in the neighborhood, the creation of athletic and recreational opportunities to rechannel youth activity, and community policing interventions that bring the police closer to families and communities to solve problems before they escalate into crimes (Huff, 1996). Many criminologists who specialize in gangs are loathe to apply what is known about street gangs to terrorists, and for good reason: interventions that have been found to be effective for street gangs may have limited relevance to terrorist cells. Street gangs tend to be more materially motivated; they rarely have strong political agendas or are driven by profound religious visions. That said, it would be a serious error to overlook strategies that are relevant to both street gangs and terrorist cells. Intervention strategies that focus on surveillance - through wiretaps, cell phone intercepts, blog monitoring, and e-mail messages - and on the disruption of sources of illicit income that support gang violence could be particularly useful and relevant, especially for terrorist cells that are known to finance their operations through such activities. Network analysis, which can help clarify the relationships among individuals and groups generally, has proven to be an increasingly useful approach to understanding the dynamics of specific gangs and could have relevance as well to the understanding of relationships among members of terrorist cells and groups (Rosenfeld, White and Phillips, 2003). Longer term approaches that remove the sources of alienation that drive young people to commit terrorist acts of the sort perpetrated in London, Madrid, and elsewhere may be even more pertinent. Marc Sageman (2004) argues that terrorist groups are much like gangs in that they emerge spontaneously from below, rather than through a "topdown" recruiting approach. Terrorist cells - "bunches of guys" - often evolve from friendships and kinships, and the seeds of terrorism germinate as some members of a cell influence the thinking of the others. A former CIA spy recruiter and authority on al Qaeda, Sageman finds that the existence of social bonds among alienated young men who happen to be Muslim has considerably more explanatory power in understanding jihadist violence than do poverty, religious belief, or political frustration. These young men enjoy a sense of clandestine belonging. The cells become effective instruments of terrorism "through mutual emotional and social support, development of a common identity, and encouragement to adopt a new faith." Sageman finds these internal group ties to be more powerful than external factors "such as common hatred for an outside group." Because participation in these associations is more fraternal than deeply ideological, the members are more likely eventually to become more receptive to positive Western influences than their parents and grandparents were (Ignatius, 2006e). Sageman's analysis has some potentially useful implications for prevention. He argues that secular Arab governments have used peaceful Muslim political movements to undermine the popular support enjoyed by jihadists, much like socialist and democratic communist parties in Europe helped isolate Soviet-supported communists and radical Marxist cells. The United States and other Western nations might do well to consider using similar strategies wherever applicable. Such an approach has in fact been used successfully by European colonial administrations in the Middle East. This approach could be considerably more effective than political displays of toughness in the "war on terror" and aggressively prosecuting - thus alienating - people who might otherwise be persuaded to provide useful information about the sources of support to terrorism, as was done, for example, in the case of the Lackawanna Six in upstate New York in 2002. Another approach to the problem of terrorist cells is suggested by political scientist Quintan Wiktorowicz. His book, Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West (2005), documents a case study in which Wiktorowicz embedded himself with al-Muhajiroun, a London-based extremist Salafist group. The group indoctrinated impressionable, directionless young Muslims, feeding them ideas aimed to transform them from passive bystanders into warriors in the fiery cause of battle against nonbelievers. Wiktorowics observes that successful intervention against such seductive dogma requires the same sort of intense deprogramming that has been used to wean converts away from modern cults in other societies; these young Muslims must be persuaded that Islam is rooted in notions of peace and harmony and is not a fundamentally hostile faith. Can such deprogramming succeed? To have some chance for success, it is important that those doing the deprogramming understand the group dynamics at work. Members of terrorist cells have been described as driven, fiercely loyal, cohesive, and unyielding - qualities that do not lend themselves readily to rapid transformation (Crenshaw, 1998; Martin, 2006; Post, 1998). Deprogramming is more likely to work when applied to groups of individuals who are still young and malleable, before their indoctrination and experiences have hardened them. Some go further in drawing parallels between street gangs and terrorist cells, suggesting that urban gangs may yet transform themselves into organized crime and terrorist networks that are hybrids of entrepreneurial gangs and terrorist cells. Tony Corn (2006), for example, characterizes the November 2005 Parisian intifada as a "dress rehearsal" for such a development. John P. Sullivan (2002) and Max Manwaring (2005) see the arrival of "thirdgeneration gangs," following a first generation of turf gangs and English soccer hooligans, and a second generation of entrepreneurial drug gangs. Sullivan regards the Bloods, Crips, and El Rukn gangs in the United States; the Medellin and Cali cartels in Colombia; and Russian "mafiyas" as forerunners of third-generation urban gangs. Manwaring focuses more on the insurgent means and government-overthrow aims of the new groups. Both authorities see these burgeoning organizations trafficking in drugs, weapons, and other contraband items and becoming more organized, politicized, sophisticated, mercenary, and international, operating largely through communication and information network technologies that had not been widely available before the twenty-first century. Regardless of the precise nature of these new hybrid gangs, how pervasive they are, and the actual threats of violence against innocent people they pose, one aspect of successful gang intervention policy is clearly pertinent to the prevention of terrorism by Sageman's "bunches of guys" doing bad things: there is no magic bullet, no single strategy that can be effective across the board. Finn-Aage Esbensen (2000) observes that the complexity of circumstances that lead to gangs doing violent acts does not lead readily to cookie-cutter solutions. Dealing effectively with these groups is likely to require comprehensive strategies that incorporate a variety of creative approaches targeting individuals and peer groups, as well as forging positive relationships with families and entire communities. Each of these entities typically contributes in varying degrees to the problem, and each can contribute no less to the solution. To prevent serious acts of terrorism by groups, it will be essential in the short term to use effective means of surveillance - including both human and technological intelligence - together with the protection of known targets. These efforts should include activities to develop and maintain the support of, and coordination with, informal social control institutions and networks in the immediate community and from wherever else these groups receive help. For the long term, the most effective strategy is likely to be one that removes the sources of alienation that drive young people to gangs and terrorist cells in the first place. To succeed, such a strategy is likely to require a concerted program aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the community at large - including parents, teachers, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens - so that the public is more inclined to support the police and other formal institutional mechanisms for controlling illegitimate behavior and less inclined to view official authorities as aliens invading and disrupting the community (Akerlof and Yellin, 1994). Law enforcement officials alone cannot successfully prevent terrorism by small, organized groups. The support of the community is needed too, and it does not come automatically. It must be earned.

E. Routine Activities Theory

In addition to interventions designed and implemented to deal with deepseated sources of terrorism, we should allocate resources and develop policies to track and prevent willing terrorists from doing damage and to protect the targets of terrorism. For these efforts, the routine activities theory is particularly relevant. According to routine activities theory, developed by Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson in 1979, crimes are the product of three essential components: motivated offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of capable guardians to protect the targets. Much as heat, oxygen, and fuel are all required to produce fire, crime requires all three essential components of crime. The routine patterns of work and leisure influence the convergence of these three components in time and place, and motivated, rational offenders are inclined to seize opportunities presented by such patterns. (It is no coincidence that the theory is alternately referred to as "opportunity theory.") This theory has particular significance for the development of situational controls for the prevention of crime through a more purposeful application of guardianship resources. Criminologists and crime prevention specialists typically discuss routine activities theory in the context of street crimes - it has obvious implications for the prevention of crimes through the use of bullet-proof shields and other forms of target hardening for convenience stores and banks, burglar alarm and surveillance systems for commercial establishments and homes when occupants are not present, an increase in the intensity of guardianship at peak crime times and places, and so on. But the theory may be no less applicable to homeland security strategies. Federal buildings have been made less accessible to street bomb attacks following Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and major monuments, bridges, buildings, and other sites in the United States that are known to have been targeted by jihadist terrorists have been similarly "hardened." Enhanced airport security systems and the surveillance of persons with known militant extremist inclinations are also consistent with prevention strategies that grow logically out of routine activities theory. James Fallows, in a 2005 Atlantic article, argues that we could do much better along these lines than we have to secure the homeland against terrorist threats. Routine activities theory could help in the development of a system of weights to assign to the allocation of scarce screening and surveillance resources, so as to maximize their effectiveness. The theory of routine activities brings good news: as with fire control, the absence of just any one of three elements will prevent a harmful event. Diligence in tracking willing offenders, hardening targets, and creating guardianship has made it considerably more difficult to commit terrorist acts in the United States than before 9/11. It may be no coincidence that there has not been a serious terrorist act for several years. But the news is not all good. First, the gains from diligence in moving aggressively along all three fronts have come at a considerable expense to individual freedoms and economic well-being. Actions against prospective offenders have alienated countless people both at home and abroad, quite possibly creating many more willing offenders in the name of homeland security. And actions to protect vulnerable targets, create guardians, and engage in other aspects of the war on terror have displaced resources from other productive uses in amounts that reach the trillions of dollars (Belasco, 2008; Stiglitz and Bilmes, 2008). More fundamentally, however, the numbers of attractive targets and motivated offenders are too large, and the availability of guardianship resources too limited, to offer realistic assurance that serious terrorist events will not be committed on U.S. soil. Under the law of large numbers, a 99.9 percent success rate assures that, over many thousands of opportunities, terrorists will eventually succeed now and then. As Richard Posner (2004) observes, "There is no way the government can survey the entire range of possible disasters and act to prevent each and every one of them." We must prepare ourselves, both physically and emotionally, for the inevitability of such events. Failure to do so will add immeasurably to the immediate harm caused by such attacks.

