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Occupation and Withdrawal

Pape is not arguing that U.S. troops provoke suicide terrorist campaigns wherever they land, but that suicide terrorist campaigns cannot be explained without the presence of foreign (not simply American) military forces operating on territory the terrorists prize. ~Greg Scoblete, responding to Kori Schake That’s right. Schake is in such a hurry to attack Pape’s […]

Pape is not arguing that U.S. troops provoke suicide terrorist campaigns wherever they land, but that suicide terrorist campaigns cannot be explained without the presence of foreign (not simply American) military forces operating on territory the terrorists prize. ~Greg Scoblete, responding to Kori Schake

That’s right. Schake is in such a hurry to attack Pape’s “offshore balancing” recommendations that she misrepresents Pape’s core argument about suicide terrorism. As Prof. Pape has been arguing for years (including this 2005 interview with Scott McConnell for TAC), the goal of suicide terrorism is to inflict enough damage on a country’s civilian population that its government feels compelled to withdraw. Unfortunately, around the same time Prof. Pape gave his interview to TAC, the London bombings in July 2005 re-confirmed everything he had been saying in connection with the Iraq war. Here is Pape’s claim:

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland [bold mine-DL]. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

Of course, the nature and origin of the military presence are significant factors in all of this, which is why Pape emphasizes foreign occupation as the driving factor. A military presence that results from an invasion or military intervention or as part of an occupation and/or counterinsurgency policy will typically generate violent opposition. A military presence that results from a basing agreement with a national government that is perceived as legitimate usually will not provoke violent opposition. This seems to be most obviously true for the American experience with suicide terrorism. The U.S. intervened in Lebanon on the side of Israel and its Lebanese allies, deployed Marines to Beirut, suffered a horrific attack from Hizbullah and then withdrew soon thereafter. Once they had achieved the objective of forcing the U.S. out of their country, there were no more attacks. Crucially, there never would have been any attacks had the U.S. not intervened where it had no business going.

Contrary to the mythology some of the more enthusiastic anti-jihadists like to promote, Hizbullah terrorists did not “follow us back home,” because Hizbullah was fundamentally a Shi’ite resistance movement in Lebanon that doesn’t particularly care about what America was doing as long as it wasn’t interfering in Lebanon. Reagan’s error regarding Lebanon was not his decision to withdraw in the wake of the barracks bombing, which some hawks still think was a “sign of weakness.” His error was obviously the reckless decision to deploy American soldiers into the midst of an international and civil war in which America had nothing at stake.

Where I partially agree with Schake is in her criticism of an “offshore balancing” approach that prioritizes removing U.S. forces and relying on military strikes from afar. This is a policy recommendation for conceivably endless war with no guarantee that it would lead to fewer terrorist attacks. On the contrary, it seems likely to generate more attacks, including more attacks by radicalized individuals here in the U.S, because these strikes from afar are more likely to lead to civilian casualties. That will generate greater resentment against the U.S. It seems to me that this is not very different from the “counter-terrorist” approach to Afghanistan that the previous administration largely followed. “Offshore balancing” of this kind doesn’t eliminate the basic problem that Pape identifies as the cause of suicide terrorism, which is that this sort of terrorism feeds off of resentment of foreign military intervention as such.

Long-term occupation is one form of this, but we would be foolish to think that we can routinely bomb another country without generating the same violent reaction. Instead of trying to force withdrawal, terrorist attacks would have the cessation of attacks as their goal. It is one thing to argue that we should not have a military presence in Afghanistan because it feeds the instability and violence the government is presumably trying to reduce, but it is quite another to claim that the U.S. can remove its forces from a country, reserve the right to continue attacking it at will, and that this still counts as a real withdrawal. The trouble here is that Pape seems not to have taken his own claims about the causes of terrorism as seriously as he should, which has given Schake an opportunity to dismiss his important and valid claims along with his more questionable recommendations.

Update on 10/18: Yesterday, Prof. Pape put up a response to Schake’s argument (via David Benson). I recommend reading all of it, but I should point out that he specifically addresses that his off-shore balancing recommendation does not include heavy reliance on drone strikes:

Finally, I agree that replacing mass boots with mass drones would be a mistake — since vast numbers of air strikes could do inflict more than enough collateral damage to incite terrorism in response — exactly what CUTTING THE FUSE explains and why off-shore balancing means responding with stand-off military forces against significant size terrorist camps like Tarnak Farms (a military base larger than the Pentagon) and not every third ranking cadre in individual houses in Quetta, where more selective or even non-military means may well be more effective.

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