The Buggy Series on Terrorism Marches On

 

In late July 2005 a new prof-bug series began on jihad terrorism, especially of the sorts that Al Qaeda and either its affiliates or imitators among radical Islamists embody on a world-wide scale . . . a global threat these days that rightly worries a hundred or more countries, whether democratic or authoritarian or for that matter Muslim or non-Muslim. The threat is all the greater because of the clear evidence that these jihad terrorist groups have been seeking to obtain WMD --- nuclear, chemical, and biological. As it happens, even the book by Robert Pape that the buggy series started focusing on in the 2nd buggy article in the series --- Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism --- agrees that Al Qaeda and other suicide-terrorist groups could acquire nuclear weapons in the future (p.6).

 

That fear of his, as it also happens, is about the only thing that his book’s arguments have in common with the buggy professor’s understanding of jihad terrorism, whether suicidal in nature or not. Pape's fear, though, is odd. It clashes with his policy-advice, which was set out at length in the two previous buggy articles. After all, were the US and its allies to follow his advice, then al Qaeda's nationalist goals --- basic and overarching in the terrorist group's motives and behavior, says Pape --- would be satisfied, wouldn't they? And so bin Laden and his "altruistic" colleagues would have no incentive to acquire either nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, let alone use them against the US and others, yes?

 

Of course, if Pape had said in his last chapter (where he is generous with his policy-advice) that it might not be followed --- and that al Qaeda would continue its quest after super-destructive weaponry as a terrorist weapon --- this would be another matter; and also consistent with his theoretical analysis. But he didn't say that: not anywhere.

 

Today’s buggy article is the 3rd devoted to analyzing the problems and other defects of Pape’s views of suicide terrorism, Al Qaeda’s included.

 

On jihad as a religion-sanctioned use of violence and war against infidels --- glossed over and sugarcoated by the pc-infested apologists in the Middle East Studies Association in this country, one of whose heads bragged after 9/11 that he was glad none of the members had remotely predicted such a terrorist attack from fundamentalist Muslims, and the current head (Juan Cole) who has tried to carry out a personal but secret campaign to smear the major Middle East scholar who has uncovered the towering defects of their work on Islamist movements and the pc-pieties that underlie their apologia --- see two recent and important book-length studies: click here and here Regarding Juan Cole's efforts to smear Martin Kramer, a scholar whose work in knowledge and insight towers above Cole's feeble excuse-making pc-pieties, click on the Kramer site and read Cole's exposed character-assasination memo to his fellow pc-acolytes and Kramer's astonished, detailed replies.

 

What The First Two Buggy Articles On Pape Tried to Show

 

The initial article on Pape’s book was mainly confined to summarizing its overall thesis about suicide-terrorism, plus the various arguments and evidence that he offers up in support of it. The 2nd article shifted tack. It began grappling with the numerous problems and other shortcomings that bedevil the entire book. In particular, it uncovered several gaps in Pape’s data-base of suicide-terrorist attacks --- a complete catalogue, he claims --- that were carried out between 1980 and the end of 2003 . . . not to forget several wrong or questionable ways he presented and interpreted the data in his initial chapters.

 

The Outcome

 

It brings us smack up against the numerous defects that beset and beleaguer his general theory of suicide-terrorism as well as the specific arguments, quantitative and qualitative, that he sets out in support of the theory.

 

Taken together --- whether intentionally or not --- the shortcomings and omissions in his data-base and his use of it alone, nothing else, end up whitewashing the clear connections between the vast number of suicide-terrorist organizations and clear connections to Islamist jihad-extremism. Worse, by obscuring or arguing away these connections, Pape’s data and uses of it --- including some statistical tests that we’ll begin looking at today --- repeatedly twist and strain at supporting his overall thesis about suicide-terrorisms since 1980.

 

That Thesis?

