In August of 2021 as the last American flight left Kabul, video of victorious Taliban fighters spread around the world. For the better part of two decades, the Taliban had employed suicide attacks and IEDs to harass a better equipped, more advanced force; and now that force was leaving. The story of the Taliban’s success has many threads, and while there is plenty of room to debate what went wrong, there is little doubt the Taliban won. Though their tactics were not the only contributing factor to their victory, it is impossible to separate the outcome from the methods. Furthermore, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is, in part, an endorsement of the tactics. More importantly, the Taliban’s success makes it difficult to dissuade terrorist groups from deploying suicide attacks in the future. In fact, the globalized nature of terrorism, the permanent record immortalized on the internet, and the success of suicide attacks makes total dissuasion impossible. Instead, the powers of the world should focus on mitigation through clear objectives, negotiation, diplomacy, and military force to achieve the best possible outcome.
To begin with, it’s important to understand the full scope of the problem suicide terrorism represents. It is not a one-sided issue, as University of Chicago professor Robert Pape (2003) points out, nor one led by mindless irrational actors. Terrorism, and specifically suicide attacks, are used because they’re effective and often carry popular domestic support (p. 349). Furthermore, target countries contribute to popular support by engaging in socially disruptive policies like regime change, democratization, and religious confrontation. While America and its allies have an unofficial policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists, the United States has shown throughout its history that it is willing to work with imperfect regimes and international groups that do not share its values (Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the Afghan mujahedeen, and modern relations with Saudi Arabia, to name a few). Therefore, the absence of western principles should not prohibit engaging with any group, terrorist or otherwise. Instead, target countries should understand who they’re working with and the objectives of the organization. This requires that western countries acknowledge certain aspects of terrorist groups that cut across preferred narratives. For example, terrorist groups often have quantifiable goals and deploy suicide attacks in pursuit of those goals.
[S]uicide terrorism is strategic. The vast majority of suicide terrorist attacks are not isolated or random acts by individual fanatics but, rather, occur in clusters as part of a larger campaign by an organized group to achieve a specific political goal (Pape, 2003 p. 344).
In other words, terrorist organizations are rational actors with objectives that have quantifiable definitions of success (p. 344). By comparison, an irrational actor commits actions without any broader objective in mind. School shootings are an example of an irrational act where violence serves its own end, and the shooter is not part of a larger organization with political aims. Recognizing terror groups as rational actors is critical to understanding their objectives and forming a response. That said, while the hardline approach is not reliable, as Afghanistan showed, accepting that terrorist have rational goals does not preclude an aggressive posture.
For policy makers who believe terrorists can be convinced that suicide attacks don’t work, consider that America’s defeat and many, if not all, of the suicide attacks that led to that defeat are immortalized on the internet. The idea that the Taliban victory will fade with time is foolish. Terrorism has globalized both in presence and in tactics. American University professor Audrey Kurth Cronin speaks to this point in an issue of International Security:
The al-Qaida movement has successfully used the tools of globalization to enable it to communicate with multiple audiences, including potential new members, new recruits, active supporters, passive sympathizers, neutral observers, enemy governments, and potential victims (Cronin, 2006 p. 38).
Cronin adds that the internet has allowed terrorism to decentralize and spread globally in a way that wasn’t possible in its earliest iterations (p. 12). For example, in 2020, fifty-four percent of global suicide attacks occurred in Africa, while the second most occurred a continent away in Asia (Mendelboim et al, 2022 para 3). That said, the number of suicide attacks worldwide has decreased dramatically from 470 in 2016 to 74 in 2021 (para 3). Yet the impact of globalization on terrorism remains uncertain. On the one hand, the de-globalization of U.S. forces from the middle east contributed strongly to the decline in suicide attacks (para 1). On the other hand, Sociology professor Donald Black points out that globalization will only continue to force divergent people and cultures together. While this can increase violence in the near term, he says, the very act of globalization can reduce differences between people and therefore terrorism itself (Black, 2004 p. 24). Clearly, globalization has helped terror networks decentralize and spread throughout the world, but it may also be a mechanism to prevent radicalization through long term integration.
Terror groups perceive a lack of commitment from the west as a weakness, however, democracy is not necessarily a prohibitor to success in combating terrorism. Issues arise for any government when objectives are not properly defined or inhibited by mission-creep. It’s easy to forget that before the United States became bogged down in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union experienced a similar fate. Difficulties are not strictly ideological. Instead, underestimating the opponent and conflating mission objectives are far more lethal to mission success then democracy itself. As Cronin puts it, counterterrorism and political change operate on completely different timelines. Consider that, “[ninety percent] of terrorist organizations have a lifespan of less than one year; and of those that make it to a year, more than half disappear in a decade (Cronin, 2006 p. 13).” Now consider that it took over a century for the United States to pacify the North American continent, and much longer if we were to consider the entirety of the colonial period. The goals of democratizing Afghanistan, defeating Al-Qaida, and toppling the Taliban operated on different timelines, involved different tactics, and had different success criteria. In short, western countries can contain terrorist activities, but it is essential that they do not conflate those efforts with the much more difficult task of nation building.
Successfully confronting terrorism and suicide attacks begins with understanding the opponent and their motivations. Second, military force and negotiations are not mutually exclusive. Pape recognized this twenty years ago when he said, “The current policy debate is misguided. Offensive military action or concessions alone rarely work for long” (Pape, 2003 p. 356). This played out in the Afghan war where simply the threat of a U.S. invasion following 9/11 had the Taliban ready to negotiate. Yet even after the Americans had toppled them from power, the United States made no effort to integrate the Taliban into the political process (Whitlock 2021). Had America utilized the opportunity provided by military force, they might have prevented twenty years of war. Finally, negotiation itself can be used as an offensive tactic. As Cronin says, splintered terrorist groups like Al-Qaida present opportunities to negotiate with individual cells and break them away from the global collective (Cronin, 2006). Furthermore, while Pape (2003) says a decreased U.S. presence in the middle east can help reduce suicide attacks (p. 357), total avoidance isn’t a viable solution. Western countries should continue to foster economic development in third world countries as a long-term counterterrorism strategy.
In summary, suicide attacks will never disappear entirely, but they can be mitigated through a combination of military, diplomatic, and economic means. Therefore, success begins with a mindset change and strictly limiting our ambitions. While these tactics operate on extended timelines, this does not preclude western democracies from using them, so long as scope and objectives are clearly defined.
References
Black, D. (2004). The geometry of terrorism. Theories of Terrorism: A Symposium, 22(1), 14-25.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3648956
Cronin, A. K. (2006). How Al-Qaida ends: The decline and demise of terrorist groups. International
Security, 31(1), 7-48. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137538
Mendelboim, A., Schweitzer, Y., & Raz, I.G. (2022). Suicide attacks worldwide in 2021: The
downward trend continues. The Institute for National Security Studies. https://www.inss.org.il/publication/suicide-attacks-2021/
Pape, R. (2003). The strategic logic of suicide terrorism. American Political Science Review, 97(3),
343-361. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3117613
Whitlock, C. (2021). The Afghanistan papers: A secret history of the war. Simon & Schuster