The Credibility of terrorist

International terrorism poses one of the greatest strategic challenges in the modern age as groups have become able to cross borders and carry out operations globally; and has gained a renewed focus since the events of September 11th 2001. It is possible that terrorists might attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction which could then be used anywhere in the world. The term 'weapons of mass destruction' itself is a relatively new term and normally encompasses chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons (CBRN).[1] These are incredibly varied in their effects as well as their availability, and whilst terrorist groups might want to acquire such "weapons of terror", the effectiveness of such weapons compared to conventional explosives may be disputed.[2] Aum Shinrikyo for example is probably the most famous terrorist group to acquire and use weapons that would now be classified as WMDs, but was only able to do so due to its considerable financial resources, and even then "failed in all 10 of its biological weapons attacks" whilst the Sarin gas attack in 1995 caused roughly the same number of fatalities as "the average Palestinian suicide bomber attack."[3] In this essay I will examine the component parts of the term weapons of mass destruction (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear) individually to assess the credibility of international terrorists using such weapons. I will show that although it is credible that terrorists would want to use such weapons and may attempt to do so in the future, conventional explosives have thus far proven more effective and in my opinion, it is far more likely that conventional terrorism will remain at the forefront of terrorist tactics. Chemical terrorism is a potentially devastating form of WMD terrorism and certainly presents a credible threat to the international community. Toxic chemical agents such as chlorine and phosgene (which were first used as chemical weapons during the First World War) are found in many industry sectors and can easily be acquired and adapted for use in chemical weapons, although these devices will not be as effective as nerve agents, which are much more difficult to produce and require sophisticated laboratories to do so.[4] Even so these weapons carry the potential to cause large amounts of casualties, although the vast majority of these would most likely be injuries rather than fatalities, and can be used effectively to create fear and encourage panic. Hamas is just one group that has pursued chemical weapons in the past, often lacing shrapnel used in suicide bombs with chemical agents, such as in December 2001 where "nails and bolts packed into explosives detonated...at the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall in Jerusalem were soaked in rat poison" in order to kill those survivors of the initial blast who were hit by shrapnel, and they have also attempted to acquire and use cyanide in attacks.[5] So far however the effect of these chemical weapons seems limited and have been used in conjunction with conventional explosives rather than separately. Chemical weapons are also dependent on various factors including temperature and humidity, and when dispersed outside they become unpredictable due to wind conditions. In 1990 for example the Tamil Tigers attacked a Sri Lanka Air Force fortification using chlorine gas which was released to drift over the fort, and succeeded in injuring over 60 government soldiers and enabled the Tamil Tigers to take the fort, but then drifted back over their own positions.[6] These chemical agents are rarely particularly effective, and it is noted that the Tamil Tigers used the chlorine gas simply because it was a weapon that they had to hand at the time and it suited a particular battlefield need. As a result terrorist organisations may try to utilise the potential of more deadly chemical weapons such as nerve agents, which I shall now discuss. The cultivation of nerve agents such as Sarin or VX, is significantly more expensive than the procurement of other more basic agents, and requires considerable amount of expertise. Despite this it is still credible that terrorists could make use of such weapons as they have done in the past, most famously perhaps the Tokyo subway attack in 1995. Aum Shinrikyo had already carried out an attack using Sarin gas in 1994 in the city of Matsumoto, targeting three judges hearing "a lawsuit over a real-estate dispute in which Aum Shinrikyo was the defendant" and which they were likely to lose, subsequently killing 7 and wounding approximately 500.[7] Following this, the Aum Shinrikyo cult group (now known as Aleph) carried out possibly the most successful chemical terrorist attack in 1995, releasing Sarin on the Tokyo subway system and causing 13 deaths and injuring approximately 6,300.[8] In a subsequent raid on Satyan 7, a "supposed shrine to the Hindu god Shiva", it was found that the building "housed a moderately large-scale chemical weapons production facility" which was designed to produce thousands of kilograms of Sarin a year, although at the time of the Tokyo subway attack it was no longer in service.[9] This attack was the most devastating chemical attack by a terrorist group, and yet other attacks carried out using conventional explosives have been more effective, such as the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 where 301 people were killed and 5,000 were injured.[10] It is unlikely that a chemical attack will occur again on such a large scale due to the amount of expense involved, as Aum Shinrikyo remains at this time "the only group that had the financing and the motivation to create or obtain a true military-grade CW agent".[11] It is also important to note that Aum Shinrikyo is an apocalyptic group, and it is relatively unlikely that a more politically motivated group, even one such as Al-Qaeda would carry out a mass casualty chemical attack. The threat of a small-scale chemical attack is very credible with the availability of resources but the effectiveness of such a weapon would be fairly limited, and would actually probably be less effective than a conventional attack. Bioterrorism is a very real threat to the international community today as it can be both disruptive as well as destructive. There are many different forms of Biological weapons that could be used, "Some are contagious and can spread rapidly in a population, while others, including anthrax and ricin, infect and kill only those who are directly exposed."[12] This diversity in effects can enable a group to carry out either targeted or indiscriminate attacks depending on their goals but both types, if carried out correctly, have the capability to majorly disrupt the targeted state or region. A biological attack is a much more realistic threat than a nuclear attack largely because "Unlike nuclear arms, dangerous germs are cheap and easy to come by", whilst their effects on people can potentially reach the same scale as a nuclear bomb.[13] For a more disruptive but by no means less devastating attack, a group could potentially target crops and livestock, disrupting a state's food supply and economy. Biological warfare itself has been in use for centuries; in the Siege of Caffa in 1346 for example the Tartar forces, who were suffering from an outbreak of plague, ordered the infected corpses loaded onto trebuchets and hurled into the city in an attempt to kill all its inhabitants.[14] In the Second World War the British planned to drop 5 million linseed cakes contaminated with anthrax spores into Germany which would then be consumed first by cattle, and then by Germans who subsequently ate the infected animals, whilst simultaneously creating a food shortage for the surviving population through the death of the remaining cattle.[15] This attack (known as Operation Vegetarian) was never put into action however Gruinard Island, the island on which the cakes were tested, was only cleared of contamination in 1990 which suggests the possible long-term effects such an attack could cause.[16] I shall now examine different types of biological weapons as well as possible future threats. Perhaps the most well-known biological agent that has been used as a weapon is anthrax, a disease caused by bacteria called Bacillus anthracis, largely because of the relative ease with which it can be cultivated and the various ways it can cause infection which each cause different symptoms (inhalation, contact with a break in the skin, or ingestion of anthrax-tainted meat).[17] Causing infection on a large scale with anthrax is however incredibly difficult. This is perhaps best shown by Aum Shinrikyo's failed anthrax attack in 1993, in which members of the group attempted to aerosolise a "liquid suspension of Bacillus anthracis in an attempt to cause an inhalational anthrax epidemic", and in the process create the conditions for another world war.[18] The attack caused a foul odour and some minor cases of appetite-loss; nausea and vomiting, but failed to infect a single person, and it was only discovered that it had been an attack using anthrax during an investigation following the Tokyo subway station attack in March 1995. The most successful attack using anthrax was perhaps the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States which occurred shortly after the events of September 11th. The attacks caused 22 cases of anthrax infection of which "Eleven of these were inhalational cases, of whom 5 died; [and] 11 were cutaneous cases (7 confirmed, 4 suspected)."[19] Although the attack did not cause mass-casualties, it did cause major disruption and caused the temporary closure of the government mail service, as well as widespread fear of finding anthrax spores in the mail. There is also the threat of terrorists using the Botulinum toxin, one of the most deadly toxins known, which "poses a major bioweapon threat because of its extreme potency and lethality; its ease of production, transport, and misuse".[20] To cause more widespread damage terrorists could attempt to utilise contagious diseases such as the Ebola virus or even possibly avian influenza, and there is evidence to suggest that Aum Shinrikyo did at least contemplate the possibility of using the Ebola virus as a biological weapon.[21] The use of contagious diseases in particular could become a major tactic for terrorist organisations in the future as it has the potential to cause widespread mass-casualties. The relative ease in the cultivation of agents such as anthrax and Botulinum, as well as the widespread and possibly transnational effects that contagious viruses could cause, makes bioterrorism a credible threat to the international community. However at this time it would appear that it would be extremely difficult to cause a crisis such as an epidemic and would probably therefore be limited to small scale attacks designed to cause more fear than casualties. Radiological terrorism is perhaps one of the most credible threats to the international community, although arguably is also the least effective. The most credible use of radiological terrorism would probably be through the use of a radiological weapon, otherwise known as a 'Dirty Bomb' or a radiological dispersal device (RDD), which is designed to kill or injure "through the initial blast of the conventional explosive, and by airborne radiation and contamination (hence the term "dirty")."[22] They are realistically more weapons of mass disruption rather than destruction, but their capacity to create both large scale casualties and mass panic cannot be underestimated. A dirty bomb is a more realistic terrorist threat than a nuclear bomb largely because of the relative ease in its manufacture, as it is simply a conventional explosive with a radioactive isotope packed inside it; when the explosive detonates the isotope is dispersed over a large area thereby causing contamination over a wide area.[23] There are a vast number of radioactive isotopes that could be used to make a dirty bomb and many of them are in the public domain, one example being caesium-137, a radioactive isotope that has widespread uses including certain cancer treatments.[24] There have been two cases of terrorists attempting or threatening to use RDDs, though neither was successful in being carried out. The first occurred in 1995 in Moscow, when Chechen separatists buried a package containing Caesium-137 in Izmaylovsky Park, announcing it to the press in order to prove their ability to create and if necessary use a radiological weapon.[25] The second instance of radiological terrorism was in December 1998, when the Chechen Secret Service discovered a dirty bomb "consisting of a land mine combined with radioactive materials", which was quickly disarmed.[26] The relative ease in which a dirty bomb could be manufactured makes it far more likely than a nuclear bomb, however there are other possible forms of radiological terrorism that are perhaps less likely but potentially more dangerous, although there are no actual records of them occurring, including distribution in ventilation systems or the use of aircraft to powdered or aerosol forms of radioactive material.[27] It is also theoretically possible that a terrorist organisation may attempt to attack a nuclear power station, following which a large enough explosion may allow the mass dispersion of a large amount of nuclear material, although safeguards and security arrangements should be able to deal with this threat. Although a successful radiological terrorist attack has not yet occurred, there are examples of the effects that radioactive materials have on humans, leading to increased fear about the possibility of attack. In September 1999 as just one example two thieves attempted to steal a container of radioactive materials from a chemical factory in Chechnya, but after half an hour one of the suspects died and the other collapsed, "even though each held the container for only a few minutes."[28] The threat to the international community from radiological terrorism is fairly credible given the relative ease in procurement and manufacture, and there is speculation that Al-Qaeda may have succeeded in creating a dirty bomb due to evidence found by British Intelligence agents and weapons researchers in 2003, although the device itself has not been found.[29] Nuclear terrorism is perhaps the most feared, and most unlikely, form of WMD Terrorism facing the world today. It has been argued that with increased amounts of uranium and particularly plutonium in circulation, due to more emphasis being placed on nuclear power, it is becoming far more likely that terrorists could acquire and build a nuclear weapon with relative ease.[30] This argument follows that it is not only likely that terrorist organisations will attempt to acquire nuclear weapons, but they will also use them as a first resort weapon as a means of advancing their aims. In the context of Al-Qaeda, Busch notes that "bin Laden has declared obtaining nuclear weapons to be a religious duty" and that Al-Qaeda has been researching into this technology.[31] This conflicts with bin Laden's own statement made in November 2001 in which he said that he was already in possession of nuclear and chemical weapons, but that they would only be used as a deterrent, although perhaps the integrity of this statement can be debated in both its claim of ownership and professed intent.[32] Governments and media seem to have a tendency to create worst-case scenarios regarding WMDs, most of which are relatively unrealistic. Albert Mauroni, a senior policy analyst with Northrop Grumman, notes as an example that the "US government fixates on scenarios that envision terrorist use of ten-kiloton nuclear weapons...worst-case scenarios that have little basis in reality" and this in itself can lead to the fear of the attack overshadowing the credibility or otherwise of a real attack.[33] The intent for terrorist organisations to acquire nuclear weapons is certainly real, as is the possibility that they would use them as a first resort weapon, however I shall now examine the credibility of such groups being able to actually obtain them. There are two main areas that governments are particularly concerned about regarding the acquisition of nuclear weapons or the technology to build them by terrorists: the theft, sale, or capture of warheads; and the theft of civilian nuclear material. In the first instance there is the threat that terrorists could attempt to "Steal, buy or otherwise acquire a ready-made nuclear weapon; or take over a nuclear-armed submarine, plane or base."[34] The most likely victim of such an attack in the modern world at the moment is Pakistan, which at this time is faced with "a greater threat from Islamic extremists seeking nuclear weapons than any other nuclear stockpile on earth".[35] Pakistan's nuclear weapons facilities have come under attack at least three times in the period 2007-2008 by terrorist groups, and with both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda having relocated to the country from Afghanistan there is a significant danger of such facilities being taken over and used against a wide range of targets, including Coalition forces in neighbouring Afghanistan.[36] To counter this threat the United States has opted for a quick reaction strategy, creating a specialist force to "seal off and snatch back Pakistani nuclear weapons" in the event of terrorist groups or other militant forces manage to acquire a weapon or the materials to build one.[37] The likelihood of terrorists buying nuclear weapons is fairly low as such weapons could be traced on use to the manufacturer, providing incontrovertible evidence against the guilty party, which would usually be a state.[38] The other method that could be used to attempt to acquire a nuclear weapon is that of the theft of civilian nuclear material from nuclear power stations or reprocessing plants. However, these isotopes cannot effectively be used as a nuclear weapon in the state they are used in nuclear power facilities. Uranium is typically only enriched to 4% in a nuclear power station whereas it needs to achieve 85% enrichment to be used as a nuclear weapon, and to "obtain weapon-grade plutonium, nuclear-weapon states have reprocessed spent uranium fuel from special production reactors."[39] International safeguards should be able to prevent illegal enrichment of uranium from occurring, and it seems unlikely that a non-state actor would be able to build the necessary facilities to achieve sufficient enrichment of uranium themselves or create weapons-grade plutonium without the nations like the United States noticing, at which point they would in all likelihood be able to destroy or capture such a facility.[40] The possibility of terrorist organisations creating nuclear fusion weapons is even more unrealistic as again such an act could not go unnoticed (due to the need to test a fission bomb first) and could easily be disrupted.[41] The threat of international terrorist organisations acquiring nuclear fission weapons is theoretically credible, although with the safeguards that are rapidly being put into place to prevent both nuclear material and weaponry from falling into the hands of terrorists; I would argue that it is simply much easier and cheaper to use more conventional weapons and at the time of writing no nuclear terrorist attack has taken place. Weapons of mass destruction could potentially cause devastation on a scale that no other weapon at this time can achieve. A well planned chemical or biological attack could theoretically kill thousands or even millions of people, whilst a radiological weapon would cause the necessary evacuation of an area and again could possibly cause large-scale casualties. The issue with these weapons is that they only have the potential to cause such damage, and historical precedents would suggest that it is a very complicated and difficult task to achieve such devastation, even if a group is able to procure such a weapon. A nuclear weapon would have a much larger and more destructive effect, as it is the only weapon of mass destruction that also destroys buildings, but the likelihood of a terrorist group acquiring or building one is fairly low at the moment. Conventional explosives have proven to be more effective than attacks involving WMDs at this point, and though it is theoretically possible that international terrorist groups might acquire weapons of mass destruction and use them upon acquisition, I believe that the use of conventional explosives will continue to dominate terrorist attacks.

D. Women in Terrorism

It was noted in Chapter 2 that due to factors pertaining to both nature and nurture, the preaching and practice of terrorism are dominated by men, but that women play a role nonetheless. The factor relating to nurture that facilitates that role is opportunity: because women are known to be generally less dangerous, they tend to be given less scrutiny in security screening processes, which provides openings for them to commit acts of terrorism not available to men. Women were involved in dangerous revolutionary activities long before the advent of suicide bombing. They made up as many as one-fourth of reported Russian terrorists in the nineteenth century, and some, such as Vera Zasulich, were prominent as leaders of the movement and participants in acts of aggression (Siljak, 2008; Townshend, 2002). Women were among the leaders of the extremist groups behind the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia and among the anarchist leaders in Europe and the United States during the same period (Martin, 2006). The founder of the Japanese Red Army, Fusako Shigenobu, in 1971, was a woman. Nearly one-third of the Italian Red Brigades in the 1970s were women (Siljak, 2008; Townshend, 2002). Two of the first recorded suicide terrorist attacks involving women were car bombings against Israeli soldiers in South Lebanon in March 1985 - the first involved an 18- year-old who killed twelve soldiers and wounded fourteen others; the second, two weeks later, involved a 16-year-old who killed two soldiers and injured two others (Stern, 2003; Taheri, 1987). The suicide assassin of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 was a young Tamil woman. The Chechnyan insurgency movement has made especially significant use of women as terrorists. Nearly half of the forty-one Chechnyan terrorists who killed more than 300 captives in a Moscow theater in 2002 were women. Two of the attackers in the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis - which resulted in 334 deaths of civilians, mostly children - were women. The Chechnyans refer to women suicide bombers as Shahidkas or the "Black Widows," despite the fact that most are teenage girls and young women who have never been married (Jusik, 2005). Suicide terrorism has increased among women in other Muslim extremist groups as well. The first Women have been responsible for more than two thirds of the suicide bombings by the Kurdish Workers Party in Turkey (Stern, 2003). In 2003, an influential Islamic scholar from Egypt issued a fatwa sanctioning female suicide bombings: "When the enemy assaults a given Muslim territory, it becomes incumbent upon all its residents to fight against them to the extent that a woman should go out even without the consent of her husband" (Bergen and Cruickshank, 2007). After years of al Qaeda's not giving prominent roles for women in jihad, a 2004 posting on its Saudi web site began to encourage women to participate actively in acts of aggression. In addition to the examples cited above in Lebanon, Ossetia-Alania (the Beslan crisis), and Russia, suicide bombing attacks by women have been documented in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kashmir, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, Sri Lanka (non-Muslim), Turkey, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere (Bergen and Cruickshank, 2007; Dickey, 2005; Zedalis, 2004). Do women participate in terrorism for the same reasons as men? Partly yes, but they do so for other reasons perhaps to a greater degree. Mia Bloom (2005) attributes the participation of women in terrorism since the latter part of the twentieth century largely to more personal justifications - typically related either to family honor, such as to avenge killings of family members, or to absolve themselves from shame, sometimes following an extramarital affair. Neuburger and Valentini add that women participate in terrorism largely "because sacrifice is rooted in their being" Tim McGirk (2007) reports that Palestinian women made eighty-eight attempts to commit suicide bombings from 2002 through early 2007, of which eight were completed. After analyzing these cases, he echoes the personal redemption explanation, citing counterterrorism authorities who observe that women's acts of terrorism are motivated largely by personal despair and a desire for absolution from sin, often after having broken taboos of strict Palestinian tradition. He notes also that many of these acts are not fully voluntary, that women often fall prey to male recruiters who seek out women - on campuses and Internet chat rooms - because women can insinuate themselves into places that are inaccessible to men. McGirk adds that some women regard an act of suicide terrorism as preferable to an arranged marriage, which is common in the Arab world. Some women who commit acts of terrorism out of a sense of honor are mothers, but they evidently regard their acts as fulfilling a higher purpose than serving as caregivers for their children. For men, acts of terrorism are more likely to be driven by religious or political fanaticism than by family honor, and in some cases, men are lured by the ninth-century Islamic scholar al-Tirmidhi's promise, written in a hadith, that every man will have six dozen virgins in paradise. Clearly, we have much more to learn about the involvement of women in terrorist activities, both as leaders and as foot soldiers. The study of women in terrorism has been ignored by many and treated with awe by others; it is a topic shrouded in mystery.3 Just as the study of the involvement of women in crime should be of considerable interest to criminologists - to learn why women engage in crime in the first place, why some of those persist in criminal activities for long periods while others do not, and why even women criminals eventually stop - the study of women involved in terrorism should be of no less concern to scholars interested in terrorism. Women may be the strongest counter to terrorism available - a point to which we return in the concluding chapter - but they have shown themselves to be willing and able contributors to terrorism as well.

