1st of Pierre Atlas's 2 takes on a terrorism conference

Some time soon (while it's still fresh in his memory) we will have Prof. Pierre Atlas of Marian College discuss his recent conference at Tufts on terrorism. He just wrote two articles about it, appended below (I have added the links). Good stuff. (Check out the comments to the Star.)

"Experts pessimistic about surge"
Indianapolis Star February 1, 2007


President Bush's troop surge in Iraq represents "a strategic mistake in the wrong direction," says Robert Pape, an expert on suicide terrorism at the University of Chicago.

Pape was one of about 25 scholars, journalists and terrorism specialists speaking at a two-day conference on the "War on Terrorism" that I attended at Tufts University last week. The diverse group of well-respected American and international experts offered a range of interpretations of the War on Terror and varied somewhat in their policy prescriptions. But there was far more agreement than disagreement and, by the end of the conference, a general consensus had emerged.

All panelists seemed to believe that the "War on Terror" has been poorly conceived and implemented by the Bush administration, and that we long ago lost sight of the true target: al-Qaida. As for the war in Iraq, it has been misguided and bungled from the beginning, and has become the best recruiting tool for global jihadists. None of the speakers believed there would be a "good" outcome for Iraq, only a set of potential outcomes ranging from "bad" to "worse."

That said, all the speakers agreed that a quick U.S. exit from Iraq would leave a dangerous vacuum, to be filled by intensified civil war, sectarian killings, and al-Qaida.

Peter Bergen, the former CNN correspondent who interviewed Osama bin Laden before 9/11, predicted, "total withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster. It would give jihadists a mini-Afghanistan."

Fawaz Gerges, expert on radical Islamist groups at Sarah Lawrence College, lamented that, "I opposed the war from day one, and yet I'm terrified to see what would happen in Iraq if we just pulled out." His sentiments were echoed by many others at the conference.

Pape agrees that we can't simply abandon Iraq. But the author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism thinks President Bush's "new strategy" of a troop surge in Iraq is a bad idea. As he told me at Tufts, he has two concerns about Bush's plan, which will send 20,000 more troops into Baghdad with a new mission to go after the Shiite militias as well as Sunni insurgents. It will not only increase the propensity for suicide attacks from Sunni extremists, but also will risk alienating the 15 million-strong Shiite population, vastly expanding the potential pool of opposition to U.S. operations.

Pape, who taught Air Force officers at the Air University for three years and is in regular contact with the defense and intelligence community in Washington, predicts that suicide attacks against U.S. troops and Iraqis working for the Iraqi government will increase, not decrease, with the surge.

The University of Chicago political scientist has built a data set of every known instance of suicide terrorism anywhere in the world since 1980. At the conference he demonstrated empirically what most scholars who study Islam or the Middle East have long argued, namely that "the connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic extremism is misleading."

Indeed, the world's greatest perpetrator of suicide terrorist attacks is not al-Qaida or Hamas but the secular nationalist Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. Most of their bombers are Hindu, but as Professor Sumantra Bose of the London School of Economics noted, Roman Catholic Tamils are disproportionately represented among the "Black Tiger" suicide bombers.

Pape argues that the widely used tactic of suicide bombing has a specific secular and strategic goal: to coerce a democratic state to withdraw its forces from territory prized by the terrorists. He asserts that this "strategic logic" explanation accounts for 95 percent of all suicide attacks worldwide.

Sending more U.S. troops into the heart of the nationalist and sectarian conflict in Iraq is precisely the wrong thing to do, Pape insists, and suggests an alternative to the surge: "The U.S. should transfer responsibility for Iraq's security to Iraqi forces and engage in offshore balancing." Navy and Air Force components could be stationed offshore "to intervene when necessary -- not U.S. combat forces on the ground." The U.S. should use these forces to make sure no side in the civil war uses heavy weapons to commit massive atrocities, as the Serbs did in Bosnia.

"Don't cut and run," Pape said. "But don't stay and die, either."

Atlas is assistant professor of political science and director of the Franciscan Center for Global Studies at Marian College. Contact him at patlas@marian.edu.