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Terrorism Is Not About Terror

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Terrorists act irrationally from a rational activism perspective, and groups act in ways most consistent with terrorism being about social status and belonging

2009-04-09–8y2017-04-21 finished certainty: likely importance: 8 backlinks similar bibliography

Statistical analysis of terrorist groups’ longevity, aims, methods and successes reveal that groups are self-contradictory and self-sabotaging, generally ineffective; common stereotypes like terrorists being poor or ultra-skilled are false. Superficially appealing counter-examples are discussed and rejected. Data on motivations and the dissolution of terrorist groups are brought into play and the surprising conclusion reached: terrorism is a form of socialization or status-seeking.

Can terrorist motives be taken at face-value? No. There is a commonly-believed “strategic model” of terrorism which we could describe as follows: ‘terrorists are people who are ideologically motivated to pursue specific unvarying political goals; to do so, they join together in long-lasting organizations and after the failure of ordinary political tactics, rationally decide to efficiently & competently engage in violent attacks on (usually) civilian targets to get as much attention as possible and publicity for their movement, and inspire fear & terror in the civilian population, which will pressure its leaders to solve the problem one way or another, providing support for the terrorists’ favored laws and/or their negotiations with involved governments, which then often succeed in gaining many of the original goals, and the organization dissolves.’

Unfortunately, this model, is in almost every respect, empirically false. Let’s look in some more detail at findings which cast doubt on the strategic model.

The Problem

From “What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy”, Max Abrahms2008:

Does the terrorist’s decision-making process conform to the strategic model? The answer appears to be no. The record of terrorist behavior does not adhere to the model’s three core assumptions. Seven common tendencies of terrorist organizations flatly contradict them. Together, these seven terrorist tendencies represent important empirical puzzles for the strategic model, posing a formidable challenge to the conventional wisdom that terrorists are rational actors motivated foremost by political ends…The seven puzzles…are:

  1. terrorist organizations do not achieve their stated political goals by attacking civilians;

  2. terrorist organizations never use terrorism as a last resort and seldom seize opportunities to become productive nonviolent political parties;

  3. terrorist organizations reflexively reject compromise proposals offering significant policy concessions by the target government1;

  4. terrorist organizations have protean political platforms;

  5. terrorist organizations generally carry out anonymous attacks, precluding target countries from making policy concessions;

  6. terrorist organizations with identical political platforms routinely attack each other more than their mutually professed enemy; and

  7. terrorist organizations resist disbanding when they consistently fail to achieve their political platforms or when their stated political grievances have been resolved.

Terrorism hasn’t impressed many observers both on case-studies & in general2. On statistical grounds, it’s incontrovertible that terrorism is a shockingly ineffective strategy; from Abrahms2012:

Jones & Libicki2008 then examined a larger sample, the universe of known terrorist groups between 196858ya and 200620ya. Of the 648 groups identified in the RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident database, only 4% obtained their strategic demands. More recently, Cronin (200917ya) has reexamined the success rate of these groups, confirming that less than 5% prevailed…Chenoweth and Stephan (200818ya, 201115ya) provide additional empirical evidence that meting out pain hurts non-state actors at the bargaining table. Their studies compare the coercive effectiveness of 323 violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns 1900–106200620ya. Like Gaibulloev & Sandler2009, the authors find that refraining from bloodshed significantly raises the odds of government compliance even after tactical confounds are held fixed. These statistical findings are reinforced with structured in-case comparisons highlighting that escalating from nonviolent methods of protest such as petitions, sit-ins, and strikes to deadly attacks tends to dissuade government compromise. Chenoweth and Stephan employ an aggregate measure of violence that incorporates both indiscriminate attacks on civilians and discriminate attacks on military personnel or other government officials, which are often differentiated from terrorism as guerrilla attacks (Abrahms2006; Cronin2009; and Moghadam2006). Other statistical research (Abrahms, 201214ya, Fortna, 201115ya) demonstrates that when terrorist attacks are combined with such discriminate violence, the bargaining outcome is not additive; on the contrary, the pain to the population significantly decreases the odds of government concessions.3

