FIGURE 6–10. Rate of deaths from terrorism, Western Europe, 1970–2007
Source: Global Terrorism Database, START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 2010, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), accessed on April 6, 2010. Data for 1993 are interpolated. Population figures from UN World Population Prospects (United Nations, 2008), accessed April 23, 2010; figures for years not ending in 0 or 5 are interpolated.
FIGURE 6–11. Rate of deaths from terrorism, worldwide, except Afghanistan 2001–and Iraq 2003–
Source: Global Terrorism Database, START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 2010, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), accessed on April 6, 2010. Data for 1993 are interpolated. World population figures from U.S. Census Bureau, 2010c; the population estimate for 2007 is extrapolated.
Like the graphs we have seen for interstate wars, civil wars, and genocides, this one has a surprise. The first decade of the new millennium—the dawn of the Age of Terror—does not show a rising curve, or a new plateau, but a decrease from peaks in the 1980s and early 1990s. Global terrorism rose in the late 1970s and declined in the 1990s for the same reasons that civil wars and genocides rose and fell during those decades. Nationalist movements sprang up in the wake of decolonization, drew support from superpowers fighting the Cold War by proxy, and died down with the fall of the Soviet empire. The bulge in the late 1970s and early 1980s is mainly the handiwork of terrorists in Latin America (El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, and Colombia), who were responsible for 61 percent of the deaths from terrorism between 1977 and 1984. (Many of these targets were military or police forces, which the GTD includes in its database as long as the incident was intended to gain the attention of an audience rather than to inflict direct damage.)200 Latin America kept up its contribution in the second rise from 1985 to 1992 (about a third of the deaths), joined by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (15 percent) and groups in India, the Philippines, and Mozambique. Though some of the terrorist activity in India and the Philippines came from Muslim groups, only a sliver of the deaths occurred in Muslim countries: around 2 percent of them in Lebanon, and 1 percent in Pakistan. The decline of terrorism since 1997 was punctuated by peaks for 9/11 and by a recent uptick in Pakistan, mainly as a spillover from the war in Afghanistan along their nebulous border.
The numbers, then, show that we are not living in a new age of terrorism. If anything, aside from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are enjoying a decline in terrorism from decades in which it was less big a deal in our collective consciousness. Nor, until recently, has terrorism been a particularly Muslim phenomenon.
But isn’t it today? Shouldn’t we expect the suicide terrorists from Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah to be picking up the slack? And what are we hiding by taking the civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them victims of suicide bombers, out of the tallies? Answering these questions will require a closer look at terrorism, especially suicide terrorism, in the Islamic world.
Though 9/11 did not inaugurate a new age of terror, a case could be made that it foretold an age of Islamist suicide terror. The 9/11 hijackers could not have carried out their attacks had they not been willing to die in the process, and since then the rate of suicide attacks has soared, from fewer than 5 per year in the 1980s and 16 per year in the 1990s to 180 per year between 2001 and 2005. Most of these attacks were carried out by Islamist groups whose expressed motives were at least partly religious.201 According to the most recent data from the National Counterterrorism Center, in 2008 Sunni Islamic extremists were responsible for almost two-thirds of the deaths from terrorism that could be attributed to a terrorist group.202
As a means of killing civilians, suicide terrorism is a tactic of diabolical ingenuity. It combines the ultimate in surgical weapon delivery—the precision manipulators and locomotors called hands and feet, controlled by the human eyes and brain—with the ultimate in stealth—a person who looks just like millions of other people. In technological sophistication, no battle robot comes close. The advantages are not just theoretical. Though suicide terrorism accounts for a minority of terrorist attacks, it is responsible for a majority of the casualties.203 This bang for the buck can be irresistible to the leaders of a terrorist movement. As one Palestinian official explained, a successful mission requires only “a willing young man . . . nails, gunpowder, a light switch and a short cable, mercury (readily obtainable from thermometers), acetone.... The most expensive item is transportation to an Israeli town.”204 The only real technological hurdle is the willingness of the young man. Ordinarily a human being is unwilling to die, the legacy of half a billion years of natural selection. How have terrorist leaders overcome this obstacle?