 

In a nutshell, all 18 suicide-terrorist campaigns --- 5 of which were still ongoing at the end of 2003 --- have first and foremost been motivated by secular nationalist ideologies: the rippling urge to rid their national territories of foreign occupying powers . . . all of them democratic, and with religion of any sort influencing the terrorist groups’ motive-force only indirectly and almost coincidentally. How so specifically? Specifically, argues Pape, religious influences will aggravate the fears and hatred of the terrorist groups directed at the foreign occupier if that occupying country happens to have a different religion from that of the national communities from which the terrorists hail, and on whose behalf they’re using suicide-terrorism. Even that impact, note quickly, is further diluted in the book. Using a statistical test that we’ll criticize later in this buggy article, Pape argues that religious differences of this sort will have an impact on the terrorist groups’ decision to employ suicide attacks --- always seen as an awesome weapon --- strictly and only if there has already been a pre-existing armed national rebellion on the part of the local nationals to rid their territories of foreign military forces, but that has failed. Seen in this light, so Pape argues, suicide-terrorism is a weapon of last-resort employed by the oppressed weak in their struggles for national self-determination and autonomy against powerful foreign occupiers . . . used with calculated rational clear-headedness as a strategic weapon to coerce the government of the foreign occupier into withdrawing its occupational forces from the terrorists’ territory.

 

Nor is that all. Seen in the same light, the suicide-terrorist organizations are altruistic in their sacrificial behavior on behalf of their oppressed ethnic and national communities, whose members support them in large number; and for that matter, the individual suicide-bombers are similarly altruistic and true national martyrs duly celebrated by their fellow nationals. 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS: TODAY'S FOCUS

 

The current article jogs our criticisms of Pape’s overall model of suicide-terrorism forward, concentrating on some of the key points in it that the brief buggy summary just touched on --- four in all, and all related.

 

(1) The 18 suicide-terrorist campaigns that unfolded between 1980 and 2003 have all been secular nationalist in their motives and behavior, with religion entering in only indirectly and more or less coincidentally in the ways just described.

 

(2) What’s more, the nationalist goals of the diverse suicide-terrorist groups have been directed specifically --- even exclusively, or so Pape comes close to implying --- at freeing their territories of oppressive foreign occupation, and there’s no need to dig deep into any ultimate ideological ambitions, whether secular or religious, at what they intend to do with their liberated territories and their fellow-nationals on it.

 

Islamic fundamentalism of the sort that Al Qaeda adheres to is no different. At most, Pape says in his chapter of it (the 7th), there are diverse Islamic fundamentalisms; they are all overwhelmingly peaceful; and the only thing they share in common is a desire to reorganize their liberated national societies according to ancient Islamic laws, the Sharia. That’s it. Nothing more really. Islamist ideology of a radical sort --- which Pape dubs Salafi (such as Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its imitators, or Deobandism in Pakistan) and which in any case are peaceful these days and “discourage violence as a legitimate means of achieving” their aim of organizing Muslim societies on “a strict and literal limitation of the Islam of the Prophet and his companions” --- has no direct influence whatever on al Qaeda’s goals and behavior in using suicide-terrorism against the US and several other countries since 1996, all allies of the US or stooge-regimes in the Arab world and other Muslim countries that depend on US military support to remain in power. Those goals are strictly nationalist.

 

True, Pape isn’t sure whether bin Laden is interested only in liberating the Saudi peninsula from US military “occupation” or all 21 of the Arab countries or even “other Muslim countries” --- of which there are 56 world-wide --- but he is sure that Osama and his cohorts are basically nationalists. If Salafi Islam has any impact on al Qaeda’s terrorism, it is --- like all religious influences on the other 8 suicide-terrorist groups Pape studies, whether Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh --- indirect and secondary, aggravating the national liberation struggles by local national or ethnic communities to rid themselves of foreign military occupiers.