Policy Box 3.2. Countering the New Global Guerrillas

John Robb, a former planner and commander of U.S. counterterrorism operations, characterizes the terrorism of the new millennium as one consisting of networks of small groups of "global guerrillas." These groups operate with greater lethality within the crevices of sovereign nations and focus on "systems disruption." Robb observes that many of the same technologies that fuel globalization also allow terrorists to attack much larger adversaries by targeting infrastructure such as energy supply lines, power grids, and financial markets. They can thus weaken the cumbersome bureaucratic nationstate with remarkable ease and relatively little expense. These nimble groups can then thrive in the lawless spaces they create. The effectiveness of this approach has been clearly revealed in Iraq, which has proven to be a rich training ground for the development of tactics of "open source warfare." In 2004, for example, an attack in southern Iraq that cost about $2,000 to execute - with no attackers since apprehended - produced an explosion resulting in some $500 million in lost oil exports. This is a rate of return of about 250,000 times the cost of the attack. Robb's solution to the problem? Decentralize counterterrorist operations and convert tightly coupled systems, which have been effective in peaceful settings but vulnerable to terrorist attacks, to systems with greater redundancy and self-sustainability: Because we are unable to decapitate, outsmart, or defend ourselves against global guerrillas, naturally occurring events, and residual nationalism from causing cascades of failure throughout the global system, we need to learn to live with the threat they present. . . . (T)his doesn't mean an activist foreign policy that seeks to rework the world in our image, police state measures to ensure state security or spending all of our resources on protecting everything. It does mean the adoption of a philosophy of resilience that ensures that when these events to occur (and they will), we can more easily survive their impact

A. Introduction

Much has been learned over the past several decades about preventing crime by developing a clear understanding of its causes. The application of sophisticated research methods to reliable data has benefited the following areas of criminal justice policy: strategies for the prevention of delinquency in general and of gang crimes and crimes in schools in particular; approaches to the design of defensible community space; and more effective policing, sentencing, and correctional strategies. If we are to prevent terrorism through the design of effective intervention strategies and policies, it will be essential first to understand its causes. Some of the findings on the prevention of crime may have only limited relevance to the problem of terrorism. Even for prevention strategies that are relevant, both for crime and terrorism, it is important to distinguish between long-term ("root") causes - especially the deep alienation and hatred that can provide the foundation for individual acts of terrorism - and short-term causes, which serve to ignite or permit such acts once the alienation has become firmly rooted. These distinctions are useful both for policy purposes and for the coherent social scientific understanding of terrorism. Terrorism is an extreme form of both crime and aggression, as described in the preceding chapter, and many of the sources of crime and aggression are sources of terrorism as well (LaFree and Dugan, 2004). To understand the causes of terrorism, it will help, first, to establish what is known generally about the sources of aggression and, then, to determine how terrorism is distinct from other forms of crime and aggression. This distinction has practical implications: state and local justice agencies are responsible for protecting communities against all forms of crime, and agencies with responsibilities for homeland and international security are primarily interested in ensuring that their policies and intervention strategies are tailored uniquely to the protection of society against terrorism. Before we proceed with the dominant theories of aggression and terrorism, it will be useful to understand what we mean by "theory." A theory is an explanation, conjecture, or assertion about a relationship or set of relationships. It is essential for building knowledge systematically about the relationships between two or more factors and to provide a framework for the empirical analysis of data that can confirm, or fail to confirm, those relationships. Theory gives meaning to relationships. Without theory, a correlation between two factors is unexplained and may in fact be just a coincidence or a product of spuriousness, the omission of factors that precede the two factors. For example, drug use and the homicide rate may be correlated because drug use causes crime, because it follows crime, because another factor or set of factors precedes both drug use and crime and thus creates a correlation between the two, or perhaps because all of these relationships may be occurring in varying degrees at the same time. The same may be true of terrorism and its correlates. It will be useful to keep these prospects in mind as we consider theories of aggression and terrorism.

A. Early Forms of Terrorism: Babylon and Rome, Asia, Europe, and America

Much of the world has become preoccupied with terrorism since September 11, 2001, but the terror dragon has in fact been marauding the planet for many centuries. Let us look at some of the more prominent episodes of terrorism over the past three millennia. Ancient Era. Acts of violence consistent with most definitions of terrorism are about as old as crime and war. Before the creation of sovereign nation-states, battles among men in defense of their tribes and territories, or to conquer others, often crossed the line to inflict damage on noncombatant populations. Among the earliest recorded such acts were those associated with the conquest of the kingdom of Judah and destruction of temples in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of Babylon, in the sixth century bce (before the Common Era, pre-Christ). The assassinations of Roman emperors - Julius Caesar in 44 bce, Caligula in 41 ce, Galba in 68 ce, Domitian in 96 ce, Commodus in 193 ce, and others - are often cited as other examples of early acts of terrorism. Middle Ages. One of the more celebrated terrorists was Genghis Khan the early thirteenth-century military leader who was known for his ruthlessness in assaulting and destroying ethnically diverse enemy tribes in the land that is now Mongolia. Named "Temujin" at birth, he assumed the title Genghis Khan ("Universal Ruler") in 1206, while still in his early forties, after his rise to vast power in his Mongol homeland. Although he created unprecedented order there, he developed considerable notoriety for ravaging conquered enemies - first in China and then at fronts to the west. By the time of his death in 1227, his empire extended to Persia, Baghdad, Afghanistan, and much of Eastern Europe. Much of the same Middle Eastern land conquered by Genghis Khan had been under assault for more than a century by marauders from the west, in the name of Jesus Christ. The Crusades created the model for a parallel cause that would follow centuries later: religious fighters destroying infidels, with high honor bestowed on martyrs who died in the just and noble cause of holy war. A series of nine numbered crusades occurred from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, the first involving a massacre of the population in Jerusalem in 1099 and the last initiated in 1271 by the man who would later become King Edward I of England. Terrorism in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Europe and America. Given this ancient history of acts that would today be regarded as terrorism, it might come as a surprise that the term "terrorism" was coined only slightly more than 200 years ago. As noted in Chapter 1, the term has been widely attributed to Edmund Burke's coining of the expression "reign of terror," which referred to brutal acts committed during the French Revolution, including the beheadings of as many as 40,000 "enemies" by France's radical Jacobin government in 1793-94. Others died of malnutrition, disease, and torture in prison, and still others perished in mass shootings and drownings. For the Jacobin leader, Robespierre, "Terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe and inflexible." In much the same way that other terms evolve, sometimes becoming nearly the opposite of their original meaning, the term "terror" is used today by people who see acts of terror as severe and inflexible - about the opposite of Robespierre's usage of terror as a legitimate instrument of justice - and usually as acts done by small groups of individuals rather than by governments. The shift in Europe from terrorism by the state to terrorism by individuals was stimulated by anarchists, often with socialist agendas, in the midnineteenth century. The anarchists started peacefully under the leadership of Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-64) in France, but they eventually escalated their activities to attacks on factories and, occasionally, the police and armed forces in France, Germany, and Austria, typically in the name of revolution In addition to Proudhon in France, underpinnings of the anarchist movement are attributable to Karl Heinzen (1809-80) in Germany, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) in Russia, and, perhaps most significantly, Karl Marx (1818-83). Anarchists did not enjoy the widespread support of mainstream European populations; their use of violence made them especially unpopular among the vast majority of the public. The anarchist movement managed to spill over to the United States with the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. But acts of terror had in fact occurred on U.S. soil decades earlier. In 1856 John Brown and his men massacred five unarmed citizens at Pottawatomie, Kansas. Brown said the killings had been committed in accordance with "God's will" and that he aimed to "strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people." His killings provoked fear and reprisals and served to bring the United States closer to civil war (Reynolds, 2005). Walter Laqueur (2003) identifies two further waves of terrorism in Europe, one in the late nineteenth century in Russia and the other early in the twentieth century in Russia and Ireland. The terrorist attacks in Russia were stimulated by student anarchist unrest during the reign of the czars in the 1870s. The most aggressive of these organizations was the People's Will, led by Nikolai Morozov. The People's Will terrorized all major centers of authority, assassinating government officials, heads of the police and military, and officials of the Orthodox Church. In 1881, they succeeded in assassinating the head of government, Czar Alexander II, in a suicide bombing attack. Alexander's son, Alexander III, responded by arresting and killing leaders of the People's Will, whose remaining members went underground and plotted the unsuccessful 1905 Russian Revolution. Two campaigns of terror followed in Russia a few years later: the "Red Terror" of 1918 and the "White Terror" response that it provoked. The Red Terror was a Bolshevik campaign against counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War. Mass arrests, deportations of suspected enemies of the state, and the deaths of some 10,000 people followed the successful assassination of the Bolshevik head of the secret police, Moisei Uritsky, on August 17, 1918, and the failed attempt thirteen days later to assassinate the top Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. By 1921, some 70,000 people had been imprisoned by the state, in what would eventually become known as the Gulag system. The White Terror was a failed, but bloody, anti-communist response by supporters of the monarchy that followed the Red Terror. Although the Russian Gulag system continued under Stalin through much of the twentieth century, terrorism by nonstate actors subsided in Russia and elsewhere after World War I.

C. Normlessness and Alienation

One of the first criminological explanations emphasizing the nurture perspective is the idea that aggression is rooted in the absence of norms, a framework established largely by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim's pioneering late nineteenth-century research on suicide concluded that suicide was closely associated with anomie or normlessness (1895/1951). Durkheim's research inspired Robert Merton (1938) and others to expand our understanding of the forces that cause alienation, perhaps foremost of which are unrealistic expectations faced by people with limited opportunities for improvement in their condition.1 One of the primary sources of alienation is social disorganization, the absence of coherent regulatory agents in a community or society. Disorganized or noncohesive settings tend to lack informal social control mechanisms; they are common breeding grounds for patterns of widespread misbehavior (Bursik, 1988). The relevance of this theory to terrorism has been observed by Akbar Ahmed (2003, 2007), Marc Sageman (2004), and Cass Sunstein (2003a), among others. Alienation is almost surely spawned by the accessibility of modern communication technologies that draw attention to the gap between rich and poor, and to offensive aspects of Western culture. There can be little doubt that the rapid expansion of terrorism in recent years derives at least in part from access to media presentations that were previously unavailable to nations with high rates of poverty and illiteracy. Alienation may be no less the product of programs of indoctrination in poor, predominantly illiterate nations in which the support of ideologically driven outsiders has filled the void. A prominent example is the spread of madrassas (religious schools) in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the latter half of the twentieth century, created and financed by wealthy Muslims, especially from Saudi Arabia and neighboring oil-rich countries. There has been no clearly established empirical link between the growth of madrassas and terrorism, but the deep influence of Wahhabi doctrine in these schools appears to have had anything but a peaceful influence on the populations in which they have been introduced (Pape, 2005; L. Wright, 2006a). A similar, if less publicized, influence appears to have occurred in South Asia. Robert Pape documents the support, at least until 2005, that Marxist-Hindu groups gave to Tamil suicide bombers in Sri Lanka The problem of alienation is by no means restricted to the Middle East, South Asia, and Indonesia. Millions of Muslims migrated to Europe during the latter half of the twentieth century looking for jobs and an escape from tyranny, persecution, and poverty. Especially large numbers of North African Muslims emigrated to France, South Asians to Britain, and Turks to Germany. Although most Muslims led quiet, pious lives in their new homes, others were drawn to extremist indoctrinations preached in local mosques. Most Muslims in Europe, including second- and third-generation Muslim Europeans, identify first and foremost with their Islamic affiliation, rather than with their nationality as British, French, or German (Kohut and Stokes, 2006; Sullivan and Partlow, 2006). By the end of the century, the extremist factions made themselves quite visible, and in the years following the 9/11 attack, calamitous acts of terrorism and rioting by these factions occurred in Britain, Spain, France, and elsewhere. The violence was clearly a product of disenchantment and alienation that emanated from a toxic brew that combined social isolation, substantially higher unemployment rates for Muslims than for mainstream society, radical indoctrination, and governmental neglect (Bawer, 2005; Kepel, 2005; Leiken, 2005; Roy, 2004; Sullivan and Partlow, 2006). Viable opportunities to intervene against deep-seated sources of terrorism by reducing alienation may be available, primarily in the form of policies aimed at education, poverty reduction, and the elimination of extremism and intolerance, both cultural and religious (Ahmed and Forst, 2005; Tolson, 2005). Such interventions will be more likely to succeed when the hysteria surrounding these problems and their manifestation as occasional acts of terrorism can be better managed (Walker, 2006). These interventions are generally regarded as public sector responsibilities, but private sector, international and local nongovernmental organizations, and faith-based institutions are often better situated to act to reduce these sources of alienation than are governments. Perhaps a silver lining in the dark cloud of 9/11 and the rise of terrorism is that they may serve to stimulate policies and direct resources to improve the education and economic well-being of people who have long suffered from poverty, illiteracy, and associated factors that diminish the quality of life.

From Profiles to Pathways and Roots to Routes

One of the major challenges is answering the question, How and why does someone become a terrorist? Terrorism researchers have approached these questions through a wide range of individual psychological models, organizational structures, and, more recently, indirect discussions of the root causes of terrorism. Such discussions tend to be rooted in notions about terrorist profiling and in the past through various degrees of subtle (and not so subtle) pathologizing of terrorists. While lacking in the necessary empirical support, such profiling remains plausible given the violence, brutality, and general callousness associated with terrorism and the fact that, despite the broad sociopolitical conditions that are thought to give rise to terrorism, it is still the case that extremely few people engage in terrorism altogether. It may thus seem warranted to consider actual terrorists as different or special in some way. For example, consider the case of al Qaeda members in the United Kingdom. A year after four coordinated suicide bombings ripped through London on July 7, 2005, a House of Commons Report (2006) into the events of that day asserted,

H. Other Theories of Aggression

Other theories of aggression and crime, such as biological defect theory (Wilson and Herrnstein, 2003; Lombroso, 1876; Raine, 2002) and labeling theory (Tannenbaum, 1938), may be applicable to terrorism, but they appear to have greater relevance to crime and aggression generally. With regard to labeling theory, for example, one could assert that some terrorists have been emboldened by the West's inclination to label people as terrorists; however, it appears that more people have been drawn to terrorism against Western targets in response to the actions of the West than by its use of the term "terrorist" (see Tittle, 2000, for a discussion of these theories). The explanations for terrorism considered above focus largely on individual terrorists and their motives. The following chapters focus more on macro theories of terrorism, explanations that pertain to the environments that shape the behaviors of individuals: religion and culture, intolerance and the role of the state, globalization, technology, and so on.

