Suicide bomb ers are not all alike .
Palestinians prepare elaborate martyr videos before
their killings and become celebrities afterward, while
Iraqi Sunnis kill their fellow citizens in obscurity. In
Afghanistan, the suicide bombers have their own
distinction: They are known for their ineptness, often
blowing themselves up without killing anyone else.
“They’re not efficient,” said Martha Crenshaw, a
senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at the Freeman Spogli Institute
for International Studies. She arrived at Stanford this
summer, after several decades of studying terrorism
as a professor of government at Wesleyan University
in Middletown, Conn.
Afghan suicide bombers tend to be poorer, younger
and less educated than suicide bombers elsewhere,
Crenshaw said during a recent CISAC seminar. She
cited a United Nations report that accused the Taliban
of strapping explosives to boys, despite a commitment
not to recruit those too young to have facial hair.
Promises of motorcycles and cell phones have been
used as inducements.
One boy whose mission failed was interviewed by
U.N. workers. “He somehow thought he would survive
the attack and get to spend the money they had promised
him, not quite understanding that he would not be there,”
Crenshaw said in an interview following her talk.
In Afghanistan, as elsewhere, the person wearing the
explosives belt or driving the car bomb is the least valuable
person in the terror group, Crenshaw said. The key people
are the bomb maker and the organizer: “They never send
the bomb maker with the bomb.” In Israel, security
officials target the bomb makers for assassination.
“It’s the organization that decides who’s going to
be attacked and when and where and why,” Crenshaw
said. “Then they recruit somebody to carry it out. So the
person carrying the bomb really is just a foot soldier.”
Afghanistan’s most famous suicide attack happened
in 2001, just two days before the 9/11 assault on the
United States. Al-Qaida operatives masquerading as
journalists preemptively blew up tribal warlord Ahmad
Shah Massoud in anticipation that he might aid U.S.
troops if they eventually invaded Afghanistan in search
of Osama bin Laden.
Today, al-Qaida, the Taliban and Hizb-i-Islami (the
group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) aim their suicide
attacks at U.S. and Afghan government forces, but the
victims are overwhelmingly civilian bystanders, often
large numbers of children. Many of the bombers,
Crenshaw said, are recruited from religious schools
across the border in Pakistan.
The predominant motivation for terrorists to employ
suicide attacks is strategic, not religious, according to
Crenshaw. One suicide bomber kills many people, a
perfect example of what the U.S. military calls asymmetric
warfare. According to the United Nations, since the
1980s suicide bombers have been involved in only 4
percent of the world’s terror attacks, but have caused
29 percent of the deaths.
Crenshaw gave her CISAC talk the day of the bloody
suicide-bomber attack on Pakistani opposition leader
Benazir Bhutto. With some 140 deaths and 500 injuries,
it was the deadliest of more than 50 suicide attacks in
Pakistan in recent years. Bhutto survived without injury,
but if she had died, the volatile country could have
come unglued, according to Crenshaw. “It shows you
how one major suicide bombing could make a big
difference,” she said.
Her interest in terrorism began in graduate school
in the late 1960s. Her first book, Revolutionary Terrorism
(Hoover Institution Press, 1978), was on guerilla
warfare against the French during the Algerian war
for independence from 1954 to 1962. It still sells on
Amazon, for $100.
How does one research suicide bombers, since most
of them, by definition, are dead? “We don’t have very
many studies that are based on extensive interviews,”
Crenshaw said. The one well-known body of work
based on interviews involves failed Palestinian suicide
bombers held in Israeli prisons. But the prisoners have
told their stories so often that it is difficult to separate
truth from imagination, according to Crenshaw.
Scholars of terrorism in general can turn to trial
transcripts, databases of newspaper stories or the
“Harmony Project” documents captured from al-Qaida
and posted online by the U.S. Military Academy at
West Point.
But less has been written specifically about suicide
bombers. “In Iraq, it’s very difficult to know who they
were, even. They’re dead and they’re blown to bits,
too,” Crenshaw said. “You might not have a hand with
fingerprints, for example. Surprisingly enough, often they
do seem to find heads. But still, how do you identify
someone in Iraq, where you don’t have a record of who
the population is to begin with? There are no identity
cards, no nothing. Really, we’re just guessing.”
The predominant
motivation for
terrorists to employ
suicide attacks is
strategic, not religious,
according to Martha
Crenshaw.
Crenshaw’s most recent paper, “Explaining Suicide
Terrorism: A Review Essay” (Security Studies, Vol. 16,
No. 1, January 2007), relied on the bookstore: She
bought and read 13 books about suicide bombers,
then produced a review of them all as a guide to other
researchers.
CRENSHAW'S RESEARCH AGENDA
Why is the United States the target of terrorism? Crenshaw is answering this question, as a lead investigator with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. Her research focuses on groups that have targeted the United States or its interests since the mid-1960s, placing incidents in context by comparing them with instances in which groups displayed similar anti-American ideas but did not resort to terrorism.
"Contrary to popular belief, only about 10 percent of active terrorist groups have targeted the United States," she says. "You have to get into the local politics to see what's going on" with anti-U.S. terrorism abroad. Such attacks can be aimed at the local regime, she explained.
Crenshaw is also editing a book tentatively titled The Consequences of Counterterrorist Policies in Democracies, to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation which supported the research.
And "The Debate over ‘New' versus ‘Old' Terrorism," a paper Crenshaw presented at the 2007 American Political Science Association meeting, is set to appear in an edited volume. Crenshaw questions common claims that terrorism in recent years has taken on a completely new character, more religious and lethal.
"Terrorism has changed over time, but there is no fundamental difference between ‘old' and ‘new' terrorism," she said. Researchers and policymakers should "ask why some groups cause large numbers of civilian casualties and others do not," she said, "rather than assuming that religious beliefs are the explanation for lethality."