Guerrilla warfare’s effectiveness is its own topic; we can note that many of the same cognitive biases like the availability heuristic that skew our beliefs on terrorism also apply to guerrilla warfare as well—everyone remembers the successful American Revolution, but who ever invokes the scores or hundreds of other revolts & failed revolutions in the British Empire which involved guerrilla tactics? (Or in the American empire, for that matter—eg. Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey rebellion, or Nat Turner? How well did the American South succeed in seceding, in a conflict with quite as many irregular forces as the American Revolution?) Does a close examination of the Vietnam War, where the much-heralded Vietcong were destroyed after the Tet Offensive and before the North Vietnamese army crushed the ARVN and conquered South Vietnam, reveal it to have been more effective than conventional warfare? A cursory look through any somewhat comprehensive list of guerrilla movements does not reveal it to be a list of luminaries. “Nobody likes a loser”, least of all in war. But to return to terrorism.

Worse, terrorism—of any kind like hostage-taking4, and including conventional warfare tactics like civilian atrocities or strategic bombing—reliably produces a political backlash towards conservatism and bolsters hardliners’ approaches to terrorism56, possibly due to a horns effect/fundamental attribution bias where the usage of violence is inferred to indicate a group is intrinsically vicious/intransigent/hateful7, so there’s a double-whammy—the terrorism makes any kind of compromise harder to reach, and if there is danger of an agreement, the extremists will try to sabotage it, which intransigence naturally makes any future agreements less likely.

To this we could add that there are many fewer terrorists than one might expect, even for the most apparently successful and globally popular groups like Al Qaeda8.

Terrorist Ineffectiveness

In a [previous study of mine] 9 assessing terrorism’s coercive effectiveness, I found that in a sample of 28 well-known terrorist campaigns, the terrorist organizations accomplished their stated policy goals 0% of the time by attacking civilians.

The al-Qaida military strategist, Abul-Walid, complained that with its “hasty changing of strategic targets”, al-Qaida was engaged in nothing more than “random chaos”. Other disgruntled al-Qaida members have reproached the organization for espousing political objectives that “shift with the wind”.

Who is effective? How could terrorists be more effective? Easily. (See my Terrorism is not Effective essay.) The strange thing is that we know, and they know, perfectly well that there are attacks which do the US tremendous damage, yet they hardly ever use them. Why are there so few Operation Bojinka, so few 9/11s, so few Operation Hemorrhages? Their economic multiplier is tremendous:

In his October 200422ya address to the American people, bin Laden noted that the 9/11 attacks cost al Qaeda only a fraction of the damage inflicted upon the United States. “Al Qaeda spent $956,324.57$500,0002001 on the event,” he said, “while America in the incident and its aftermath lost—according to the lowest estimates—more than $956.32$5002001 billion, meaning that every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars.”10

The cargo airplane plot?

“Two Nokia mobiles, $236.84$1502010 each, two HP printers, $473.69$3002010 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the [AQ] magazine [Inspire] said.11

Ironically, it was cheaper for Palestinians to launch suicide attacks:

Hassan cites one Palestinian officials prescription for a successful mission: “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” (30). The total cost is about $286.9$1502001.12

Other airline plots?

It is recognized that the cost of the actual equipment used in an attack can be quite low. For example, the ingredients used to build each bomb intended to blow up airliners bound for the United States from the United Kingdom in 200620ya are estimated to have cost only $24.58$152006.13 The cost of an IED has been estimated to be $40.97$252006 to $49.16$302006.14

Similarly, the material cost for conducting a suicide bomb has been estimated at only $233.3$1502008.15…the FATF estimated that the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 had direct costs of $111,446.07$50,0001998.16 Other estimates, even for car-bomb suicide terrorists, are in similar ranges, although prices vary greatly over time and so all of the above is out of date.17

Considering European terrorism incidents as a whole, they are all uniformly cheap, with the cheapest being knife/axe attacks (~$0); 3⁄4s cost <$14,358.38$10,0002015, with only 3 exceeding $28,716.77$20,0002015.