B. Nature and Nurture

Perhaps the oldest and most basic question about aggression is whether it is based primarily in nature or in environmental and social factors, starting with the quality of nurturance, bonding, and social education in the family (Hirschi, 1969). Two factors that are fairly distinctive about terrorists support the innate nature of aggression: age and sex. Like street offenders, terrorists are predominantly male and typically in their late teens or early twenties. There are, of course, important exceptions, as with individual street crimes, but the predominance of young males as both criminals and terrorists - and the strong correlation with aggression generally - is beyond dispute (Mednick et al., 1987; Raine, 2002; Wilson and Herrnstein, 1998). Criminologists generally group the theories that explain relationships between age and aggression under the "life course" theories, aimed at describing various stages of life and pertinent aspects of the relationship among age, aggression, and crime (Laub and Sampson, 2006; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Thornberry, 1997). The life course perspective has shown that people who commit crimes in their teens and early twenties tend to cease such activity as they develop enduring social connections and a stake in society, especially through marriage and work; the few who persist beyond their early twenties tend to be social nomads (Laub and Sampson, 2006). One of the most exhaustive surveys of suicide terrorists, by Robert Pape (2005), confirms the disproportionality of young males as suicide bombers. Pape and a team of University of Chicago graduate students collected data on as many cases of suicide terrorism for which reliable information was available from international newspapers and other public sources. The Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism assembled a database of 462 cases of people who committed suicide in terrorist attacks over the period 1980 through 2003. Fifty percent of the cases involved Arab attackers in Lebanon and Palestine who were associated with al Qaeda, and most of the rest were Kurds, Chechens, and Tamils. The Chicago team was able to establish the sex of the offender in 82 percent of the cases, age in 60 percent, education level in 67 percent, and income level in 77 percent. The researchers found that the average age of suicide terrorists was as low as 21.1 years for Lebanese Hezbollah suicide terrorists, followed by 21.9 years for Tamil Tigers, 22.5 years for Palestinians, 23.6 years for Kurds affiliated with the PKK, 26.7 years for al Qaeda terrorists, and 29.8 years for Chechens, the oldest group in the survey. Some portion of these age differences is attributable to differences across the general populations from which the terrorists come: the median ages of the Lebanese and Palestinian populations are about ten years younger than that of the Chechen population. Pape and his colleagues found that sex varies more considerably than age across these groups, ranging from no females among the al Qaeda terrorists to more than half females among the Chechens and Kurds. The percentages by group were as follows: al Qaeda 0 percent, Palestinians 5 percent, Hezbollah 16 percent, Tamil Tigers 20 percent, Chechens 60 percent, and PKK 71 percent. Pape attributes the lower percentages for first three groups to the tendency for Islamic fundamentalists to discourage females from participating as warriors. The 48 women suicide terrorists studied were significantly older than the 213 men in the survey. More than 60 percent of the men were in the 19- 23 age group and about 25 percent were at least 24 years of age, whereas only 40 percent of the women were in the 19-23 group and nearly half were at least 24 years old. As with crime, other biological characteristics may well be associated with terrorist behavior, such as prenatal and neonatal health, brain chemistry, glandular health, and the functioning of the autonomic nervous system, but such links to terrorism have been neither well documented nor empirically validated. Although there are basic similarities between the characteristics of terrorists and of street criminals, there are also some noteworthy differences, primarily related to nurturance factors. Terrorists tend to be better educated and better off financially in their respective societies than street criminals are in ours (Pape, 2005; Sageman, 2004). In this regard, terrorists roughly resemble a hybrid between street offenders and white-collar offenders. Women who engage in terrorism are also different from those who engage in conventional crime. They are more inclined to act as suicide bombers than as violent street criminals, for a variety of reasons: detonating a bomb does not require the same degree of physical size and strength as, say, a mugging on the street; women can get close to targets often without receiving the same degree of scrutiny as men; and they may be more inclined to see themselves as martyrs willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause than to see themselves merely as self-interested criminals Although terrorism is dominated by men, women do play a role as suicide terrorists. Women committed to terrorist acts are particularly dangerous because they tend to be regarded as less serious security threats and hence can often make their way more readily to vulnerable targets. One of the more notorious such cases was the 1991 suicide bombing and assassination of the former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, an act committed by a Tamil woman, Thenmuli Rajaratnam, known simply as "Dhanu." Some of the most puzzling cases of terrorism by women are those involving mothers - suicide bombers who had children when they committed their acts. If there is a fundamental difference between men and women regarding motives for participation in suicide bombing, it is that women are more inclined to sacrifice themselves as an act of personal revenge for the loss of a loved one or to absolve themselves from shame, whereas men are more likely to be motivated by religious or political fanaticism (Bloom, 2005). The next chapter explores these issues more fully. One final thought about the nature-nurture issue. An ongoing debate among scholars interested in the study of aggression centers on the question, Why fuss over the importance of nature as a source of aggression if nothing can be done about it? The usual answer to this question focuses on interactions between nature factors and interventions: it is valuable to know how specific interventions at our disposal vary in their effectiveness for reducing aggressive behaviors across different types of populations. With regard to terrorism, the pertinent question moves up to a higher level: Why fuss over the importance of factors that pertain to the individual if terrorism policy operates at the federal level? One answer to this question is that terrorism can be home-grown - a serious crime and a local matter - and at least to this extent it is as valuable to know how specific interventions at our disposal to prevent domestic terrorism vary in their effectiveness as it is to know about interactions between nature and crime prevention interventions. This information might benefit all nations interested in reducing terrorism and its export.

Role models serve as a source of authoritative legitimacy for the justification of violent reaction, sustaining the individual's commitment to the group to the point of actually engaging in violent acts. In Post, Sprinzak, and Denny's (2003) analysis, the social setting (implicit or explicit approval from peers and family) appeared to be the source of the greatest apparent positive quality for joining. However, the researchers' interviews with imprisoned activists revealed other supportive qualities of involvement:

Perpetrators of armed attacks were seen as heroes, their families got a great deal of material assistance including the construction of new homes to replace those destroyed by the Israeli authorities as punishment for terrorist acts... The entire family did all it could for the Palestinian people, and won great respect for doing so. All my brothers are in jail. One is serving a life sentence for his activities in the Izz ad-Din Al Qassam battalions. (P. 177) Similar themes emerge from interviewees in Northern Ireland: The idols among our community shot up because they stood for something. . . . As soon as your parents, and the priest at the altar, and your teacher are saying, "These men are good men. They are fighting a just thing here," it filters down quickly that these people are important and whatever they say must be right. So all of a sudden, you are bordering on supporting something that is against the government. (Burgess, Ferguson, and Hollywood forthcoming, n.p.) An additional expected benefit associated with attaining and sustaining commitment is the status it carries within an immediate circle of activists as well as within a broader supportive community. Such status can be powerful not only for sustaining commitment but also as a lure for peripheral onlookers not engaged in any focused activity but with the future opportunity to do so. A sense of approval from a significant other person can also catalyze socialization into more extreme behavior. Atran (2003) illustrated that Palestinians regularly "invoke religion to invest personal trauma with proactive social meaning," with injury seen not as burden but as a badge of honor. An inescapable social quality of increased involvement in a terrorist movement is a sense of gradual progression. From examining accounts closely, increased commitment to the movement appears to be characterized by a slow marginalization away from conventional society and toward a much narrower society where extremism becomes all-encompassing. It is also characterized by a sense of increasing disillusionment with alternative avenues developing in conjunction with increasing involvement in peripheral activities. What constitutes an alternative avenue likely reflects a "community of practice" dimension identified by Hundeide (2003) as a necessary quality that the movement must put in place to solidify commitment by the individual member. Increased commitment and ever-greater and ever-focused involvement will carry with it the realization that in difficult or challenging times, the need to "stick it out" is paramount (e.g., Sherman 2005). Involvement in terrorism encompasses constant change and vastly differing levels of activity, commitment, and overall involvement—all of which might be present in one small terrorist grouping. As McCauley and Segal (1989, p. 55) memorably put it, at any one time, some members are "beginning to find out . . . others are becoming committed, others are firmly committed, others becoming less committed, and still others are in the process of leaving entirely." We can see how the profiling of terrorists (based on conceptually dubious attempts to identify individual qualities of those filling certain specific roles) will be quite limited without a sense of the varied factors influencing how and why that role became attractive, open, and attainable for a specific individual moving through the terrorist group. What might determine the total extent of active terrorists at any one time might relate to a whole host of local internal and external group, organizational, leadership, and other management or response issues. What is necessary from a counterterrorism perspective is a way of assessing capacity and threat or risk without having to revert to limited notions of counting membership based on restrictive and unrelated criteria. A final feature of increased involvement for the individual is the realization that the associated steps can carry different levels of currency. With the impressive variety in roles and functions found within even small terrorist groups comes also different psychological baggage. While active service roles (for example, directly planting bombs or engaging in a shooting within the Provisional IRA or the role of martyr in a four-man al Qaeda cell) may be limited to minimize the risk of security breaches, leaders can also attach a psychological value to the restriction of such opportunities. Hassan's (2001) interviews revealed that by limiting those accepted for martyrdom operations, "others are disappointed. They must learn patience and wait until Allah calls them." The limitation thus performs the important function of sustaining the perceived attractiveness of attaining and fulfilling such a role.