People have exposed themselves to the risk of dying in wars for as long as there have been wars, but the key term is risk. Natural selection works on averages, so a willingness to take a small chance of dying as part of an aggressive coalition that offers a large chance of a big fitness payoff—more land, more women, or more safety—can be favored over the course of evolution.205 What cannot be favored is a willingness to die with certainty, which would take any genes that allow such willingness along with the dead body. It’s not surprising that suicide missions are uncommon in the history of warfare. Foraging bands prefer the safety of raids and ambushes to the hazards of set-piece battles, and even then warriors are not above claiming to have had dreams and omens that conveniently keep them out of risky encounters planned by their comrades.206
Modern armies cultivate incentives for soldiers to increase the risk they take on, such as esteem and decorations for bravery, and disincentives for them to reduce the risk, such as the shaming or punishment of cowards and the summary execution of deserters. Sometimes a special class of soldier called file closers trails behind a unit with orders to kill any soldier who fails to advance. The conflicts of interest between war leaders and foot soldiers leads to the well-known hypocrisy of military rhetoric. Here is how a British general waxed about the carnage of World War I: “Not a man shirked going through the extremely heavy barrage, or facing the machine gun and rifle fire that finally wiped them out.... I have never seen, indeed could never have imagined, such a magnificent display of gallantry, discipline, and determination.” A sergeant described it differently: “We knew it was pointless, even before we went over—crossing open ground like that. But you had to go. You were between the devil and the deep blue sea. If you go forward, you’ll likely be shot. If you go back, you’ll be court-martialed and shot. What can you do?”207
Warriors may accept the risk of death in battle for another reason. The evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, replied, “No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.” He was invoking the phenomenon that would later be known as kin selection, inclusive fitness, and nepotistic altruism. Natural selection favors any genes that incline an organism toward making a sacrifice that helps a blood relative, as long as the benefit to the relative, discounted by the degree of relatedness, exceeds the cost to the organism. The reason is that the genes would be helping copies of themselves inside the bodies of those relatives and would have a long-term advantage over their narrowly selfish alternatives. Critics who are determined to misunderstand this theory imagine that it requires that organisms consciously calculate their genetic overlap with their kin and anticipate the good it will do their DNA.208 Of course it requires only that organisms be inclined to pursue goals that help organisms that are statistically likely to be their genetic relatives. In complex organisms such as humans, this inclination is implemented as the emotion of brotherly love.
The small-scale bands in which humans spent much of their evolutionary history were held together by kinship, and people tended to be related to their neighbors. Among the Yanomamö, for example, two individuals picked at random from a village are related almost as closely as first cousins, and people who consider each other relatives are related, on average, even
more closely.209 The genetic overlap tilts the evolutionary payoff toward taking greater risks to life and limb if the risky act might benefit one’s fellow warriors. One of the reasons that chimpanzees, unlike other primates, engage in cooperative raiding is that the females, rather than the males, disperse from the troop at sexual maturity, so the males in a troop tend to be related.210
As with all aspects of our psychology that have been illuminated by evolutionary theory, what matters is not actual genetic relatedness (it’s not as if hunter-gatherers, to say nothing of chimpanzees, send off cheek swabs to a genotyping service) but the perception of relatedness, as long as the perception was correlated with the reality over long enough spans of time.211 Among the contributors to the perception of kinship are the experience of having grown up together, having seen one’s mother care for the other person, commensal meals, myths of common ancestry, essentialist intuitions of common flesh and blood, the sharing of rituals and ordeals, physical resemblance (often enhanced by hairdressing, tattoos, scarification, and mutilation), and metaphors such as fraternity, brotherhood, family, fatherland, motherland, and blood.212 Military leaders use every trick in the book to make their soldiers feel like genetic relatives and take on the biologically predictable risks. Shakespeare made this clear in the most famous motivational speech in the literary history of war, when Henry V addresses his men on St. Crispin’s Day:And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.
Modern militaries too take pains to group soldiers into bands of brothers—the fire teams, squads, and platoons of half a dozen to several dozen soldiers that serve as a crucible for the primary emotion that moves men to fight in armies, brotherly love. Studies of military psychology have discovered that soldiers fight above all out of loyalty to their platoonmates.213 The writer William Manchester reminisced about his experience as a Marine in World War II:Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them.... I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.214
Two decades later, another Marine-turned-author, William Broyles, offered a similar reflection on his experience in Vietnam:The enduring emotion of war, when everything else has faded, is comradeship. A comrade in war is a man you can trust with anything, because you trust him with your life.... Despite its extreme right-wing image, war is the only utopian experience most of us ever have. Individual possessions and advantage count for nothing: the group is everything. What you have is shared with your friends. It isn’t a particularly selective process, but a love that needs no reasons, that transcends race and personality and education—all those things that would make a difference in peace.215
Though in extremis a man may lay down his life to save a platoon of virtual brothers, it’s rarer for him to calmly make plans to commit suicide at some future date on their behalf. The conduct of war would be very different if he did. To avoid panic and rout (at least in the absence of file closers), battle plans are generally engineered so that an individual soldier does not know that he has been singled out for certain death. At a bomber base during World War II, for example, strategists calculated that pilots would have a higher probability of survival if a few of them who drew the short straws in a lottery would fly off to certain death on one-way sorties rather than all of them taking their chances in the fuel-laden planes needed for round trips. But they opted for the higher risk of an unpredictable death over the lower risk of a death that would be preceded by a lengthy period of doom.216 How do the engineers of suicide terrorism overcome this obstacle?