Funding seems to be a constant issue for spree killers or terrorists, even when objectively there is no reason to think about it:

So terrorists want to hurt the US, they know many effective ways to do so, and… hardly anything happens. The work of rational actors?

The Solution

When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.

Osama bin Laden, 2001

So, then, what is the explanation for such self-defeating, irrational actions? Can we explain the self-defeating as deliberate, due perhaps to false flag attacks? No; even if false flag attacks were more common than everyone believes and made up—a universal century-long strategy of tension in every country (despite the absence of evidence)—say 20% of the scores of thousands of terrorist attacks in the 20th & 21st centuries, that still leaves countless organizations & terrorists inexplicably incompetent19 & ignorant20. In the spirit of Robin Hanson’s X Is Not About X posts (see “Politics isn’t about Policy”), I’d like to offer one of my own: terrorism is not about terror; it’s not even about politics. It’s about socializing.

There is comparatively strong theoretical and empirical evidence that people become terrorists not to achieve their organization’s declared political agenda, but to develop strong affective ties with other terrorist members. In other words, the preponderance of evidence is that people participate in terrorist organizations for the social solidarity, not for their political return.

In Marc Sageman’s Understanding terror networks (summary), he writes:

Ibrahim commented on the superior attractiveness of a religious revivalist organization over a secular political one, namely the strong sense of communion that Muslim groups provided for their members…‘The militant Islamic groups with their emphasis on brotherhood, mutual sharing, and spiritual support become the functional equivalent of the extended family to the youngster who has left his behind. In other words, the Islamic group fulfills a de-alienating function for its members in ways that are not matched by other rival political movements’ (Ibrahim, 198: 448).” “The Saidi branch was composed of several groups, based in provincial university towns. They recruited heavily according to kinship and tribal bonds.

…Friendships cultivated in the jihad, just as those forged in combat in general, seem more intense and are endowed with special significance. Their actions taken on behalf of God and the umma are experienced as sacred. This added element increases the value of friendships within the clique and the jihad in general and diminishes the value of outside friendships. To friends hovering on the brink of joining an increasingly activist clique, this promised shift in value may be difficult to resist, especially if one is temporarily alienated from society…once they become members, strong bonds of loyalty and emotional intimacy discourage their departure.

From Scott Atran’s2003 review (ibid):

Studies by psychologist Ariel Merari point to the importance of institutions in suicide terrorism (28). His team interviewed 32 of 34 bomber families in Palestine/Israel (before 199828ya), surviving attackers, and captured recruiters. Suicide terrorists apparently span their population’s normal distribution in terms of education, socioeconomic status, and personality type (introvert versus extrovert). Mean age for bombers was early twenties. Almost all were unmarried and expressed religious belief before recruitment (but no more than did the general population). Except for being young, unattached males, suicide bombers differ from members of violent racist organizations with whom they are often compared (29: R. Ezekiel, The Racist Mind). Overall, suicide terrorists exhibit no socially dysfunctional attributes (fatherless, friendless, or jobless) or suicidal symptoms. They do not vent fear of enemies or express “hopelessness” or a sense of “nothing to lose” for lack of life alternatives that would be consistent with economic rationality. Merari attributes primary responsibility for attacks to recruiting organizations, which enlist prospective candidates from this youthful and relatively unattached population. Charismatic trainers then intensely cultivate mutual commitment to die within small cells of three to six members. The final step before a martyrdom operation is a formal social contract, usually in the form of a video testament.