A Brief History of Terrorism

Reading

Theories of Aggression and Terrorism

Reading

B. Ethnic and Religious Terrorism in the Twentieth Century

Some of the more prominent examples of ethnic terrorism include the Kurds and Turks in southern and eastern Turkey, the Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq, the Sunnis and Shi'a in Iraq, the Russians and Chechens in the Trans-Caucasus region, the Basques and Spanish nationalists in north central Spain, the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, the English Protestants and Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland, and the Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. A very brief description of each of these struggles follows. 1. Turks and Kurds The Kurdish people reside in a region often referred to as "Kurdistan," an area encompassing southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, the northeastern tip of Syria, and northwestern parts of Iran. Numbering between 25 and 30 million people, the Kurds share a kinship with ancient Persians and speak a variety of languages that derive from the Farsi, Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic languages. One distinctive feature of the Kurdish people has given rise to two long-standing struggles with neighboring ethnic people: the Kurds are one of the largest ethnic groups in the world that do not have their own separate identity as a nation. They are by no means a united people - the Kurds in Turkey have had deadly, long-standing disputes with the Kurds of Iraq - but their struggles with ethnic Turks and Iraqis became especially prominent in the latter part of the twentieth century. The Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) was founded in 1974 to create an independent Kurdistan. Extreme Marxistleaning factions of the PKK have advocated terrorist attacks to create a break from Turkey, with the goal of eventually creating their own sovereign nation. However, the PKK has relied heavily on drug smuggling, kidnapping, and thuggery - targeting both Turks and moderate Kurds - and has not won widespread support either from within or outside the Kurdish community. 2. Sunnis and Kurds The Kurds have had similar problems in Iraq as in Turkey, with much more brutal opposition from Saddam Hussein. In 1988, Saddam destroyed between 3,000 and 5,000 people in the Kurdish village of Halabja with rockets and poison gas. The Iraqi Kurds were emboldened by encouragement from the United States to help overthrow and defeat Saddam's army in the 1991 Gulf War, but a fledgling Kurdish uprising was quickly overwhelmed by Iraqi forces, and the Kurds received no military support from the United States or other coalition forces. Kurdish hopes for sustained independence from Sunni oppressors rose substantially in 2003 with the fall of Saddam. 3. Sunni Arabs and Shia Although Sunnis and Shia are primarily religious rather than ethnic groups, significant ethnic, cultural, and political differences have evolved between Sunnis and Shia over the centuries. The split began with a disagreement over the question of who should be the proper successor to the Prophet Muhammad. (For a more in-depth discussion of the doctrinal disagreements between Sunnis and Shia, see Chapter 5.) This dispute has never been resolved, and Sunnis and Shia have grown into separate communities in most of the lands in which they now reside. Today Sunnis make up the vast majority of the world's more than one billion Muslims, outnumbering Shia by about four to one. Sunnis are the dominant Muslim population in the world's largest Islamic regions: Indonesia, South Asia, North Africa, and much of the Arabian peninsula. Shia live primarily in the countries of Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Yemen - and Pakistan, much of which was once ancient Persia. Except in Iran and during a few brief interludes elsewhere, the Sunnis have dominated the Shia as political rulers, giving the Sunnis a legacy of power and leaving the Shia as a marginalized faction, even in places where they were a significant majority of the population, notably Iraq. This has left the Shia with a narrative of martyrdom, persecution, and suffering (Nasr, 2005). The Iranian Revolution in 1979 drove fear into the hearts of many Sunni Muslims in the Middle East. The eight-year war between Iran and Iraq was largely initiated by Iraq's Sunni Ba athists against Iran's Shia to prevent Iran's Grand Ayatollah Khomeini from spreading his influence throughout what was then a more secular, less devoutly Islamic Middle East than exists. today. Sunnis had ruled Iraq for generations, despite their constituting less than 25 percent of the Iraqi population. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the Sunni minority largely resisted U.S. attempts to create a coalition Iraqi government, in the hopes that somehow they might return to the undiluted power they had experienced since the country's creation in 1920. The February 22, 2006, terrorist bombing of the Al Askari "Golden Shrine" Mosque in Samara, one of Shi a Islam's holiest sites, set off sectarian violence in and around Baghdad. Thousands of Iraqi Muslims were killed in tit-for-tat terrorist attacks in the following weeks, first involving Shi ite militias retaliating against Sunni mosques and innocent people, and then Sunni groups launching counterattacks. Iranian influence has emerged and become stronger throughout the "Shi ite crescent" - running from Iran through Iraq and down to Lebanon - in the years following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, as the Shi a made significant inroads against traditional Sunni rule in much of the Middle East (Nasr, 2005). To the extent that one can make out distinct Sunni and Shi a blocs across a sea of ethnic and tribal factions that constitute Islam, they are headquartered in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) and Tehran (Iran), respectively. These centers distribute money accumulated from vast oil resources to support a variety of outreach programs: from fundamentalist Sunni madrassas (religious schools) throughout much of South Asia to welfare programs for families in southern Lebanon and weapons and supplies for Hezbollah. Sunni Arabs are torn today between their distinct identities as Arabs and as members of the traditional ruling majority in struggles against Persians and Shi a, on the one hand, and as Muslims joined with Shi a in a more recent struggle against decadent Western influences, on the other. The world watches with great interest to see how these multiple identities and conflicting loyalties will play out, especially as the Iranians continue to advance their development of nuclear technology. 4. Russians and Chechens Chechnya is a territory about the size of the state of Connecticut, in the Trans-Caucasus region, with a population of just over one million people. The people speak Russian, but are mostly Muslims, having converted to Islam in the fifteenth century when the region was part of the Ottoman Empire. Ethnically, Chechnya is a loosely knit assemblage of more than 100 clans that declared independence from Russia after the fall of the USSR in 1991. Russia rejected the claim, invaded Chechnya in 1994, and then agreed to a ceasefire two years later, after the killing of more than 10,000 Russian soldiers and some 200,000 Chechen citizens. The Russian heavy-handedness had the effect of unifying the previously loose collection of autonomous Chechen clans. Militant Chechens retaliated by launching suicide bombing strikes against Russian civilians on trains, subways, and elsewhere. The two most serious attacks were against 700 hostages at a theater in Moscow in 2002 and 1,200 at a school in Breslan in 2004, the latter involving the deaths of 330 people, mostly children. Ethnicity plays a role in the unification of Chechens, but given the history of disconnectedness among the clans that make up Chechen society, their cohesion today is attributable as much to political necessity - aimed at achieving order, increasing defensive effectiveness, and attaining independence from Russia - as to religious or ethnic kinship. The Chechen separatists have been sharply divided over whether their struggle is primarily a secular or Muslim matter. Some militant leaders, such as Shamil Basayev, have sought assistance from al Qaeda and other Islamist organizations, whereas others, such as Aslan Maskhadov (killed by Russian soldiers in 2005), have opposed such help. 5. Basques and Spaniards Basque separatists are among the oldest groups of ethnic militants who have organized themselves politically to create their own independent state after feeling marginalized and exploited by an alien majority. The Basques are a distinct Roman Catholic ethnic group who make their homeland in the north central part of Spain, near Spain's border with France; they speak their own distinct language - a distant derivative of Latin, with overtones of Spanish, French, and German. The Basque resistance movement organized itself as Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) - "Basque Fatherland and Liberty" - in 1959, in opposition to the rule of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who had imposed particularly oppressive rule over the Basques. The Spanish government granted the Basques considerable autonomy in 1979, including their own elected parliament, police force, and school system; the right to tax themselves; and the institution of other social reforms. ETA has nonetheless frequently marginalized itself even among the Basque population by committing desperate acts of terror, including attacks on tourists in Madrid and the bombing of rescue workers. 6. Hutus and Tutsis Rwanda, a small country in the southern part of central Africa, became one of the fastest growing and most densely populated countries on the continent in the twentieth century. Its cultural roots can be traced back at least to the early fifteenth century, when its several clans were fused into a single kingdom, known as "Abanyiginya." The two dominant clans in twentiethcentury Rwanda and neighboring Burundi were the Tutsis, who held political and military superiority, and the Hutus, who were traditionally the spiritual leaders and advisors in the kingdom. Although some ethnic characteristics differentiate the Tutsis from the Hutus, the primary differences are social and economic rather than ethnic: over the centuries, the Tutsis were the feudal overlords, and the Hutus were the subjugated. The tables turned in 1959, with the emergence of the Hutu nationalist party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement (PARMEHUTU), which killed about 20,000 Tutsis and caused up to 500,000 to flee to neighboring lands. A Tutsi response - the Tutsi Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) - was formed in 1985 under the leadership of Paul Kagame. In 1990 RPF forces invaded Rwanda from a base in neighboring Uganda. Then in 1994, two extremist Hutu militia groups carried out a campaign of genocide over a 100-day period, following the assassination of the Rwandan president. More than one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered and raped during this period, the most extensive genocide since the Nazi Holocaust. The RPF eventually restored order, causing the killers to flee to Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Two wars followed in the Congo in the late 1990s. The absence of an organized response and rescue operation was one of the great failures and controversies that followed this genocide. UN peacekeepers had been stationed in Rwanda, but the United Nations refused to deploy them to confront the militias and to stop the slaughter of innocent, helpless people. President Clinton later called his failure to act "the biggest regret of my administration." In 1998, a UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) indicted several suspected Hutu war criminals and convicted one, an ex-mayor, of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. No compelling ethical justification has come forth to explain why the West has reacted so much more forcefully to acts of terrorism in Bosnia and the Middle East than to the slaughter of innocents in Rwanda. 7. English Protestants and Irish Catholics Northern Ireland, located on the northeast tip of the island of Ireland, was constituted by the British Parliament in 1920 under the Government of Ireland Act as one of four components of the United Kingdom. Its population of just under two million is about 45 percent Protestant and 40 percent Catholic, with the other 15 percent mostly undeclared as to religion. Northern Ireland's serious ethnic, religious. and political problems are rooted in the Protestant Reformation and King Henry VIII's split from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. Many Irish Catholics with deep ties to the Irish culture rejected the split, and a large minority (the "Greens" or Republicans) prefer to be part of the Republic of Ireland. In contrast, Irish Protestants (the "Orange" Unionists) tend to be more closely related - both genealogically and culturally - to the British and Scots and to feel a kinship with Great Britain. These cultural differences have created considerable political disharmony over the years. The ethnic and religious split boiled over into an extended period of sporadic terrorist activities and militia firefights known as the "Troubles" - from 1969 to 1997 - during which time militant Irish Catholics, fighting as paramilitary groups under the umbrella of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) campaign, aimed to end British rule and make Northern Ireland a part of the Republic of Ireland. The British government responded by professing neutrality and responsibility for maintaining law and order throughout the province of Northern Ireland, while engaging in its own antiterror campaigns involving the British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the Ulster Defence Regiment. This official expression of neutrality was betrayed by the events of "Bloody Sunday" - January 30, 1972 - when British paratroopers killed thirteen Irish demonstrators in Londonderry, which served primarily to bolster the recruitment efforts of the IRA. In all, some 3,000 people were killed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1993 a formal peace process was launched. The Northern Ireland Act was passed, setting conditions of partial martial law. A joint declaration of peace was made by the end of the year. Four years' worth of negotiations followed among Britain, the Republic of Ireland, and major political factions of Northern Ireland - the most significant of which was Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA. The eventual result was a landmark accord: the Good Friday Agreement, signed by the British and Irish Republic on April 10, 1998, and endorsed six weeks later in a referendum by a majority of Northern Irish voters. Except for the typical levels of serious crime that occur in urban areas, the 1998 accords have, remarkably, been followed by several years of relative calm. There are a number of noteworthy aspects of this episode. Over the course of the ordeal, the civil disturbances both in Belfast, the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, and elsewhere in the country tended to occur less often in integrated middle-class suburbs and to be more frequent and deadly in the poorest, most highly segregated areas. In Northern Ireland as in other places with histories of ethnic violence, the longer and deeper the hostilities, the more difficult it is to bring political processes to bear to control the attitudes and behaviors of combatants on the ground, especially in poorer, more volatile areas. 8. Tamils and Sinhalese Sri Lanka, known as Ceylon until 1972, is a large tropical island nation in the Indian Ocean, off the southeast coast of India. It had been a colony of Britain until 1948, when it gained independence. It now has a population of more than 20 million, about 15 million of whom are Sinhalese, 4 million Tamil, and the rest a mixture of other ethnicities. The two dominant ethnic groups, the Sinhalese and the Tamils, are quite distinct from one another: the Sinhalese are mostly Buddhist and the Tamils are mostly Hindu, they speak different languages, and they have different genealogies. Although there had been tension between the Sinhalese and Tamils from the time of independence from Britain - when the Sinhalese gained control of the government and tilted the laws in their favor, making Sinhalese the official language of the state and gaining increased access to higher education and good jobs - the two groups nonetheless managed to avoid major hostility. Then, in 1983, a reported gang rape of a Tamil doctor by Sinhalese soldiers sparked a retaliation attack by a group of Tamil militants known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in which the "Tamil Tigers" killed thirteen government soldiers in Jaffna. The government responded, in turn, with two weeks of pogroms (a Russian term that applies to governmentinduced riots against ethnic minorities), involving the murder and rape of Tamils and looting of their villages; this period came to be known as Black July. The mayhem ended when the Indian government, then headed by Indira Gandhi, issued a stern warning to the Sri Lankan government to stop the violence. The government's heavy-handedness galvanized support among the Tamils for an independent Tamil state in the northeast corner of the island. During the next twenty years there were a string of suicide bombings, mostly by Tamil teenagers and occasionally by pre-teens, and strong government crackdowns in retaliation. Some of the most serious Tamil attacks include the 1991 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in a suicide bombing by a Tamil girl; the killing in 1996 of 1,200 soldiers at a government camp; and deadly terrorist attacks on commercial targets in Colombo, the nation's largest city. During these twenty years, Sri Lanka experienced about 65,000 deaths, with disastrous effects on the social and economic stability of the country. A ceasefire was declared in 2002, but new violence erupted in late 2005, leading to a renewed threat of civil war, with no clear end in sight.

E. Post-9/11 Terrorism: Alienation Meets Advanced Technology

The September 11 attack. In the hundred years following the Declaration of Independence, three episodes of war or war-like hostility each produced many thousands of deaths on American soil: the Revolutionary War, the wars against Native Americans, and the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens have been killed in wars abroad - in Europe, the South Pacific, Korea, and Southeast Asia - but except for the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, virtually none had been killed at home. The fifty years following the Pearl Harbor attack saw the ending of World War II, and then some forty years of Cold War between the West, led by the superpower United States, and the communist bloc of nations, led by the other superpower, the Soviet Union. Then, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ending of the Cold War soon after, Francis Fukuyama (1992) wrote as follows: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Then, in 2001, a new chapter was opened in history. The idea of a new millennium beginning with massive violence against noncombatants, committed by individuals acting outside state authority and with no interest in improving themselves materially was bizarre enough, perhaps a plot concept for a novel or motion picture thriller. But the killing of some 3,000 people and destruction of buildings that had been international symbols of vast power - making dust of the 110-floor World Trade Center Twin Towers and destroying a major sector of the Pentagon - made the September 11 attack an event of unprecedented scale and huge symbolic importance. Osama bin Laden's videotaped gleeful reaction to the attack suggests that the prospect of such a shocking, unprecedented strike against the world's sole superpower was a strong motivating factor behind the plan to attack New York and Washington in such a spectacular way. Other factors contributed to the incomprehensibility of the event and the public shock that followed: it was a suicide attack, committed by a large team of aliens, who managed to orchestrate and successfully carry out a complicated scheme, on U.S. soil, involving the training of pilots, the simultaneous hijacking of four large passenger jets, the evasion of federal antiterrorist surveillance systems, slipping through airport security, and overpowering the pilots and crews of each and every one of the planes. The attack involved nineteen men from four Middle Eastern countries - fifteen from Saudi Arabia and the others from Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. It had been thoroughly planned in Hamburg and rehearsed in the United States, and it benefited from financial support and loose guidance from al Qaeda, which at the time was headquartered in Afghanistan. The plan had called for four teams of five men, each team consisting of a trained pilot and four strongmen who were prepared to commandeer the jets after takeoff and then crash them into major targets. The four jetliners departed within minutes of one another on a brilliant, cloudless morning - two from Boston's Logan International Airport, one from the Newark International Airport, and the fourth from Washington Dulles International Airport. The terrorists carried out the plan with a 75 percent success rate: three of the four jets struck their intended targets, and the fourth - apparently set to strike the U.S. Capitol building, or possibly the White House - crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a rural area in Somerset County, in he southwestern portion of the state. The hijackers used box cutters and well-prepared commando techniques to overwhelm the pilots, crew, and passengers. Each aircraft was thus transformed from a passenger jet into a giant incendiary bomb, the fuel tanks of each filled to near capacity with 24,000 gallons of highly combustible jet fuel The fatalities included 265 in the four planes and 2,595 more on the ground, including 343 New York City firefighters, 23 officers from the New York Police Department, 37 Port Authority police officers, and 125 civilians and military personnel at the Pentagon. Five buildings in addition to the Twin Towers were destroyed or badly damaged at the site of the World Trade Center in New York, as well as four subway stations and major radio and television communications equipment. The Aftermath of 9/11. The immediate shock from the attack of 9/11 was heightened by the extended period of calm and optimism that preceded it. The event came more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and following years of unusual economic growth and relative peace on most of the planet. People the world over were now suddenly overcome with horror and bewilderment: Why would anyone want to do such a thing? How could such a large group successfully orchestrate such an attack? The immediate outpouring of sympathy and support was both moving and reassuring. The day after the attack, the headline of the Paris Le Monde newspaper read, "Nous sommes tous Americains" (We Are All Americans"). ´ The sense of siege was deepened further in the United States by an anthrax attack launched days later, with a series of letter envelopes postmarked as early as September 18, 2001. The envelopes contained highly refined anthrax spore powder sent from Trenton, New Jersey, to government officials in Washington, D.C. - including Senators Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont - and to prominent media people in New York City and Boca Raton, Florida. This attack produced twenty-two cases of anthrax poisoning by inhalation and five deaths. Although it was concluded that the attack was probably launched by a disgruntled U.S. scientist thinly veiled as a Muslim, it served to confound and add to the horror of the 9/11 attack. Stores throughout the United States experienced a run on gas masks, duct tape, and emergency provisions as people prepared for more such attacks. Response to the Attack: The War on Terror. In the weeks that followed, numerous narratives came forth attempting to make sense of the attack of 9/11: what it meant, why it happened, and what should be done about it. From the White House came an "Axis of Evil" narrative, delivered in President Bush's January 2002 State of the Union speech, about menacing tyrants and barbarians with dark intentions in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.4 From the left both at home and abroad came strident messages about American imperialism, corporate greed, and globalism as the primary sources of the problem Such divergent rhetoric notwithstanding, the United States responded expeditiously and assertively to the 9/11 attack. It began by assembling substantive support from a large coalition of nations and appealing to Afghanistan's Taliban government to turn over the al Qaeda leaders to whom they had been granting safe harbor. After those appeals were rejected, the United States launched "Operation Enduring Freedom" on October 7, 2001, the centerpiece of which was a decisive assault that destroyed al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan and overthrew the ruling Taliban government. Thus began the U.S. "war on terror." The Invasion of Iraq. The next phase of the War on Terror was considerably more controversial: the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, under the banner, "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The principal initial justification for the invasion was the clear and widespread perception - by international teams of inspectors and others - that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological, and possibly radioactive weapons. That Iraq was providing financial and moral support to suicide bombings in Israel provided further justification for the invasion. A more controversial justification was the characterization of the invasion as an integral part of the war on terror, including the claim that Iraq had significant links to al Qaeda. In October 2002, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution giving President George W. Bush the authority to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein did not give up his weapons of mass destruction. Then, in March 2003, following Hussein's failure to comply, more than 200,000 U.S. military personnel, including 100,000 soldiers and marines; some 45,000 British military personnel, including 25,000 British soldiers and marines; and an additional 2,000 Australians and 2,400 Polish military personnel were deployed to staging areas in Kuwait. The bombing of Baghdad commenced on March 20. Plans to invade from the north had to be aborted when the Turkish Parliament refused to permit its land to be used to support such an operation. Although the invasion of Iraq succeeded in ending the brutal twenty-fouryear rule of Saddam Hussein, it also gave rise to an insurgency that had not been widely anticipated. The insurgents were predominantly Sunnis and former Ba athist members, but over the next several months they began to include as well a growing number of jihadists from neighboring countries, led by Abu Musa al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian associate of Osama bin Laden. The link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda may have been tenuous, but it did not take long for the new Iraq to become tied strongly to a seemingly endless stream of al Qaeda-inspired insurgents. Many of the same Iraqis who celebrated the overthrow of the harsh tyrant Saddam Hussein, especially among the Shi a population, soon became equally animated over their displeasure with the U.S. occupation of their country and the conduct of the U.S. effort in the years following Saddam's overthrow. As the number of casualties on both sides mounted seemingly without end, it became clear that the effort to bring democracy and order to Iraq would not be as clean, quick, and easy as many had believed. The April 2004 release of vivid photographs revealing the serious abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans at the Abu Ghraib prison - American soldiers cast as villains - served grievously to undermine the claims of legitimacy and moral authority of the U.S. effort and to generate opposition in Iraq, the United States, and the rest of the world. Even though the vast majority of servicemen and women had been serving bravely and honorably in Iraq, the perception of abuse and brutality by a few U.S. military personnel became considerably more significant to people in many parts of the world than the nobility of the service of many others. The campaign in Iraq may yet, in years to come, make the country more democratic and generally better off than it had been under Saddam Hussein, and it could even serve, eventually, to stabilize the region and stimulate democracy, freedom, and the rule of law. Many observers, however, see the U.S. effort in Iraq increasingly resembling the disastrous campaign in Vietnam waged several decades earlier. The debate over the wisdom of invading Iraq, over the manner in which it was done, and over its ultimate effect on terrorism is likely to continue for years to come without a clear resolution. Making Sense of 9/11 and the War on Terror. What then are the distinctive characteristics of the post-9/11 era concerning both terrorists and the way the world responds to them? Let us consider the terrorists first. Has the number of terrorists increased since September 11? Coming up with hard figures of the number of terrorists either before or after September 11 is even more difficult than attempts to achieve agreement on the definition of "terrorism." However, the National Counterterrorism Center (2007) reports a considerable increase in the number of lethal and nonlethal terrorist attacks since its creation in 2003, with some 14,000 attacks and more than 20,000 deaths in 2006 - and 13,000 in Iraq alone. One fact is undeniable: the coverage of terrorism in the media is many times greater than it was before the 9/11 attack. In much the same way that increased coverage of crime in the United States during the 1990s created an impression that there was more crime during that decade - despite the fact that crime actually declined substantially - it might be that increased coverage of terrorism has created a false impression of increases in the number of terrorists. In fact, estimates by the U.S. Department of State (2006) suggest that the number of terrorist attacks worldwide declined from the 1980s to 2003, but that it rose sharply from 2003 to 2005, due largely to the spike in terrorist attacks in Iraq during this period (DeYoung, 2006; Glasser, 2005; Sabasteanski, 2006) More clearly documented than the number of terrorists is the plummeting popularity - among people in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries - of both the United States and the terrorists since September 11, 2001. Surveys by the Pew Research Center of more than 90,000 people in fifty nations reveal that a primary source of the growing unpopularity of the United States is a clear sense that it prosecuted its war on terror in a manner that was excessively unilateralist and nationalistic (Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2004). U.S. policies and actions against terrorism altered its image from that of champion of freedom and land of opportunity to world bully and exploiter (Kohut and Stokes, 2006). What about the nature of terrorism? Research on terrorists and their attacks has uncovered the emergence of what has been referred to as the "new terrorism," which is characterized by small, diffused networks with dubious sponsorship and unclear, nihilistic goals (Lesser et al., 1999; G. Martin, 2006; Robb, 2007). Much of this new terrorism is informed by revolutionary approaches to the conduct of guerrilla operations, especially in densely populated areas, where terrorists can inflict damage and spread fear on a much grander scale. Perhaps the single, most important development in the conduct of terrorism, especially in urban areas, is the validation of tactics developed decades ago by Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian revolutionary who wrote the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. Marighella's manual is an accessible guide to the effective waging of asymmetric warfare. Written in 1969, his manual describes techniques that have now been well tested and refined over several decades. They involve the principles of demoralizing and winning against a larger military or police force with stealth and surprise, flexibility and speed, planning, and knowledge of the physical area. The core idea is to shock the government forces and in the process win over the public using ingenuity and skill in small teams fighting against numerically and financially superior forces that are less flexible and burdened with heavy equipment, rules, and rigid hierarchies. When a population is won over to the cause of the insurgents, it becomes more difficult for the government forces to distinguish friend from foe. This leverages the small numbers of the insurgents, consistent with the asymmetric "smoke-and-mirrors" approach of terrorism. Such techniques have been put to use by al Qaeda and other terrorist and insurgent forces, which had to decentralize because their own hierarchy was crippled by effective counterterrorist strikes and activities that killed many of their key operatives, driving their organizations and remaining leaders more deeply underground and forcing them to shift emphasis from operations to inspiration. Terrorism has also become more lethal, as information about how to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction is now more widely accessible than ever to multitudes (see Box 3.2, "Countering the New Global Guerrillas"). Countering this new brand of terrorism is not likely to succeed if it focuses exclusively on the prosecution of a war against terrorists and the protection of targets. Terrorism is produced by terrorists, but it has a "demand" side too. Of course, few targets of terrorism wish to be victims, as might be suggested by use of the term "demand." But to the extent that the targets make themselves more attractive by calling attention to the acts of terrorism and overreacting to them, they contribute actively to the expansion of terrorism. We look more closely at an important aspect of this phenomenon - the fear that gives life to terrorism - in Chapter 10.

