Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

SUICIDE TERRORISM • 649Osama bin Laden hijacked four U.S. airline passenger flights andsucceeded in using three of these planes as flying bombs that theyflew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and into one sideof the Pentagon. The planners of these attacks understood that thefull fuel tanks of these planes would make them effective incendiarybombs capable of destroying the structural integrity of the steel girdersof the twin towers and so able to bring these buildings down. Suicidebombers present an unusual challenge for antiterrorism officialsbecause most countermeasures ordinarily depend on deterring terroriststhrough a natural fear of death or other punishment, whereas thesuicide volunteer has already embraced death.Following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, RobertA. Pape of the University of Chicago published the results of hisquantitative analysis of suicide for the period 1980–2001 in “TheStrategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (American Political ScienceReview 97, no. 3 [August 2003]: 20–32), in which he establishedfive findings: First, suicide terrorism has been rationally adopted bya variety of terrorist groups as an effective means of coercing politicalconcessions. It is not a monopoly of Islamic fundamentalists, forPape found that 43 percent of the perpetrators were motivated by secularideologies rather than religious fundamentalism. Second, mostsuicide terrorist campaigns have been pursued to achieve specificterritorial objectives. Third, suicide terrorism has been on the rise dueto its effectiveness in gaining results. Pape notes among such successesthe removal of U.S. and French forces from Lebanon in 1983,the removal of Israeli troops from Lebanon in 1985, the removal ofIsraeli forces from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and the SriLankan concessions to Tamil separatists from 1990 onward. Theone case Pape noted in which suicide terrorism has not paid off wasthe Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) suicide campaign in Turkey,which actually led to greater Turkish repression of Kurdish separatistswith no visible gains for the PKK. Fourth, Pape noted that suicideterrorism with more limited targeting (i.e., directed toward militaryand political targets) tended to be more successful than suicide terrorismresulting in indiscriminant killings of civilians. Finally, Papenoted that suicide terrorism seemed to be most effectively counteredby measures that reduced the terrorists’ confidence in being able toconduct their attacks successfully. Pape later expanded his quantitativestudy to include suicide attacks in the period 2001–2005 in his