 

Oddly, but predictably, Pape says hardly anything about the Taliban in Afghanistan except to note in Appendix III that it is a Salafi-influenced movement, p. 273. Nor does he consider Shia-fundamentlism of the sort that reigns in the clerical police-state of Iran as relevant to his study of suicide-terrorism, quite simply because --- so he claims [wrongly as we'll see] --- the hardline mullahs have never sponsored or been responsible for suicide terrorist attacks. Then too Wahhabi Saudi Arabia is passed over, both as another system of institutionalized Sharia-run life and a source of financial support for al Qaeda and hate-mongering anti-Semitism and other forms of vicious propaganda. On Pape's cheery view, as you'll see, these three Sharia-infested countries --- the only ones we have familiarity with in the contemporary era --- aren't indicators of something fanatical and vicious about extremist Islamic fundamentalism.

 

Pape uses another statistical model --- based on a new table of data --- to test whether fundamentalist (Salafi) Islam has noticeably influenced Al Qaeda's suicide-terrorism. That table, as prof bugy will strive to show, is riddled with errors that add up to head-spinning whoppers.

 

(3) The US, as this brief summary of Pape’s views has just indicated, has been an alien, unwanted military occupier of Saudi Arabia and elsewhere (like Afghanistan). And even though Americans might see things differently, what counts is how bin Laden and Al Qaeda sees things, not others. No reality-testing by a scholar is needed, you see.

 

On similar grounds, Hitler’s demented paranoid delusions about a world-wide Jewish conspiracy to dominate Germany and all racially superior Aryan peoples --- by means of using Bolshevism to conquer and rule the Communist Soviet Union and Wall Street and London stock-markets and banks to control the Capitalist world --- didn’t need reality-testing either. Others might disagree with the Nazis' weltanschauung, but scholars and other informed observers have no right or duty to probe this Jew-hating dementia. What matters is that Hitler and the Nazi leadership and enough German elites shared this world-outlook; and so --- like al Qaeda’s rational and calculated strategic uses of terrorism --- the Nazis and their allies were also fully rational and presumably limited in their use of genocide when they tried to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population . . . 8 million in all (roughly 1.5% of Europe’s total population in 1939, and 0.6% of Germany’s when Hitler came to power in 1933).

 

That any resulting scholarly analysis of Nazism would look . . . well, bizarre and head-spinning except to Nazi apologists shouldn't bother the scholar responsible for it, should it?

 

(4) And finally, the targets of the suicide-attacks in all 18 campaigns have been invariably directed at coercing foreign military occupiers that are democratic --- a claim, as you’ll find out, that is misleading and wrong-headed . . . accurate only if Pape is able to ignore about a dozen other suicide-terrorist attacks carried out by Islamist fundamentalists that he either overlooked in his data-collection or consigned to the 14 of 315 suicide-terrorist bombings that, he says, were sporadic or random and hence not like the systematic group-organized, planned, and implemented suicide attacks carried out by his 9 terrorist groups in 18 different campaigns. Which, note, includes 1 suicide attack by the Sikh BKI in India that killed a huge total of 16 persons in 1995.

 

Looks strange, no? --- this fast-and-loose use of data or omission; but with the purpose in the BKI case of adding 1 non-Islamic religion to the secular/Hindu Tamil Tigers (LTTE) in Sri Lanka. For that matter, as you’ll further find out, Pape counts separate suicide-terrorist campaigns when they aren’t actually separate and isolated easily, chronologically or otherwise --- other than at most a lull in the campaigns for negotiations with the alien occupying government (whether the motive by the terrorist group is to negotiate seriously or to use the negotiations as a pretext for regrouping and obtaining new members or weapons). The LTTE has used this pretext at least a couple of times. Even so, table 1 in Pape's book distinguishes 18 separate organized campaigns; overlooks certain others that were carried out by Muslim extremists in Algeria and Egypt and Tunisia; inflates the small-number of cases he can use for statistical purposes (or so it seems); further obscures the clear connections between Islamist extremism and suicide-terrorism.

 

Well, as you'll see below, that's not the end of it. If the previous article uncovered several defects in Pape's data and his use and presentation of it, there happen to be other data-ridden glitches --- a few of them real whoppers --- that mar his theory of sucide-terrorism and related arguments.

 

In short: junk-in, junk-out.