Psychologist Brian Barber surveyed 900 Moslem adolescents during Gaza’s first Intifada (1987–6199333ya) (31: B. Barber, Heart and Stones). Results show high levels of participation in and victimization from violence. For males, 81% reported throwing stones, 66% suffered physical assault, and 63% were shot at (versus 51, 38, and 20% for females). Involvement in violence was not strongly correlated with depression or antisocial behavior. Adolescents most involved displayed strong individual pride and social cohesion. This was reflected in activities: for males, 87% delivered supplies to activists, 83% visited martyred families, and 71% tended the wounded (57, 46, and 37% for females). A follow-up during the second Intifada (2000–200224ya) indicates that those still unmarried act in ways considered personally more dangerous but socially more meaningful. Increasingly, many view martyr acts as most meaningful. By summer 200224ya, 70 to 80% of Palestinians endorsed martyr operations (32)…In contrast to Palestinians, surveys with a control group of Bosnian Moslem adolescents from the same time period reveal markedly weaker expressions of self-esteem, hope for the future, and prosocial behavior (30). A key difference is that Palestinians routinely invoke religion to invest personal trauma with proactive social meaning that takes injury as a badge of honor. Bosnian Moslems typically report not considering religious affiliation a significant part of personal or collective identity until seemingly arbitrary violence forced awareness upon them.

Consider data on 39 recruits to Harkat al-Ansar, a Pakistani-based ally of Al-Qaida. All were unmarried males, most had studied the Quran. All believed that by sacrificing themselves they would help secure the future of their “family” of fictive kin: “Each [martyr] has a special place-among them are brothers, just as there are sons and those even more dear” (34: D. Rhode, A. Chivers, New York Times, 2002-03-17, p. A1).

From the RAND study “Deradicalizing Islamic Extremists”, Rabas et al 2010 (emphasis added):

In a study of Colombian insurgent movements, Florez-Morris found that members who remained in the group until it collectively demobilized did so as a result of social and practical needs, shared beliefs, and the group’s role in boosting their self-identity by making them feel important. In addition to these benefits, insurgents were also deterred from leaving by the lack of other options, a result of the clandestine nature of the organization (Mauricio Florez-Morris, “Why Some Colombian Guerrilla Members Stayed in the Movement Until Demobilization: A Micro-Sociological Case Study of Factors That Influenced Members’ Commitment to Three Former Rebel Organizations: M-19, EPL, and CRS”, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 22, No. 2010-03-02, p. 218.)21

That study mentions some interesting datapoints from the Saudi rehabilitation programs:

The second study—which focused on individuals who had allegedly participated in violence in Saudi Arabia—revealed an equally interesting set of factors. Most significantly, the data show greater domestic problems and troubled homelives for this group. Approximately half came from homes with a father over the age of 50, and one-quarter (26%) came from polygamous households. Saudi authorities stress that they believe there is a correlation between less attention received at home and trouble later in life. Similarly, over a third (35%) of the second study’s subjects came from homes with “family problems”, and one-fifth were identified as orphans with no traditional parental oversight.

Another RAND study (RAND 2010) examines detailed financial records of al-Qaeda in Iraq, finding that personnel represent a major cost of branches, which were highly profitable as they engaged in theft & extortion, but not enough to compensate for the risk—even taking into account AQI’s policy of paying salaries to the families of dead or imprisoned members, members were forfeiting at least half their lifetime income. But the RAND researchers also discuss how US Army enlisted personnel—presumably better educated and trained than AQI members—have discount rates as flabbergastingly high as 57.2%22, and that their data did not allow them to estimate the education or skills of the AQI members or how much the members might be skimming off the multifarious criminal activities. Given that the central Anbar AQI group had to transfer $4,263.18$2,7002010 on average for one of the local groups to launch one attack and the raw materials, as quoted previously, are so cheap, one wonders at the efficiency of AQI in turning dollars into attacks; how much of the overhead is truly necessary with members dedicated to the cause?

