2005 debate

Robert Pape: The U.S.-led war on terrorism is going badly

because it is being waged on a faulty premise. That premise
is that suicide terrorism is mainly a product of Islamic
fundamentalism. The main cause of suicide terrorism against
the United States is the stationing of American combat forces
on the Arabian Peninsula starting in the early 1990s. Today,
over 140,000 American combat forces are on the Arabian
Peninsula. As the American force presence has grown, so has
suicide terrorism by al-Qaeda. A major goal of Osama bin
Laden is to compel the United States to leave the Arabian
Peninsula. Between 1995 and 2004, seventy-one individuals
killed themselves for bin Laden. The largest number, thirty
four, came from Saudi Arabia, and the majority came from
the Persian Gulf, where the United States began to stationing
combat forces in 1990.
- Islamic groups receive the most attention in Western media,
but the world's leader in suicide terrorism is actually the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a group who
recruits from the predominantly Hindu Tamil population in
northern and eastern Sri Lanka and whose ideology has
Marxist/Leninist elements. The LTTE alone accounts for 75
of the 186 suicide terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2001. Even
among Islamic suicide attacks, groups with secular
orientations account for about a third of these attacks

The behavior of Hamas illustrates the point. Hamas terrorism has

provoked Israeli retaliation that has been costly for Palestinians,
while pursuing the—apparently unrealistic—goal of abolishing the
state of Israel. Although prospects of establishing an Arab state in
all of “historic Palestine” may be poor, most Palestinians agree that
it would be desirable if possible. Hamas's terrorist violence was in
fact carefully calculated and controlled. In April 1994, as its first
suicide campaign was beginning, Hamas leaders explained that
“martyrdom operations” would be used to achieve intermediate
objectives, such as Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and
Gaza, while the final objective of creating an Islamic state from the
Jordan River to the Mediterranean may require other forms of
armed resistance (Shiqaqi 2002; Hroub 2000; Nusse 1998).

Kramer: Occupation raised the temperature necessary for

this innovation, but it would not have been sufficient.
Beyond a strategic logic, there must be a moral logic, which
is the entry point for innovative interpretations of Islam.

The Palestinian case is not simply one of struggle against

occupation; it is also a struggle for primacy among rivals.
Israel had been in occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West
Bank for nearly thirty years before the first Palestinian
suicide bombing. Why did it take so long? Dr. Pape contends
that frustration with Oslo and settlement expansion made
for a tipping point. In actuality, Palestinian suicide bombings
coincide with intensified political struggle for dominance in
the Palestinian arena, specifically between Hamas and the
Arafat-led Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Suicide
bombing as an alternative strategy has had obviously
negative results, such as the loss of international sympathy
and the construction of Israel's security fence. This suggests
that while occupation is the fuel of the suicide campaign,
ending the occupation is not its prime objective. The attacks
are used to win converts and to build identity over time.

The prominence of Saudis in suicide bombings against U.S.

targets is the result not of an imagined U.S. occupation, but
the very real indoctrination of Saudis that has persuaded
them of their role as defenders and definers of normative
Islam. Saudis, from the royalty down, have always been
overrepresented in Islamic causes, in terms both of money
and personnel.

I conclude. No one thesis explains it all. And since Professor Pape

did his research, suicide bombing continues to mutate, in directions
his thesis did not predict or anticipate. A most remarkable
development has been the prominence of North Africans,
especially Moroccans, in the “second wave”of Al-Qaeda suicide
attackers. Even in Professor Pape’s tables, they were right behind
Saudi Arabia in numbers, and those numbers are growing. We
have seen British-born Pakistanis undertake a suicide attack in
Israel, and the 7/7 attacks in London. And we have seen dozens of
suicide bombings of Sunni against Shiite, in Iraq but also across
Pakistan. Professor Pape’s thesis is just not elastic enough to
accommodate all these evolutions. He drew far-reaching
conclusions on the basis of one stage in the development of the
phenomenon. But it is already mutating, in two directions: into
more globalized, transnational forms; and into sub-national,
sectarian forms.

Theory in Religion affecting conflicts:

primordialist perspective --- Samuel Huntington,
Gilles Kepel, Jeffrey Seul, and Bassam Tibi
- the embeddedness of nations in civilizations will
be the most important determinant of world
politics in the twenty-first century.
- The pivotal characteristic of each civilisation, in
turn, is the religion or cosmology on which it is
based. Hence, we have Buddhist, Christian,
Confucian, Hindu, Islamic, Judaistic, and Taoist
civilisations.
- In this view, cultural similarities and
dissimilarities produce converging and diverging
state interests, respectively. States with similar
 religious traditions and cosmologies will form
alliances directed against those with whom they
have little in common in cultural and religious
terms. Violence will be largely confined to
interactions that take place between
civilizations.
- At the same time, states with similar religious
traditions and cosmologies will work hard to
accommodate their disputes in order to
strengthen their joint power position vis-à-vis
other civilizations.