Shattering Warfare's Rules

The U.S. military faced suicide bombers in the past: in the closing months of World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots flew bomb-laden planes into U.S. Navy ships. The kamikazes generated casualties but could not change the outcome of the war. Strapped into their aircraft, those who volunteered to die for the "divine emperor" were the closest thing we ever faced to today's Islamist fanatics. But there were key differences: The kamikaze pilots were disciplined military men attacking military targets. Their goal wasn't to slaughter civilians but to stave off defeat. They were fighting for an imperial idea, not for a global religious crusade. Driven by a nihilistic desire to achieve salvation through slaughter, today's suicide bombers are a genuinely new phenomenon. With their twin goals of self-annihilation and creating mass carnage, they've fundamentally shifted the battlefield's rules - and its location. We've heard a great deal about our high-tech "revolution in military affairs." Welcome to the counter-revolution.

G. Strategic and Psychological Motives

The growth of terrorism may be related to the political agendas and strategic views of the leaders and the psychological motives of their followers. Suicide bombers are widely presumed to be psychologically disturbed and their leaders deranged. How, after all, could a well-adjusted person do or direct such an act? Many such terrorists may, indeed, be troubled souls, and all reveal themselves to be fanatical in the extreme, but there is both a logic and a method to the madness. 1. Motives of Leaders and Followers As noted in Chapter 1, one important feature of terrorism is its use of asymmetric violence against soft targets. Because terrorists typically lack the resources and training required to wage conventional warfare against strong, endowed adversaries, they circumvent superior military and police powers by striking at vulnerable targets, typically using available low- or medium-technology, high-explosive devices. The selection of large concentrations of innocents as primary targets violates conventional rules of military engagement and norms of civil society. However, when no viable short-term alternatives present themselves, it becomes a logical option to achieve one's political goal by targeting ordinary citizens and characterizing them as culpable members of the enemy, disregarding social mores and military conventions; the goal then is to intimidate and confuse a target population, often provoking them to react badly, either ineptly or by overreacting, or both. The challenge of the terrorist leaders is to find ways of attracting people to carry out the attacks. How do the leaders enlist others in such a dangerous and morally corrupt cause? To provide a justification for the attacks and thus gain the support of followers along the way, it is essential first for terrorist leaders to claim legitimacy for such acts. That the acts are regarded as illegitimate and inhumane by a stronger adversary and its allies becomes irrelevant. The basic rationale of terrorist organizations is that means regarded by some as inhumane or "dirty" are often required to achieve a worthy end: to rid the landscape of an evil enemy, who threatens our "correct" way of life and our very wellbeing. This requires leaders with enough charisma to attract followers by persuading them that the targets are dangerous and less than human - and then to convince them to persist in the engagement with a strategic sense of the importance of staying the course; leaders must also have enough practical sense to be able to provide tactical guidance on how to carry out the missions. Terrorist organizations also require followers who are sufficiently alienated and malleable to sacrifice themselves in the cause, either through suicide attacks or missions that expose them to grave risks. 2. Rationality and Culture The 9/11 attacks were possible because the aviation security system that prevailed until 2001 was based on the assumption that rational people would not hijack a jet airplane and be willing to blow themselves up in some cause, however "holy" or politically worthwhile. The assumption was, of course, incorrect, and it was made despite the fact that the idea was not totally without precedent: the United States had, after all, learned nearly sixty years earlier that young Japanese pilots were willing to sacrifice themselves in what they too regarded as a heroic venture in the name of a noble cause. Yet, terrorists' motives and behaviors are all perfectly logical and rational when considered in the context of accomplishing a mission, even if suicide bombing and other risky ways of killing civilians violate most conventional standards of rational behavior. To fully grasp the rationality of terrorists, it is important first to understand our own perspective on rational thinking and behavior. It has been difficult for the West to accept terrorist acts as rational for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most significant is an insularity that has been largely invisible to the insulated. During their lifetimes and prior to 9/11, most people in the United States and Europe had not witnessed mayhem on a large scale on their home soil. Terrorism is shocking because it is unfamiliar, something that happened only long ago or in far-away places. The United States, in particular, has been protected by two vast oceans and a system of national defense that had for centuries been virtually impenetrable. Our own notions of rationality have thus been shielded by both physical and psychic distance from competing notions derived from other value systems. We have come to think of our ideas about rationality as universal rather than unique to our culture, and to a very large extent have succeeded in exporting these ideas to others and persuading people in many corners of the world of the superiority of this value system. Post-Enlightenment notions of rationality have served the West quite well for centuries, but - leaving aside for the moment the prospect that the logic of terrorism, if not the ethics of it, may in fact be consistent with our own notions of rationality - our system is in fact not the only framework of rational thought. The notion of terrorism as irrational derives further from the widespread perception that suicide bombers and their supporters are lunatics, driven by mad, evil forces and caught up in mindless, fist-shaking rage. Photographic and videotaped images of crowds of enraged men and women and beheadings of hostages serve to deepen this perception of the madness, depravity, and irrationality of a distant other. The West is told again and again that the suicide bombers are young unmarried men driven by promises of seventytwo virgins in paradise, yet Sageman (2004) and others find this account to be misleading: many of the suicide bombers are married, and some are women. Jessica Stern (2003) further undermines the notion that suicide terrorists are irrational. Based on four years's worth of extensive interviews with militant jihadists and non-Muslim religious terrorists alike, she has found that the followers are, by and large, disenfranchised souls caught up in moral fervor, but not psychologically disturbed within the context of their environment. The idea of a high holy calling that gives the disenfranchised an opportunity to achieve martyrdom in a flash of exalted glory, if not limitless sex with virgins, makes some sense, given the limited range of legitimate alternatives and resulting sense of hopelessness these people tend to experience. Terrorists and their supporters may be seriously uninformed, misguided, and deluded about essential facts, conducting themselves in ways that make them seem crazed by conventional Western standards, but this does not mean that they are irrational. They appear, rather, to be following both an individual and a collective means-ends rationale in a manner that adapts quite well to the means available to them (Benmelech and Berrebi, 2007; Iannaccone, 2006). Western expressions of wishes for freedom and democracy for the subjects of autocratic rule, however well intended, combined with images of extraordinary affluence in the West and lack of respect for non-Western cultures, may offer more frustration than promise, especially when those receiving the messages have no direct personal experience of freedom or democracy and little credible hope of having either. Western military intrusions into Islam lands, in the name of countering and punishing terrorism, can add defiance to the frustration (Crenshaw, 2002; LaFree, 2007). Although the rage that follows often manifests in ways that are indecent, immoral, and unacceptable under Western and non-Western systems of ethics alike, it is not irrational (Lewis, 1990). The rage underlying terrorism may or may not be regarded as rational by conventional Western systems of psychology and norms of behavior, but most terrorists would not be qualified as clinically psychopathic. It has been discussed above that terrorists are not unusual within the societies from which they come. They are typically neither less educated nor less financially well off than their peers, and they do not appear generally to be psychologically maladjusted. According to Jerrold Post, a renowned political psychologist, research on the psychopathology of terrorists indicates that "the family backgrounds of terrorists do not differ strikingly from the backgrounds of their politically active counterparts" (Post, 1998, p. 9). Engagement in terrorism can thus provide an exciting channel for ordinary alienated youths to experience group cohesion and build self-esteem; it may give the weak an opportunity to feel strong. Terrorist leaders may have megalomaniacal designs, but their followers do not appear to be particularly unusual. The 9/11 attackers have been likened to the Japanese kamikaze pilots; although they were better educated than most of their contemporaries, they were more like soldiers in a cause designed to give purpose to their lives than brainwashed zombies or psychopaths (Dyson, 2006; Sageman, 2004). They have been likened, similarly, to household members who place the welfare of the family above their own individual welfare (Enders and Sandler, 2006). Clearly, the idea of rational behavior is incomplete if it ignores the individual's willingness to subordinate his or her own personal well-being to that of the community. Although such inclinations may be stronger in some cultures than others, they are found in all societies. The ultimate sacrifice of self for the community or culture is regarded as "heroism" and awarded a position of honor in most societies. 3. Rationality, Passion, and Shame The 2005 bombing of a wedding party at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, provides a lesson in the logic of winning and losing hearts and minds, and the tension between the passions and rational thinking of terrorists. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Abu Musa al-Zarqawi, who directed the attack in Amman, had experienced strong and growing popularity and increased enlistments of radical Muslims from throughout the region as al Qaeda's supreme commander on the ground in the terrorist operations in the Middle East (see Chapter 6 for a profile of Zarqawi). Zarqawi directed his campaign against U.S. forces and Iraqis trying to rebuild civil society, his recruitments fueled by the growing unpopularity of the United States. Although much of the insurgency against the United States in Iraq was indigenous, originating with native Sunni and Shi'ite Iraqi militia groups opposed to U.S. occupation of their communities and perceiving that the United States favored the wrong Iraqi factions, Zarqawi's ability to import Muslims to engage in "freedom fighting" activities against the United States and Iraqis who supported the U.S. "puppet" government was fed by the popular view that the United States was engaged in a holy war against Islam; this perception gained force following the Abu Ghraib torture expose, a ´ "recruitment poster" for Zarqawi's mission in Iraq. Zarqawi, a Jordanian, was known to despise the Jordanian government and was hoping to create the same sort of breakdown of order in Jordan as he had in neighboring Iraq. But when he directed the bombing of the wedding party, he seriously miscalculated, creating considerably more backlash than support for his cause. The Jordanian people rose up in large numbers to express their sense of outrage at Zarqawi's latest attack, and Jordan emerged as a closer ally to the United States in the months that followed (Solomon, 2006). The turnaround in Zarqawi's popularity is consistent with another counterterrorism intervention that has proven successful in dealing with crime: shaming. Shaming is an ancient solution to the problem of crime, revived by John Braithwaite in the late 1980s. The concept derives from people's moral sense, their natural inclination to be accepted by people around them (J. Wilson, 1993), and their rational expectation that they are likely to be more well off when they are accepted socially. Braithwaite (1989) maintains that social cohesion is created informally through people's desire to fit in and not be social outcasts. Social stigmatization has deterrent power, and gossip is a basic medium for achieving social cohesion. In addition, Braithwaite holds, consistent with strain theory, that this cohesion reduces crime and that it does so most effectively when offenders feel genuine regret for the harms done to others associated with their acts. Shaming may be useful as well in countering the forces that induce young people to participate in terrorism. It may be used as a tool of public policy, but to be effective it must appeal to people locally and at the smallest and closest levels of social relationship - family and peers - who can serve effectively as shaming forces. 4. Rationality and Deterrence The rationality of most people also provides the basis for one of the most fundamental of all justifications for imposing sanctions for misbehavior: deterrence. The deterrent effect of sanctions, invoked either publicly or privately, derives from the rational expectation that if one misbehaves, authorities may respond in ways that will make one regret the misbehavior. The effect can occur in either or both of two ways. Under general deterrence, one is discouraged from misbehaving because of the threat of sanctions that may be imposed, even if one has never experienced the sanction before. Under individual or special deterrence, one is discouraged from misbehaving because one has previously experienced the sanction and wishes not to repeat the experience. Implicit in both types of deterrence is an understanding that people will gauge their behaviors in accordance with a rational calculus that compares the expected benefit of the misbehavior with the expected cost of the sanction. Can deterrence be an effective tool against terrorism? Yes, but it can also backfire if not used prudently. The English utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1830) wrote that punishments can be too small and not achieve the desired effect, but they can also be too large, causing a sense of injustice and a defiant backlash against authority (see also Sherman, 1993). Sanctions used in the name of deterrence can thus create precisely the opposite effect. The key is proportionality: to be effective, the sanction must be widely perceived as proportional to the misbehavior. If it is widely perceived as disproportionate, it can create not only a counter-deterrent effect but also much deeper harms by undermining the legitimacy of the authority imposing the sanction. The rationality of terrorists has been underestimated, but so too has the intensity of their passion. The West need not abandon its systems of rationality and social control that took so long to develop and that have served both the West and others well over the centuries. At the same time, however, we should be clear that serious problems can follow if the West projects its own notions of rationality on others - following archaic patterns of colonialism and imperialism - without first testing the water to learn about the cultures and deeply held traditions of others. We might, instead, keep our own views of rational behavior in perspective and avoid regarding them as universal and other systems as irrational or foolish, not only out of a sense of humility and respect for others but also in the interest of rational self-protection.