Increased spending from the AQI Anbar administration to its sectors increases the number of attacks in those sectors, with one additional attack occurring for every additional $4,263.18$2,7002010 transferred…Putting together an IED or buying a mortar for an attack is cheap. However, our findings add to the mounting evidence that militant group operations involve far more than just one-time costs. Maintaining a militant organization can be quite expensive. For AQI, personnel costs for members constituted the bulk of these expenses. Without such recurring payments, it is unlikely that AQI could maintain its effectiveness in committing violence. The group incurred large costs keeping imprisoned members on the payroll as an obligation to their families and paying the families of dead members. Although such payments likely increased the loyalty of members, they also diverted large amounts of money that could have otherwise been used to attack Coalition and Iraqi forces.

“Psychology of Terrorism”, Borum2004:

A similar mechanism is one in which a desperate quest for personal meaning pushes an individual to adopt a role to advance a cause, with little or no thoughtful analysis or consideration of its merit. In essence, the individual resolves the difficult question “Who am I?” by simply defining him or herself as a “terrorist,” a “freedom fighter,” “shahid” or similar role (Della Porta, 199234ya; Knutson, 198145ya). Taylor and Louis (200453) describe a classic set of circumstances for recruitment into a terrorist organization: “These young people find themselves at a time in their life when they are looking to the future with the hope of engaging in meaningful behavior that will be satisfying and get them ahead. Their objective circumstances including opportunities for advancement are virtually nonexistent; they find some direction for their religious collective identity but the desperately disadvantaged state of their community leaves them feeling marginalized and lost without a clearly defined collective identity” (p. 178).

Belonging: In radical extremist groups, many prospective terrorists find not only a sense of meaning, but also a sense of belonging, connectedness and affiliation. Luckabaugh and colleagues (199729ya) argue that among potential terrorists “the real cause or psychological motivation for joining is the great need for belonging.” For these alienated individuals from the margins of society, “joining a terrorist group represented the first real sense of belonging after a lifetime of rejection, and the terrorist group was to become the family they never had” (Post, 198442ya). This strong sense of belonging has critical importance as a motivating factor for joining, a compelling reason for staying, and a forceful influence for acting. “Volkan (199729ya) .. argued that terrorist groups may provide a security of family by subjugating individuality to the group identity. A protective cocoon is created that offers shelter from a hostile world” (Marsella, 200323ya). Observations on terrorist recruitment show that many people are influenced to join by seeking solidarity with family, friends or acquaintances (Della Porta, 199531ya), and that “for the individuals who become active terrorists, the initial attraction is often to the group, or community of believers, rather than to an abstract ideology or to violence” (Crenshaw, 198838ya). Indeed, it is the image of such strong cohesiveness and solidarity among extremist groups that makes them more attractive than some prosocial collectives as a way to find belonging (Johnson & Feldman, 198244ya).

Conclusion: These three factors—injustice, identity, and belonging—have been found often to co-occur in terrorists and to strongly influence decisions to enter terrorist organizations and to engage in terrorist activity. Some analysts even have suggested that the synergistic effect of these dynamics forms the real “root cause” of terrorism, regardless of ideology. Luckabaugh and colleagues (199729ya), for example, concluded “the real cause or psychological motivation for joining is the great need for belonging, a need to consolidate one’s identity. A need to belong, along with an incomplete personal identity, is a common factor that cuts across the groups.” Jerrold Post (198442ya) has similarly theorized that “the need to belong, the need to have a stable identity, to resolve a split and be at one with oneself and with society—… is an important bridging concept which helps explain the similarity in behavior of terrorists in groups of widely different espoused motivations and composition.”

…Della Porta (199234ya), for example, notes that among Italian extremists, “the decision to join an underground organization was very rarely an individual one. In most cases it involved cliques of friends. In some cases recruitment was determined by the individual’s solidarity with an”important” friend who was arrested or had to go underground.” More recently, using open source material, Marc Sageman (200422ya) analyzed the cases of approximately 172 global Salafi mujahedin and found that nearly two thirds “joined” the jihad collectively as part of a small group (“bunch of guys”) or had a longtime friend who already had joined.

