Iraqi tank.21
By most accounts, the first official female suicide bomber was a seventeen-year-old Lebanese girl, Sana'a Mehaydali, who was sent by the Syrian Socialist National Party (the SSNP or PPS), a secular, pro-Syrian Lebanese organization, to blow herself up near an Israeli convoy in Lebanon in April 1985. Women took part in twelve of the suicide attacks conducted by the SSNP during the 1980s. From Lebanon, the phenomenon of female bombers spread to other countries—from Sri Lanka to Turkey, Chechnya, Israel, and, most recently, Iraq and Afghanistan.
There has been a significant public-relations payoff and financial benefit to sending, for example, eighteen-year-old Ayat Akras into the Kiryat HaYovel supermarket in Jerusalem to set off a bomb.22 The underlying message conveyed by female bombers is: terrorism is no longer a fringe phenomenon and the insurgents are all around you. Akras's death demonstrated that the Palestinian militant groups were not all composed of religious fanatics who believed that they would be granted entrance to paradise or that God would reward them with seventy-two virgins (houris). Nor are the organizations' leaders gripped by a burning desire to see all women locked behind black veils. This is a political war, not a religious war, and the suicide bombings are being carefully planned and executed as part of a precise political strategy.23
MAKING SENSE OF SENSELESS ACTS
Even terrorist organizations have a rationally calculated strategy when they plan attacks and campaigns against their enemies. Modern armies have at their disposal arsenals and trained cadres of military recruits. States can call upon stores of weapons and destroy their enemies on the battlefield. Terrorist organizations, however, rarely have access to the same kinds of firepower as states and thus must adapt their strategies to account for this imbalance. The use of terrorism and suicide terrorism can be considered an example of the law of comparative advantage. In modern states where the technology is available, states can take a high-tech approach to war. Most terrorist organizations, however, have few resources besides cheap labor and dedicated individuals willing to die for the cause. In the words of Ahmad Yassin, the founder of Hamas, the militant Islamic organization that has perpetrated hundreds of attacks inside Israel: “Once we have warplanes and missiles, then we can think of changing our means of legitimate self-defense. But right now, we can only tackle the fire with our bare hands and sacrifice ourselves.”24
When conventional military strategies are not available or fail, the rebels resort to guerrilla warfare; when guerrilla war fails, they resort to terror; when traditional methods of terror fail, they resort to suicide terrorism and acts of increasing barbarism against their enemies. In all the cases examined in this book, a group (or groups) is fighting against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy and has no choice but to resort to terrorism if it is to continue its struggle. Even so, much of the success of terrorism hinges on whether the larger community that the terrorists say they represent approves of or rejects the use of violence.
If their own community supports and appreciates the bloodshed, we will see a literal explosion of violence and of groups that use terror to compete for the public's attention and approval. However, if the public rejects violence, or if the terrorists go too far and kill too many civilians or too many members of their own community, the groups will have to switch gears. This has been the case in Spain, where Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (or ETA, meaning roughly “Basque Homeland and Freedom”) attacks ended in so many civilian casualties that the organization implemented new operating procedures in which it promised it would give advance warning before detonating a bomb. This was also true of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), which tried unsuccessfully to implement a homicidal car-bomb campaign in the spring of 1990, only to have hundreds of staunch supporters accuse the organization of making them look like those “fanatics” in the Middle East. The PIRA faux suicide-car-bomb campaign began and ended on the same day; when the leadership realized that using such extreme tactics would alienate their base, they went back to using traditional car bombs that allowed the driver to escape with his life.
Inasmuch as the population can demand that even terrorist leaders demonstrate restraint, the population can also be the driving force behind increasing violence against the state and its constituents. Not all civilians will reject civilian casualties on the other side. If during the course of fighting a war on terror, the government demonstrates its sheer disregard for the other side and sacrifices civilian lives in the pursuit of the terrorists, the propaganda by terrorist leaders begins to resonate with the population upon whose support the insurgent group relies. When the government targets enemy civilians in aerial bombardments or uses helicopter gunships or drones, the civilians on the other side become legitimate targets. In interviews for my previous book, Dying to Kill, many Palestinians said, in effect, “If our civilians are not safe from harm, neither will Israel's civilians be safe.” Thus any state or government fighting a war on terror must remember that its actions have consequences and that if its actions are unrestrained, the terrorists' will be too.
Just as terrorists adhere to a logic that grows out of their situation, so too does the state—acting to suppress or destroy the rebel movement—develop a rationale to justify its actions. This rationale may be as simple as a democratic state using legitimate force to eliminate an insurgency. The state may identify the rebel forces as foreign, or as members of a race they want to eliminate, sequester, or assimilate into the population. The relative freedom that the state enjoys in pursuing its policy of oppression varies according to a number of factors, including democratic accountability, sensitivity to international opinion, transparency to scrutiny, and the power of the ideology driving the action.
The case studies that follow tend to show that the ferocity of the oppression provokes a reaction from the terrorists more or less equal in ferocity. For example, in May 2009, the government of Sri Lanka used brutal force to eradicate the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The international community alleged that the government had perpetrated massive human rights abuses and that thousands of innocent civilians were caught in the crossfire. The Sri Lankan air force bombarded villages suspected of LTTE support, and thousands of women and children who were not members of the terrorist groups perished in the process. In the aftermath of the violence, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch Asia, and scores of other NGOs called for an international investigation into alleged war crimes. The government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa refused, and limited international access to the region. For the government, this was how to end the scourge of terrorism. The cases in this book argue the opposite: terrorism does not end with the barrel of a gun; rather, this kind of state brutality gives rise to new generations vowing to fight again in the near and distant future.
Modern military technology provides the state with mobility (helicopters, tanks, planes, forward-operating bases); an extraordinary surveillance capability (satellites, unmanned drones, video, night vision); and overwhelming firepower. The state is also likely to control or have considerable influence over the media, therefore determining the level of support the policy of oppression enjoys. The terrorist has a range of options in attempting to counteract the state's advantages. These include attempts to influence public opinion by use, say, of the Internet or other new media (Twitter, Facebook, etc). They also include sniper attacks, acts of sabotage, ambushes, and bombings. In dire conditions, the terrorist may rationally conclude that he or she can strike a blow against the state only by giving up all hope of escape. In this sense, if the terrorist is sufficiently motivated, the suicide mission appears to be a rational choice. More often than not, suicide terrorism is a tactic of last resort. It is rarely the first choice for insurgent organizations; after all, the cost of suicide terrorism may be the loss of the best and the brightest of their supporters. It is also a tactic of weakness. Like the kamikaze attacks of World War II, the tactic appears rational only when all other options have failed. Under such conditions, the organizations create mechanisms and manipulate cultural mores to justify suicide (which might be contrary to their religious beliefs), and use intense propaganda and indoctrination to convince their populations that they have more to offer when dead than alive.
The logic of terror and oppression
