Tuesday, October 05, 2010
How to End Suicide Bombings? Research Suggests Ending Military Occupations
To put an end to suicide bombings, the United States needs a new strategy that would reposition troops and work with local allies to boost their fighting capacity, contends Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and one of the nation’s leading experts on suicide terrorism.
Despite a popular belief that suicide terrorism is the result of religious fanaticism, such bombings are really a calculated response to occupations by outsiders, according to research in a new book, “Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It”. The book examines exhaustive data on suicide attacks since 1980 in the Middle East, Chechnya, Sri Lanka and around the world.
The data show that the best way to reduce suicide bombings in Afghanistan or Iraq is not to condemn Islamic extremism, but to end foreign occupations as quickly as possible, Pape claims.
RSS