Certainly an ideology of an afterlife helps, as in the posthumous Playboy Mansion promised to the 9/11 hijackers. (Japanese kamikaze pilots had to make do with the less vivid image of being absorbed into a great realm of the spirit.) But modern suicide terrorism was perfected by the Tamil Tigers, and though the members grew up in Hinduism with its promise of reincarnation, the group’s ideology was secular: the usual goulash of nationalism, romantic militarism, Marxism-Leninism, and anti-imperialism that animated 20th-century third-world liberation movements. And in accounts by would-be suicide terrorists of what prompted them to enlist, anticipation of an afterlife, with or without the virgins, seldom figures prominently. So while expectation of a pleasant afterlife may tip the perceived cost-benefit ratio (making it harder to imagine an atheist suicide bomber), it cannot be the only psychological driver.
Using interviews with failed and prospective suicide terrorists, the anthropologist Scott Atran has refuted many common misconceptions about them. Far from being ignorant, impoverished, nihilistic, or mentally ill, suicide terrorists tend to be educated, middle class, morally engaged, and free of obvious psychopathology. Atran concluded that many of the motives may be found in nepotistic altruism.217
The case of the Tamil Tigers is relatively easy. They use the terrorist equivalent of file closers, selecting operatives for suicide missions and threatening to kill their families if they withdraw.218 Only slightly less subtle are the methods of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, who hold out a carrot rather than a stick to the terrorist’s family in the form of generous monthly stipends, lump-sum payments, and massive prestige in the community.219 Though in general one should not expect extreme behavior to deliver a payoff in biological fitness, the anthropologists Aaron Blackwell and Lawrence Sugiyama have shown that it may do so in the case of Palestinian suicide terrorism. In the West Bank and Gaza many men have trouble finding wives because their families cannot afford a bride-price, they are restricted to marrying parallel cousins, and many women are taken out of the marriage pool by polygynous marriage or by marriage up to more prosperous Arabs in Israel. Blackwell and Sugiyama note that 99 percent of Palestinian suicide terrorists are male, that 86 percent are unmarried, and that 81 percent have at least six siblings, a larger family size than the Palestinian average. When they plugged these and other numbers into a simple demographic model, they found that when a terrorist blows himself up, the financial payoff can buy enough brides for his brothers to make his sacrifice reproductively worthwhile.
Atran has found that suicide terrorists can also be recruited without these direct incentives. Probably the most effective call to martyrdom is the opportunity to join a happy band of brothers. Terrorist cells often begin as gangs of underemployed single young men who come together in cafés, dorms, soccer clubs, barbershops, or Internet chat rooms and suddenly find meaning in their lives by a commitment to the new platoon. Young men in all societies do foolish things to prove their courage and commitment, especially in groups, where individuals may do something they know is foolish because they think that everyone else in the group thinks it is cool.220 (We will return to this phenomenon in chapter 8.) Commitment to the group is intensified by religion, not just the literal promise of paradise but the feeling of spiritual awe that comes from submerging oneself in a crusade, a calling, a vision quest, or a jihad. Religion may also turn a commitment to the cause into a sacred value—a good that may not be traded off against anything else, including life itself.221 The commitment can be stoked by the thirst for revenge, which in the case of militant Islamism takes the form of vengeance for the harm and humiliation suffered by any Muslim anywhere on the planet at any time in history, or for symbolic affronts such as the presence of infidel soldiers on sacred Muslim soil. Atran summed up his research in testimony to a U.S. Senate subcommittee:When you look at young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005, hoped
to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006 and 2009, and journeyed far to die killing infidels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia; when you look at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them; then you see that what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy.... Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: . . . fraternal, fastbreaking, thrilling, glorious, and cool. Anyone is welcome to try his hand at slicing off the head of Goliath with a paper cutter.222
The local imams are of marginal importance in this radicalization, since young men who want to raise hell rarely look to community elders for guidance. And Al Qaeda has become more a global brand inspiring a diffuse social network than a centralized recruiting organization.
The up-close look at suicide terrorists at first seems pretty depressing, because it suggests we are fighting a multiheaded hydra that cannot be decapitated by killing its leadership or invading its home base. Remember, though, that all terrorist organizations follow an arc toward failure. Are there any signs that Islamist terrorism is beginning to burn out?
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 53