A buggy series on jihad terrorism --- bombings and other attacks carried out by Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups --- started at the end of July 2005 and continued in a 2nd article on August 24th. As you'll see today, there have been over 2800 individual jihadist terrorist attacks world-wide since 9/11 and Al Qaeda's suicide-terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. Yes, over 2800 such attack . . . almost all aimed at civilian targets in dozens of countries around the globe

Enter Robert Pape and Suicide-Terrorism

That 2nd buggy article on jihad terrorism was devoted entirely to probing the ideas and analysis that appeared in a recent book by Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, on suicide-terrorism --- Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism its title --- and that have evoked a large favorable response in the popular media . . . especially on the political left.

Small Wonder.

The surprising thesis of the book is that all the organized suicide-terrorist attacks that erupted between 1980 and the end of 2003 --- or at least 95% of the 315 total, some 301 --- were carried out by well-organized terrorist groups, 9 in all that unfolded in 18 different suicide-terrorist campaigns that were all directed against the militarized occupational policies of democratic governments on their homeland territories. That's no less true of Al Qaeda than any of the other 8 terrorist groups.

In particular, its motives and those of the other 8 groups have been overwhelmingly nationalist, a desire for national self-liberation and autonomy from the alien occupier; and their suicide-terrorist attacks against the hated enemy have evoked popular support from their national and ethnic communities. (Pape, as the article showed, isn't sure whether bin Laden and Al Qaeda aim at liberating the Saudi peninsula from American occupation, or the entire Arab world of 300 million people in 21 countries, or entire 56 Muslim countries around the globe with over a billion people. He is sure, though, that bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda leaders and members are primarily nationalists and behave in accord with this theory.)

Altruistic Motives and Behavior of the Terrorists

What's more, the members of these terrorist organizations, leaders and bombers alike, turn out upon study to be essentially altruistic and wholly rational in choosing to assault the detested occupying power with a last-resort recourse of the weak --- way outgunned by the occupier --- to the terrifying weapon of suicide attacks.

Their altruism consists in their willingness to sacrifice themselves to the cause of national liberation. Their rationality fits the wider logic of all strategic action in armed conflicts between groups and states: to coerce an opponent by upping the costs of its behavior --- in the case of all the suicide-terrorist campaigns, the costs of its occupation of alien territory by force --- and hence shifting the cost/benefit calculus of the occupying countries' governments in an unfavorable direction: so much so that the government will, in the end, have to major concessions to the suicide-terrorists' leaders and followers as well as to their oppressed national or ethnic communities. In 7 of the 13 suicide-terrorist campaigns that had ended by the 2000, so Pape finds, the coercive logic paid off: the government of the occupying democratic country either wholly abandoned its occupation or largely accommodated the suicide-terrorists' aims. That's why there's been an unexpected

Religious Influences on the Suicide Terrorist Groups

In all these suicide-terrorist campaigns, Pape finds that religion has played at most a secondary and reinforcing influence on nationalist urges.

Not only that, Islam itself has been at most loosely associated with only about 50% of all the organized 301 suicide-terrorist bombings and other attacks. If Islam or Hinduism or Sikh religion --- the three involved in the 9 terrorist groups --- have had this kind of indirect influence, it's not been in the ways Bush, Blair, and dozens of other governments that have been attacked by jihad terrorists for over two decades believe it has. No, religion will at most aggravate the level of the antagonism between the occupying military power on one side and the suicide-terrorist groups and their ethnic or national communities on the other if --- and only if --- they represent different religions.

The US is secular and, so Pape argues, Christian in its culture, and hence that has sharpened the conflicts with Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups associated with it (tightly or loosely). Similarly, Al Qaeda and its franchises or imitators have declared war not just on the "covert colonialism" of the US, but all its allies in its colonial and occupational policies . . . including, apparently, almost all the Arab and Muslim governments world-wide that, in Al Qaeda's view, are renegade or apostate Muslims and depend ultimately on the US or Western armed powers for their existence. (The term "covert colonialism" is, note quickly, bin Laden's terminology, not Pape's. No matter. Pape insists more than once that what counts in determining what an alien occupier is and its allies is what the terrorists organizations happen to perceive and believe, not outsiders themselves. And Pape resolutely refuses to engage in "reality checking.")