Homeland Vulnerable

The suicide bomber is so powerful a weapon that not even the terrorists have realized its full potential. Today, we see intermittent, localized attacks. The suicide bomber is at the same stage of development as the tank was in World War I: used in small numbers, armored vehicles did not achieve and sustain critical mass. The obvious forerunners of today's Islamist fanatics were the Assassins, the notorious cult that operated from Persia through Syria in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Armed only with sacramental knives and patience, the Assassins terrorized governments by killing sultans and grand viziers. It took the invading Mongols - the all-time masters of counter-insurgency warfare - to destroy the Assassins in their mountain strongholds To be fair to the Assassins, they attacked only the mighty, not the masses. And, as Bernard Lewis, a respected authority on the Middle East and Islam, has pointed out, Islam's prohibition against suicide meant that yesteryear's murderers allowed themselves to be caught and suffer torture rather than kill themselves. But the new age of faith is also an era of the perversion of religion, from the primitive blood-cult evident in ritual beheadings to the rationalization of a suicide bomber's death - not as self-murder but the consequence of a brave attack in the conduct of holy war. Nor should it be as difficult as we assume for Westerners to grasp the psychology at work in the suicide bomber. Our own history is full of martyrs and religious warriors who went boldly and knowingly to their deaths. In every culture, the really good haters die well.

C. Emergence of the Suicide Bomber

The terror dragon arose from decades of slumber in the mid-twentieth century, when indigenous groups in Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Israel and Palestine, Kenya, and elsewhere rebelled against ruling colonial regimes, often using dramatic, vicious acts of violence to gain attention to their causes. Algeria. Among the most historically significant of the terrorist groups of the latter half of the twentieth century was Algeria's Front de Liberation ´ Nationale (FLN), which introduced the tactic of massive targeting of civilians. When France's government executed two Algerian rebels in 1956, the FLN responded sensationally over a three-day period, slaughtering forty-nine French citizens vacationing in Algeria. The FLN terrorists launched lethal attacks on beachfront cafes and other targets where tourist families, including children, were concentrated. The terrorists succeeded not only in grabbing headlines that seized the world's attention but also in sending shockwaves across the French countryside that were especially deep and broad: the FLN raised the price of France's continuing colonization of Northern Africa to unaffordable levels. The French had given up Morocco as a protectorate in 1956, and the mayhem in Algeria surely accelerated France's inclination to relinquish its rule there as well, giving Algeria full independence by 1962. In the process, the FLN gave the tactic of attacking vulnerable civilians with brutal, overwhelming aggressive force a new strategic validity that had no recent historical precedent. Spain. The FLN's crusade for Algerian autonomy inspired like-minded groups elsewhere to use similar tactics, but not always with the same effectiveness. In 1959, Basque separatists in Northern Spain, under the banner of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), started a long campaign of car bombings and assassinations that killed more than 800 people over the ensuing years, including President Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973 and other prominent politicians, judges, government officials, officers of the armed forces, journalists, professors, businessmen, and children. Although the attacks by ETA failed to produce full national independence from Spain, they did induce the Spanish government to give the Basques greater political autonomy. By the 1990s, however, Basque terrorists lost both focus and the widespread support of the mainstream Basque population, as noted in Chapter 2 (see the section on ethnic terrorism). Quebec. In Canada, Marxist-oriented Queb´ ecois separatists formed the ´ Front du Liberation de Quebec (FLQ) in 1963, launching a campaign of bombings aimed at achieving independence from Canada. The borrowing of the first two letters of FLN's acronym was no coincidence, but both the intensity and success of the FLQ turned out to be less profound than the FLN's. Through the mid- and late 1960s, the FLQ carried out bombings, bank robberies, and other acts of violence, at least five of which resulted in the deaths of targeted civilians. The FLQ campaign achieved a rhetorical victory in 1967 when Charles de Gaulle offered unusual words of support: "Vive le Quebec Libre" ("Long live free Quebec"). In 1970, the FLQ kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross, and in 1980 it kidnapped and killed the Minister of Labor and Vice-Premier of Quebec, Pierre Laporte. In the latter half of the twentieth century, terrorism by the FLQ became a sensational distraction, serving largely to undermine the legitimate interests of the Queb´ ecois separatist movement. ´ Israel and Palestine. The seeds of Palestinian terrorism were planted on November 29, 1947, with the passage of Resolution 181 by the United Nations General Assembly, partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into two separate states - one Jewish and one Arab - with Jerusalem part of both and under international control. The Arabs were particularly unhappy with the UN resolution. Hostilities began almost immediately between Jews and Arabs, with hundreds killed on each side from the time of passage of the resolution until May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared independence and statehood for Israel. The State of Israel was officially recognized by Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and most other non-Arab nations. A formal declaration of war was issued immediately by the Arab League, made up of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and supported by volunteers from Libya, Saudia Arabia, and Yemen who joined in the campaign. After two failed attempts to achieve a truce between the warring factions in the summer and fall of 1948, the Israelis were able to repel the Arab coalition forces and forge separate armistices with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1949. In the war and its aftermath, some 700,000 Arabs and a similar number of Jews living in Palestine were uprooted, with most of the Jews migrating to Israel and Arabs moving to Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe.1 The quick, efficient, and complete defeat of the Arab armies by the Israeli forces left the Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular with a sense of humiliation and loathing. The years that followed saw the rise of Palestinian nationalism led by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded by the Arab League in 1964 and led by Yassir Arafat. The PLO engaged in extensive guerrilla and terrorist operations over the ensuing years. Arafat's PLO pioneered hijacking, hostage-taking, and a long series of school bus bombings to win global recognition. In the pantheon of terrorism, Arafat's distinctive achievements include the following: the first major hijacking of an Israeli commercial jet in 1968 the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich by a PLO faction calling itself "Black September" the hijacking of an Israeli plane en route to Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, resulting in an Israeli commando raid to liberate the hostages the sensational killing of a wheelchair-bound American, Leon Klinghoffer, during the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro Arafat gradually pulled back from direct involvement in such activities in order to win political and financial support from the West and gain international legitimacy. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 after signing the Oslo Accords the previous year, in which Arafat agreed to recognize Israel's right to exist, guarantee Israel's security within its defensible borders, and work through a series of negotiations toward a peaceful resolution of the remaining problems. In the meantime, a new wave of fundamentalism swept the Middle East, starting with the 1979 Iranian Revolution. More radical organizations then emerged in Palestine, including Hamas in 1987, under the leadership of Shaykh Ahmed Yassin; Hezbollah, created and supported by Iran; and the Islamic Jihad. These organizations all targeted Israel as an oppressor, professed unwavering support for the Palestinian cause of freedom and justice, and rejected pressures from the United Nations, the United States, and European nations to find a peaceful two-state resolution to the conflict with Israel. Acts of terrorism came in waves throughout this period, but they became increasingly deadly over the long arc of the last three decades of the twentieth century, as opposition mounted to the expansion of Jewish settlements the West Bank and Gaza and the tactic of suicide bombing became more popular. Leftists in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The idea of poor people rising up against a powerful oppressor is one of the most dominant and enduring themes underlying terrorism. The success of this idea in France in the nineteenth century, in Russia in the early twentieth century, and against colonial rulers in Algeria and elsewhere inspired leftists in much of Europe, Africa, and North and South America throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. These campaigns were typically stimulated by mixtures of idealistic Marxist and nihilistic anarchist notions, as well as by romantic martyr icons such as Che Guevara or Malcolm X. Most prominent among these terrorist groups are the following: Baader-Meinhof Gang, which kidnapped and murdered people and robbed banks and stores in West Germany Red Brigades, which committed kidnappings, murders, and bombings in Italy in the 1970s and '80s, including the notorious kidnapping and assassination of former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978 Weather Underground (or "Weathermen"), a dissident splinter group of the Students for Democratic Society, which set off bombs in Chicago, Berkeley and San Francisco, New York, Washington, and elsewhere in 1969 and the early '70s, inspired largely by opposition to the Vietnam War Leftist revolutionary movements in Africa (including the Movement for the Liberation of Angola [MPLA] and the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front) and South America (most notably, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] and the Shining Path in Peru) also engaged in terrorist activities throughout much of the latter half of the twentieth century. These groups might, however, be described more accurately as guerrilla revolutionary groups rather than conventional terrorist groups, because the targets they attacked were primarily military and governmental rather than civilian. The Emergence of the Suicide Bomber. Perhaps the most devastating legacy of the latter half of the twentieth century is the legitimation of suicide bombing as a popular tactic for achieving political objectives. When people see themselves as rendered collectively helpless, humiliated, or otherwise aggrieved by overwhelming military or police power, asymmetric attack in the name of martyrdom and collective justice can become a compelling alternative to remaining in a state of hopelessness. Suicide bombing offers to such people what the French president called "strength of the weak" (la force du faible; Hoagland, 2006a). But the gains for the society from which the attackers come may be illusory - there is little evidence that suicide terrorism diminishes the sense of hopelessness among the people of those societies much beyond the time of the attacks. Nonetheless, increased frustration and dreams of change have been the essential justifications used in the escalation from rock-throwing by young Palestinians to suicide bombings of Israeli buses, restaurants, and marketplaces in the 1990s; by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka; and by al Qaeda in Sudan during the same decade. Although suicide attacks are an ancient practice, traceable at least to Samson's biblical era attack on the Philistine temple, the practice was not widely used until the kamikaze raids on U.S. military targets in the Pacific, which proved effective during World War II. The tactic was revived in 1983 by Hezbollah's landmark suicide bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, an attack that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, and injured more than 100 others. Among the dead were the Central Intelligence Agency's director of Middle East operations. The weapon was a van carrying some 400 pounds of explosives, deployed by a suicide driver. Six months later, a delivery truck filled with TNT rammed its way into the Marine barracks in Beirut and exploded, killing 241 U.S. servicemen. About twenty seconds later, another truck exploded at the French military compound, killing another fifty-eight paratroopers there. Within six months, all multinational forces had withdrawn from Lebanon, signaling a victory for those behind the attacks. Sharp increases in the number of suicide bombings internationally are undeniable. Scott Atran reported fewer than 5 suicide bombings throughout the world annually in the 1980s, about 16 annually in the 1990s, and 180 annually from 2001 to 2005 - with a more than fivefold increase from 2001 to 2005, from 81 attacks in 2001 to 460 in 2005. By 2007, Nordland and Dehghanpisheh reported a higher number of suicide bombings in Iraq alone. Similar increases have been reported by Pape (2005), by Benmelech and Berrebi (2007), and others. Rand terrorist researcher Bruce Hoffman (2005) reported that 80 percent of suicide bombings that have occurred since 1968 took place after 9/11. That percentage had increased to 95 percent by 2007. As a tactic, suicide bombing can be extremely efficient and effective. The explosives are aimed precisely at a target by means of the most direct form of human guidance possible, with both the physical location and timing of the explosive device under full human control. Target selection plans can be modified at the discretion of the bomber as circumstances warrant. Because of the ability to exercise such discretion on the ground, the amount of damage to a target can be more devastating than that achieved by conventional guided weapons, which are, in any event, unavailable and unaffordable to those who plan such attacks. Suicide bombings tend to be especially destructive when directed by more capable attackers at more carefully selected targets (Benmelech and Berrebi, 2007). The acts are difficult to prevent without imposing sharp restrictions on normal freedoms of assembly and movement. The psychological damage - the extent of terror - and its destructive impact on the economic and social vibrancy of the larger target population can be immense. In Iraq, the tactic made it very difficult for the U.S. military to achieve its objective of winning hearts and minds by getting close to the people because it had to protect itself against strangers with bombs: military convoys routinely warned Iraqis to stay 100 meters away or risk getting shot (Nordland and Dehghanpisheh, 2007). And there is no shortage of suicide bombers. The supply of willing bombers in areas with high concentrations of alienated people can be seemingly inexhaustible. They are attracted not only because they view their alternatives as somewhat limited, if not bleak, but also because they perceive distinct benefits from engaging in the attacks: martyrdom, revenge against enemies for prior wrongs, fame in death, honor to the family, virgins in paradise, and so on. Suicide bombing became a particularly common occurrence in Israel in the 1990s. The Palestinian groups Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade developed and refined the use of suicide belts containing shrapnel, worn under loosely fitting clothes, and designed to inflict maximum damage on targets with large concentrations of people, such as crowded buses, cafes, and open-air markets. It became common practice afterward for the offending group to declare responsibility for the act and release a tape of the suicide bomber explaining him- or herself before the attack. The Israelis often responded by bombing the home of the parents of the attacker or the headquarters of the group claiming credit for the act. Suicide bombings spiked internationally after 2001 and were heavily concentrated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Statistics compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center, under its Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, reveal that during the 25-year period 1983 through 2008, over 1,840 suicide bombings killed about 22,000 people (Robin Wright, 2008). The rate of suicide bombings jumped from 12.9 annually throughout the world from 1983 through 2002, to over 316 annually for the five years afterward, a 25-fold increase in the annual rate of suicide bombing attacks. Nearly 1,200 - 64 percent of all suicide bombings accounted for internationally from 1983 through 2007 - occurred since 2001 in the two countries with a significant U.S. presence: 920 in Iraq and 260 in Afghanistan. What about the moral dimension of suicide bombing? Suicide bombers often leave tape-recorded justifications that make various claims of martyrdom, personal or family revenge, social justice, a holy cause, assertions that the people targeted are not truly innocent, the desire to end one's feeling of despair, and so on. Suicide bombers may be able to offer a coherent moral justification for attacking military targets, but there can be no moral justification for killing noncombatants (Walzer, 1992). To do so violates all conventional codes of ethics, including the holy scriptures of all the major religions. One can stretch to find interpretations of the Bible, the Quran, and other religious texts that appear to condone such acts, but serious religious scholars invariably find such interpretations to be taken out of context or to be otherwise invalid. We may not be able to find a coherent justification for killing noncombatants, but a wealth of data have been accumulating from these attacks, and they are now being studied (Benmelech and Berrebi, 2007; Hoffman, 1999; LaFree and Dugan, 2004; Mickolus, 1982; Pape, 2005; Sabasteanski, 2006). It will surely be worthwhile to continue to learn systematically about the several hundreds of suicide bombings about which we have useful data. As Ralph Peters (2005) says in Box 3.1, "It's much harder to defeat an enemy you don't understand." Suicide attacks are not likely to end in our lifetime, but we may be able to substantially reduce such attacks by understanding why and how they occur. The key will be to remove both the desire and opportunity for future such attacks. Terrorism on U.S. Soil. In addition to its Weather Underground experience during the early 1970s, the United States saw its own fair share of homegrown terrorists acting alone or in pairs during the latter half of the twentieth century, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. A precursor to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) occurred in 1993, when a car bomb linked to al Qaeda exploded in the parking garage of the WTC, killing six people and injuring 1,000 others. All of these episodes fit the basic definition of terrorism - violent crimes against noncombatants that induce widespread fear and panic, typically involving a political agenda. (They are discussed in more detail in Chapters 6 and 8.) In short, terrorism became considerably more visible and more sophisticated in the latter half of the twentieth century. Both the frequency and lethality of terrorist attacks were largely the product of emerging information processing and communication technologies, which facilitated the coordination of terrorist activities and gave terrorism a stage on which it could be publicized. Terrorism also developed a new face, one distinctly less political and rooted more apparently in agendas related to religious fundamentalism and alienation against modernity. As we proceed, we shall visit and revisit the question of whether this association is real or largely illusory and whether religion has been appropriated to lend legitimacy to interests that are more deeply rooted in political agendas than spiritual callings.