‘instrumentalists’, reject the view

that differences in religious traditions and
cosmologies are genuine causes of
political conflict.5 Instrumentalists do not deny the
current renaissance of religious
movements. They argue, however, that in most
cases this is the result of growing economic, social,
and political inequalities in and between nations.
Therefore,
when we observe the faithful turning into warriors,
we should not attribute this
change to any particular dogmatic dispute, but
should understand it as a
consequence of the unequal distribution of power
and wealth between the parties.
At the international level, instrumentalists do not
expect any major departure from
the traditional patterns of state practice. In the new
century, as it was in the old,
politics between states will be determined by power
and material interest, not by
culture or religion.6 A number of observations are
adduced to support this view.
Two of them are particularly important:
(a) Domestically, the politicisation of religious
traditions and the radicalisation
of religious communities is especially likely in times
of economic decay, social
disintegration or state collapse.7 Desperate people
subject to poverty,
marginalisation, or physical threats turn to their
religious traditions in search of an
alternative political order that satisfies their need for
welfare, recognition and
security. In this context, religious communities
operate primarily as refuges of
solidarity, sources of cultural reaffirmation, and safe
havens.

Instrumentalists tend to portray the ability of political

entrepreneurs to
instrumentalise old myths and sacred traditions for
their own aggrandisement as
virtually unlimited. According to Anthony D. Smith,
there are countless cultural,
ethnic, and religious markers floating in each nation
that can be called upon by
self-interested leaders for the purpose of forming
group identities and mobilising
their members into collective action.10 Evidently,
inventing combat-capable
communities requires some pre-existing raw
materials such as common myths,
common language and common religious traditions.
But these raw materials exist
in abundance. To put it differently: if serious political
and economic cleavages
exist in a nation, it should be easy for political
entrepreneurs to give meaning to
these cleavages in terms of cultural, ethnic, or
religious discrimination. The
observed relationship between religion and violence
then amounts to a spurious
correlation, and there is not much point in exploring
the political consequences of
the revival of religion any further.
(b) At the international level, instrumentalists are
unable to discover the
formation of new alliances along religiously or
culturally defined fault lines. By
contrast, the constellation of power and material
interest still goes a long way to
explain international interactions. This is especially
true in the security area. For
example, when the military potential of a regional
state such as Iraq increased,
neighbouring countries began to look for external
support, disregarding both their
common religious ties with the ascending power and
the incompatible
understandings of the sacred shaping the civilisation
of the potential ally.11 What
seems to count in the final analysis is the balance of
forces that should be
reestablished.
Additionally, they argue, even in the recent past
there are simply too many wars
fought in religiously homogeneous areas to give
much credit to the primordialist
Similarly, Daniel Patrick Moynihan notes:
‘Ethnic conflict does not require great differences;
small will do’.14 Put differently,
comparatively minor divergences in the
understanding of the sacred, as exist for
example between Sunnites and Shiites or between
Catholics and Protestants,
become highly significant in the escalation of conflict
behaviour while the many
and supposedly more significant commonalities that
the engaged parties share are
pushed into the background.
The empirical evidence thus does not support the
primordialist hypothesis
regarding the autonomous conflict-generating power
of religious differences.
Belief in divine truth seemingly attains greater
political significance only in times
of economic, social or political unrest. Additionally,
the mobilisation of religious
communities depends on the contingent interests of
power-conscious elites. At the
international level, there is still no evidence for a
stable pattern consisting of
alliance formation within civilisations and security
competition between them.
Instrumentalists recognise, however, an impact of
religious convictions on conflict
behaviour. Political entrepreneurs time and again
invoke the sacred to mobilise
their constituency into violent action. But in the
contemporary instrumentalists’
understanding the causal pathway is unambiguous:
the politicisation of religions
leads to the escalation of given disputes and never to
their de-escalation.
In this paper, we wish to present and defend a third
position located somewhere
between primordialism and instrumentalism. Its
representatives can be called
‘constructivists’.15 Constructivists regard social
conflicts as embedded in cognitive
structures such as ideology, nationalism, ethnicity, or
religion. These structures,
which consist of ‘shared understandings,
expectations, and social knowledge’,
provide social actors with value-laden conceptions of
the self and others and