Pape Ends with a Plea for a New Policy in Dealing with Al Qaeda

Pape singles out Al Qaeda as the US's only terrorist opponent, with none of the other suicide-terrorist groups that are Islamist like Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the like a threat to us at all ---Islam itself, in whichever form, always secondarily influential in their aims and behavior anyway. Not surprisingly, then, he argues that the Bush war on terrorism and its "invasions" of Muslim countries like Afghanistan and Iraq --- in a quixotic and disastrous policy of transforming them into western-like democracies --- have not just failed, but increased the terrorist threat to this country. What to do then? We should withdraw our forces from those countries and concentrate on protecting the oil fields of the Middle East --- Pape's view of what the main national interest of the US in the region --- by offshore deterrence against interruption of the oil supplies (presumably by Al Qaeda or others if their terrorism works to destabilize Saudi Arabia and other Arab and Muslim countries) with air- and sea-power, plus tightening immigration and border controls at home.

Once that happens, he insists, al Qaeda will no longer be able to convince Muslims to become terrorists and attack us abroad or at home, and for that matter Muslims world-wide will not be able to do anything but explicitly condemn such attacks. (In his last chapter, oddly, Pape says we should worry whether al Qaeda ever acquired nuclear weapons to use on it . . . especially since he has admitted earlier that bin Laden does at bottom hate the US as a country and culture, not just for its policies in the Saudi peninsula or elsewhere. It's odd, this worry and Pape's admission about bin Laden's hatred, no? After all, Pape has concluded his study by insisting that if our government were to follow his advice, then bin Laden and al Qaeda will have no reason any longer to attack us with terrorism, and in any case Muslims world-wide wouldn't support them if they tried.)

---

All these points about the Pape book and more were set out at length in the previous buggy argument. Today the argument shifts focus and begins to criticize in depth Pape's views and theory of suicide-terrorism --- their overall thrust and their individual main points and evidence. The buggy criticisms, note here at the outset, won't end with this article. Far from that, the series on Pape's book will likely take three or four more article to complete. Starting today, to be precise, prof bug will set out the Pape theory and main points under five or six key headings; and today's probing will be directed at only the first of these. Namely,

 

1. SUICIDE TERRORISM: PAPE'S DATA ABOUT IT AND HIS USES AND
INTERPRETATION OF THAT DATA.

PAPE'S DATE AND CLAIMS

Pape claims that he has assembled a data bank that covers all the suicide terrorist attacks that erupted worldwide between 1980 and 2003. There were 315 attacks in all, of which 95% --- or 301 --- were unleashed in 9 separate conflicts that have involved 18 different organized, coherent campaigns. See the two parts of the relevant table below, which come from Pape's first chapter.

Of these 301 suicide-terrorist attacks, Islamic fundamentalism turns out to be associated with only a half. Other religions or secular ideologies have marked the other half; and even then, Pape interprets the data to clearly show that secular nationalism --- the desire of the suicide terrorist organizations to coerce an alien occupying power --- was the primary motive at work in animating the suicide-terrorist organizations and individual suicide attacks. Both points here are elaborated at length in later chapters by Pape. And both, as we'll see in a moment or two, are highly disputable, especially the first one . . . the claim about Islam (at times elsewhere in the book he says "Islamic fundamentalism) being at work in only half of the suicide-terrorist "attacks".

Note, to continue our summary of Pape's presentation of the data, that there are different numbers for separate conflicts (9) and organization-initiated suicide terrorism in 18 campaigns.

That's because the same terrorist organization has sometimes been engaged in multiple terrorist campaigns --- for instance, three series of different suicide-terrorist attacks initiated by Hezbollah . . . first against the US and France in Lebanon (1983); then in 1982-1985 against Israeli military invasion into its territory in southern Lebanon; and again in 1995-2000 to drive out Israeli occupiers and their local supporters. Hamas, another Islamist organization operating out of the West Bank and Gaza, has been involved in 5 such campaigns, all targeting Israel.