Terrorist Pathways

To move toward fruitful avenues for psychologically informed counterterrorism initiatives, it is useful to consider what involvement in terrorism implies. The reality of involvement in terrorism today is typified by its complexity: involvement in terrorism seems to imply—and result in—different things to different people, as well as different things to the same person over time and experience. Far from the simplistic distinctions between leaders and followers, even the smallest of terrorist movements comprise a variety of roles and functions into which recruits are assigned or encouraged to move. Additionally, adoption and retention of those roles is neither discrete nor static. As outlined earlier (Horgan 2007), there is very often migration both between and within roles, from illegal (e.g., engaging in violent activity) to gray areas (supporting the engagement in violent activity) to legal (e.g., peaceful protest, visiting relevant Web sites to learn). While many of the activities that members of terrorist movements engage in are not actually illegal per se (and cannot be meaningfully encompassed under the label terrorism but instead subversion), without these activities, actual terrorist operations could not develop, evolve, or be sustained over time and place. Engagement in violent activity is what we most commonly associate with terrorism. The reality of terrorist movements today, however, is that this most public of roles and functions tends to merely represent the tip of an iceberg of activity. Supporting the execution of a violent attack are those directly aiding and abetting the event, those who house the terrorist or provide other kinds of support, raise funds, generate publicity, provide intelligence, and so forth. The person we think of as "the terrorist" is therefore fulfilling only one of multiple functions in the movement, albeit the most dramatic in terms of direct consequences.

I. Do Explanations of Terrorism Lend Legitimacy to It?

We have reviewed the standard definitions of terrorism, considered similarities and differences between terrorism and other forms of aggression - particularly, crime - and discussed the sources of and explanations for an individual's participation in terrorist activities. Terrorism manifests in a variety of ways, and it is important to understand the fundamentally distinct types of terrorism - whether or not politically motivated, whether or not state sanctioned, whether or not closely affiliated with larger organizations, whether manifesting individually or in groups, and so on - and how one set of circumstances that might explain a particular individual's participation in terrorism might not apply to another individual. Does offering explanations for terrorism lend legitimacy to the cause of terrorists bombing innocent people? No. Does it justify their behavior or shift blame from the terrorists to victims? Not at all. How, then, is it helpful to regard terrorism as having elements of rationality or to suggest that it may have something to do with their weaknesses and our own limitations? The answer is that a better understanding of both the terrorists and victims can enable us to respond more effectively to terrorism. We need not relinquish valid concerns about terrorism or abandon our vigilance against it. Nor should our gaining an understanding of the nature and causes of terrorism come at the expense of our core moral values. Such understanding can help us prevent actions that are a product of our own ignorance and can induce us to engage more purposefully in effective interventions to prevent further acts of terrorism. This should become increasingly clear as we proceed through successive topics in this book, starting with the history of terrorism, the focus of the next chapter. As we review this material, we will do well to consider Santayana's warning that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

Conclusions by Horgan

We may yet discover that even the beliefs of deeply committed extremists may be more subject to change than we previously expected. It is worth exploring the role of the individual as a consumer of propaganda, particularly in the context of a conflict. We need to understand the major function of terrorist leaders to encourage changes in political and religious beliefs—even minute changes for those already deemed to be more or less converted while at the peripheral stages of involvement—and a sense of accommodation in the involvement in terrorism as not only legitimate but also attractive and important. The objective should be to publicize the negative consequences of terrorism, challenge its legitimacy through the appropriate channels, and encourage a displacement of activity that would otherwise result in greater involvement in a terrorist movement. In addition, such a strategy could prove immensely valuable in reducing the perceived sense of effectiveness of terrorism for already involved members. To succeed, we need to face some facts. The assumption of a moment of epiphany that explains some assumedly conscious decision to become a terrorist is naïve, misleading, and, crucially, unsupported by empirical evidence. Involvement in terrorism is a complex process of accommodation and assimilation across incrementally experienced stages. Potential and actual terrorists move between and within roles, although these migration and promotion processes remain poorly understood. Some individuals become involved more quickly than others, but a consistent quality across all terrorist movements is the gradual sense of progression. Furthermore, this movement process is based on initially supportive qualities. The most obvious common denominator influencing individuals' embracement of their own radicalization—at any level—is a sense of positive expectation. As 92 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY Downloaded from http://ann.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on October 14, 2008 FROM PROFILES TO PATHWAYS AND ROOTS TO ROUTES 93 long as commitment and dedication to one's socialization further and further into the movement remains positive for the follower, the process eventually results in the formation of a new—or at least effectively consolidated—identity. Profiling the individual and his or her presumed associated qualities has no future in serious analyses of either the terrorist or the pathways to radicalization in which he or she engages. We ought to consider instead profiling (1) the process of violent radicalization and (2) the meaning of engagement with that process to the individual terrorist. In considering the nature of involvement in terrorism, we might begin to develop phase-specific counterterrorism initiatives, depending on what we can ascertain is the most effective intervention point: whether it be initial prevention of involvement, subsequent disruption of engagement, or eventual promotion of disengagement. Acknowledging these distinctions will allow for the development of unique kinds of interventions, depending on where we eventually decide they may be best focused. The disengagement phase remains the most poorly understood and least researched, but ironically, it is in this phase that practical counterterrorism initiatives—aimed not only at facilitation of disengagement but also at prevention of initial involvement—might actually become very effective.

LR Assessment Tasks

When drafting an assessment, analysts must remember to: 1. Formulate the main message, putting the bottom line up front 2. Ensure that each section, paragraph, and sentence advance the storyline. 3. Make sure there is sufficient reasoning and compelling evidence to support the judgements. 4. Consider the possibility of some evidence that could be deception. 5. Ask whether any contrary information undercuts your line of analysis. 6. Consider the impact of information gaps on your analysis. 7. Clearly express levels of confidence in your judgements and uncertainties 8. Consider whether a warning message should be delivered. 9. Reflect alternative views wherever appropriate 10. Distinguish analytic judgements from the intelligence reporting 11. Be concise, make very word count and use the active voice. 12. Avoid bias, advocacy, and value laden terms In addition to the above several ancillary tasks that just be performed before giving an assessment to superiors for editing and review. Analysts must ensure that: 13. The title and lead sentence capture the What? and the So What? 14. The proper format has been used 15. Key terms are well defined. 16. The Source Summary Statement is well-crafted. 17. All graphics are consistent with the text. 18. All grammatical errors, typographical errors, or misspellings have been corrected. 19. Classification and other handling caveats are correct. 20. Footnotes, endnotes, and sourcing meet established standards. 21. Contributors and those who have coordinated the paper are identified.

While more influences could probably be identified, these factors, when combined, provide a powerful framework for what could be termed "openness to socialization" into terrorism. They highlight why, given two people who are exposed to the same conditions (and even come from the same family), one may step toward involvement in terrorism and the other may not. We should note that these factors are only potent at one very specific juncture: the phase of initially becoming

involved. Once the potential recruit begins to move toward the potential of belonging to a group (before engaging in terrorist events), a different set of factors begin to exert unique influence. These include the power of the group, the content and process of ideology (or ideological control), the influence of a particular leader, and so on. Additionally, individuals will experience the steps toward increased involvement in different ways. Overall, for any given individual, becoming involved in terrorism will reflect a dynamic, though highly personalized, process of incremental assimilation and accommodation.

[M]uch of the thinking about the terrorist is still rooted in assumptions about profiling, while . . . no terrorist profile has yet been found—not only between members of different terrorist movements but also among

members of the same particular movement. First, the dramatic consequences of successful terrorist activity force us to confront the effects of behavior that would, to most normal people, suggest incomprehensible fanaticism, bordering on abnormality or even some sort of sickness—"How could anyone do this?" being a typical response to the shocking behavior associated with terrorist attacks. The second, more difficult question is, given that so many people are exposed to the presumed generating conditions for terrorism (or root causes), the triggering factors and catalysts both for religious and political mobilization, why is it that so relatively few people actually do this (even within conflict zones, let alone outside of them)? For example, more than 2 million Muslims live in Britain, many of whom are exposed to the same social conditions, backgrounds, and origins. Yet, so very few become radicalized to the point that they engage in terrorism. So how do we account for this? A temptation has been to assume that some qualities of specialness exist within a specific group of terrorists, in terms of both what makes them alike as well as what presumably makes them different from the rest of us (or at least from those who do not engage in terrorism). Ariel Merari (personal correspondence 2006) has correctly argued that it is more precise to state that "no terrorist profile has been found" rather than "there is no terrorist profile." However, several real dangers are associated with the continued effort to construct such profiles, particularly as far as understanding recruitment to terrorism is concerned. In assuming the existence of a profile, we tend to miss several critical features associated with the development of the terrorist. These would include, but are not limited to, the following: • the gradual nature of the relevant socialization processes into terrorism; • a sense of the supportive qualities associated with that recruitment (e.g., the "pull" factors, or lures, that attract people to either involvement in terrorism in a broad sense or that are used to groom potential recruits); • the sense of migration between roles (e.g., moving from fringe activity such as public protest to illegal, focused behavior); and • a sense of the importance of role qualities (e.g., what attractions does being a sniper hold as opposed to becoming a suicide bomber, and how do these qualities become apparent to the onlooker or potential recruit?)

When we assume static qualities of the terrorist (a feature of profiles), we become blind to the qualities of the dynamics that shape and support the development of the terrorist. We also obscure the basis from which a more practical counterterrorism strategy might develop to prevent or control the extent of those who initially become involved in terrorism. Counterterrorism efforts still frequently rely on

profiles. While delivering a presentation on terrorist profiling at a workshop for counterterrorism officials in 2006, a senior official protested to me, "Profiles are useful. Of course they are. The reason . . . is that your average suicide bomber is not going to be the middleaged, white, father of three kids." The context of this comment, made in the United Kingdom, is that such a suicide bomber had not been encountered there yet. But this example serves as a reminder that the assumptions that feed into how we think about the terrorist (who he or she is, and what population or demographic he or she is likely to come from) are often based on the actuarial projections from a small, and statistically insignificant, sample of individuals. The dangers of overgeneralization should be obvious. But highlighting these limitations still does not answer the critical question: why does one person become involved in terrorism and the other does not? It is impossible to give an answer to this question that will allow us to predict with certainty who is likely to become a terrorist (and conversely, who is not). However, it might be useful to identify predisposing risk factors for involvement in terrorism (Horgan 2005) as a prelude to some form of risk assessment for prediction of involvement. These factors may include the following: 1. The presence of some emotional vulnerability, in terms of feelings of anger, alienation (often synonymous with feelings of being culturally uprooted or displaced and a longing for a sense of community), and disenfranchisement. For example, some alienated young British Muslims, looking for guidance and leadership that they do not get from mosque leaders because of a perception that the leaders are too old, too conservative, and out of touch with their world, may turn elsewhere for guidance and clarity. 2. Dissatisfaction with their current activity, whether it be political or social protest, and the perception that conventional political activity just does not work or produce results. A related issue here is that violent radicals view terrorism as absolutely necessary. For example, in a video message before blowing up himself and six others in London, Mohammad Sidique Khan employed the language of "war" in urging British Muslims to oppose the British government. The view is that terrorism is a necessary, defensive, and, above all, urgent activity against an offensive enemy perceived as bent on humiliating and subjugating its victims. 3. Identification with victims—either real, in terms of personal victimization (e.g., by the military or police) or less tangible. For European Muslims who become involved in violent jihad, this identification is with Palestinian victims of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, victims in Iraq, or the conflict in Kashmir. In Khan's video testimony, he blamed his behavior on the actions of the United States and United Kingdom: "bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people," identifying with the suffering of Muslims around the world even though he came from Yorkshire, in northern England. 4. Crucially, the person has to believe that engaging in violence against the state or its symbols is not inherently immoral. This belief, while it may be fine-tuned by a religious figure, is usually held by the time the person has decided to become involved to the point of engaging in terrorism. 5. Also important is a sense of reward that the recruit has about what "being in this movement" represents. All suicide bombers, across the world, have one thing in common. They come to believe that they will achieve more in death than they ever could in life, a very powerful motivating factor not only in initial recruitment but also in terms of sustaining that person's commitment to the movement once a member. In practical terms, involvement might result in heightened status, respect, or authority within the immediate peer group, the broader radical movement, and (at least as imagined by the recruit) the wider Muslim community. The clearest answer to why someone wants to become involved in a suicidal mission is that the person seeks the kind of martyrdom and accompanying rewards on display as when violent radical Web sites hailed the 7/7 bombers as heroic martyrs and exalted them as almost pop stars. 6. Finally, kinship or other social ties to those experiencing similar issues, or already involved, are crucial