 

Thirteen of these campaigns ended before the start of 2004, 7 of them favorable to the terrorist organizations engaged in suicide-terrorism. Five were still ongoing as of December 2003 until Pape's manuscript was being printed. Here are the two parts of the table that Pape has created for exhibiting the data (Dying To Win, p. 15)

Date	Terrorists	Religion	Target Country	Attacks
1983	Hezbollah	Islam	US,France	5
1982-85	Hezbollah	Ialm	Israel	11
1985-86	Hezbollah	Islam	Israel	20
1990-1994	LTTE	Hindu/secular	Sri Lanka	15
1995-2000	LTTE	Hindu/secular	Sri Lanka	54
1994	Hamas	Islam	Israel	2
1994-95	Hamas	Islam	Israel	9
1995	BKI	Sikh	India	1
1996	Hamas	Islam	Israel	4
1997	Hamas	Islam	Israel	3
1996	PKK	Islam/secular	Turkey	3
1999	PKK	Islam/secular	Turkey	11
2001	LTTE	Hindu/secular	Sri Lanka	6

Ongoing Suicide-Terrorist Campaigns At The End of 2003

Date	Terrorists	Religion	Target Country	Attacks
1996-	al-Qaeda	Islam	US, Allies	21
2000-	Chechens	Islam/secular	Russia	19
2000-	Kashmirs	Islam	India	5
2000-	several	Islam/secular	Israel	92
2003-	Iraq Rebels	Unknown	US, Allies	20

 

BUGGY CRITICISMS OF PAPE'S DATA BASE --- AND HIS PRESENTATION AND INTERPRETATION OF SUICIDE-TERRORISM AND THE LINKS TO ISLAM

As it happens, there are several problems with all these claims --- either substantively or in the way Pape presents and interprets the data in the two parts of the table (and a later table as we'll see).

(i.) Did Pape Really Pin Down All Suicide-Terrorist Attacks Between 1980 and the End of 2003?

No, it seems doubtful . . . at any rate given his focus on 301 of the 315 suicide-terrorist bombings and other attacks that he focuses on . . . those, he claims, that alone were part of a systematic organized suicide-terrorist campaign. We can find some of the cases he omitted from his 301 organized suicide terrorist campaigns on p. 264 of Pape's book. Others you can't, as the suicide-terrorist attacks he missed or decided to dismiss as relevant are listed in the following table. Whatever his reason, Pape not only wrongly dismissed the two cases involving Egyptian Islamists --- and a third that he doesn't include at all in the discarded 14 attacks --- but the one involving Algeria, and the effect is to whitewash Islamist connections to suicide-terrorist attacks. (Of the 14 suicide cases Pape claims were "isolated", 13 have a clear Islamist link. The 14th was carried out in Sri Lanka by LTTE, another puzzling omission.)

It gets worse. Half of the 14 omitted attacks were carried out by well-established terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas. Three others he lists as "unknown" group, one of which --- a motorcycle bomb aimed by a suicide-attacker at the interior minister of Egypt --- isn't listed in an authoritative study by the Jaffe On the other hand, Pape missed three important suicide-attacks by organized Egyptian terrorist groups, two of which attacks --- in Yugoslavia (Croatia in October 1995) and on the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan a month later --- he lists as "unknown"! The third sucide-attack was the most prominent of all --- 58 foreign tourists killed in Luxor, a tourist site in Egypt, in 1997. In all respects, the killing of the tourists --- mainly by knife (it brought the terrorists closer to their God by shedding the blood of infidels) --- entailed intentional suicide. As one report put it about all three:

. . . Egypt has also experienced suicide attacks by Islamists. For example, in a 1997 attack in Luxor, six gunmen from the group al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya killed fifty-eight foreign tourists. The gunmen remained at the attack site for forty-five minutes, hunting down tourists who had hidden. The gunmen made no attempt to flee, sticking to their deadly task and casually drinking soft drinks until security forces finally arrived and killed them easily. This was, in other words, a suicide operation. The two most prominent radical Islamist groups in Egypt -- Gama'a and Islamic Jihad -- have also carried out two suicide attacks outside of that country. The first was directed at a police station in Croatia in October 1995, and the other at the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan one month later

As you'll see in the next buggy article, the omission of Egypt from Pape's list of "301" organized suicide-cases --- and even more his confusion in his list of "isolated attacks" about the causes of a suicide suitcase bomb in Algeria in January 1995 (discussed in a moment or two) --- cause another problem for Pape other than to whitewash Islamist connections to suicide terrorism: neither Egypt nor Algeria is a democratic government, let alone an occupying one. Worse, Egypt figures in Pape's analysis in the text of his book as an "ally" of the US that does fit his (contorted) theory of how Al Qaeda has attacked only the US and its "allies". Egypt was never involved in the Afghan war, nor in the Iraq war; and it withdrew its small contributing forces from the Saudi peninsula (if Iraq is that) after the first Gulf war in 1991. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda no doubt see Egypt in these terms, but that too --- as the next article shows --- allows Al Qaeda terrorists to attack any country in the world, Muslim or not, that it deems a stooge of the US (itself, as Pape admits in passing at one point, seen by bin Laden to be controlled by Jews in its foreign policy).

 

Here, then --- keeping in mind these problems in Pape's data base and use of it --- are the suicide terrorist attacks that he missed --- either by omission or by wrongly burying them under the category of Al Qaeda suicide attacks on the US and its "allies" . . . a term, we'll see later, that Pape let bin Laden and his associates to define as they want. Only one attack by Al Qaeda figures in the following buggy list --- on a Tunisian synagogue in 2002 that killed mainly German and foreign tourists: in no way except in Al Qaeda minds --- which probably see all Muslim countries in the world except Iraq as American allies one way or another --- is Tunisia an ally of the US.

All of the attacks, you'll notice, are by Islamist terrorist groups.

Suicide Terrorist Campaigns Missed By Pape 1980-2003

Date	Terrorists	Religion	Target Country	#Attacks	#Killed & Wounded
1981	Egyptian Islamic Jihad	Islamist	Egypt	1	1 k (Pres Sadat); 12 w
1995	Egyptian Islamic Jihad	Islamist	Pakistan	1	16k; 60 w
1992	Hezbollah	Islamist	Argentina	1	29 k; 242 w
1994	Hezbollah	Islamist	Argentina	1	85 k; 300 w
1994	Anser Allah	Islamist	Panama	1	21 k;
1995	GIA: Armed Islamic Group (Algeria)	Islamist	Algeria	1	42 k; 265 w
1994	GIA	Islamist	France	1	aborted plane bombing of Eiffel Tower
1997	Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya & Jihad Talaat al-Fath.	Islamist	Egypt	1	62 k; 19 w
2002	Al Qaeda	Islamist	Tunisia	1	19 k
2002	Jemaah Islamiyah	Islamist	Indonesia (Bali)	1	202k;
2003	Jemaah Islamiyah	Islamist	Indonesia	1	12k; 150 w
2002	Al-Qaeda linked Somalis	Islamist	Kenya	1	13k; 80 w
2003	MILF: Moro Islamic Liberation Front	Islamist	Philippines		21 k; 150 w
2003	GIMC Moroccan Combatant Group	Islamist	Morocco	1 - 5	45k

*This abortive suicide bombing by a hi-jacked airline --- GIA out of Algeria the terrorist group in charge of the mission --- is singled out because it was intended, as the captured terrorists admitted, to crash into the Eiffel tower full of tourists. The mission failed when the French pilot claimed he had to stop in Marseilles to refuel, and French commandos stormed the plane,

**It's not clear how to list the 5 separate but simultaneous bombings in Casablanca. It depends on how Pape would define them: as 1 attack or 5.

(ii.) Problems with How Pape Interprets the Data in His Table for Casual Links