One last quote (from Abrahms again):

Second, members from a wide variety of terrorist groups…say that they joined these armed struggles…to maintain or develop social relations with other terrorist members. These are not the statements of a small number of terrorists; in the Turkish sample, for instance, the 1,100 terrorists interviewed were 10 times more likely to say that they joined the terrorist organization ‘because their friends were members’ than because of the ‘ideology’ of the group.

There are other interesting points; both of Abrahms’s papers are well worth reading, as is Abrahms2012:

A final explanation is that terrorists derive utility from their actions regardless of whether governments comply politically. This interpretation is consistent with the emerging body of evidence that although terrorism is ineffective for achieving outcome goals, terrorism is indeed effective for achieving process goals (eg. Abrahms2008; Arce and Sandler, 200719ya, 201016ya; Bloom, 200521ya; Kydd and Walter2002). Whereas terrorist acts generally fail to promote government concessions, the violence against civilians can perpetuate the terrorist group by attracting media attention, spoiling peace processes, and boosting membership, morale, cohesion, and external support…Indeed, terrorists tend to ramp up their attacks during peace processes, precluding concessions (see Kydd and Walter, 200224ya).

  • Arce, Daniel. and Sandler, Todd. (200719ya) “Terrorist Signaling and the Value of Intelligence”. British Journal of Political Science 37 576–586

  • Arce, Daniel. and Sandler, Todd. (201016ya) “Terrorist Spectaculars: Backlash Attacks and the Focus of Intelligence”. Journal of Conflict Resolution 54 354–373.

  • Bloom, Mia M. (200422ya) “Palestinian Suicide Bombing: Public Support, Market Share, and Outbidding”. Political Science Quarterly 119 61–88

  • Kydd, Andrew H. and Walter, Barbara F. (200224ya) “Sabotaging the peace: The politics of extremist violence”. International Organization 56 263–296

With this perspective, many things fall into place. For example, in the RAND Corporation’s In Their Own Words: Voices of Jihad, the authors remark:

The Internet offers another example. It is awash in jihadi web sites, and there is little question that it is being exploited for training, fundraising, recruitment, and coordination. Yet again, when browsing the blogs and chat rooms, one gets the impression that what is being witnessed is largely a form of “fantasy jihad.” It is not comforting to see so many obviously educated23 young Muslims playing the game, but their participation does not mean that each log-on represents a sleeper cell.

Certainly not; indeed, one could well predict that ‘e-jihad’ users will tend to be rather harmless. It’s rather harder for online peers (compared to meatspace friends) to guilt one into action, after all. And one could well predict that more material factors would, say, influence which clerics tend to become radicalized and jihadist, like career success in working for a government (Nielsen2013).

O RLY?

The foregoing was originally posted to LessWrong.com, where it was energetically critiqued.

Terrorism Does Too Work!

There are multiple memorable instances where terrorism seems to work. This should be no surprise; after all, if terrorism never worked, would we ever be concerned about it? Of course not. Terrorism works, darn it!24

Cited examples include the IRA, the PLO, Hezbollah, and Hamas. As one commentator wrote: “Let’s stop pretending that terrorism doesn’t work. Do you think England would ever have talked with the IRA, or that Israel would have given territory to the Palestinians, if not for terrorism?”

NO WAI

There are several possible replies. For example, Pape’s work is focused pretty much only on suicide attacks; his findings on effectiveness, even if correct, may not generalize to the many non-suicide attacks. Further, Abrahms consider it unclear how reasonable his specific analysis is:

Not only is his sample of terrorist campaigns modest, but they targeted only a handful of countries: ten of the eleven campaigns analyzed were directed against the same three countries (Israel, Sri Lanka, and Turkey), with six of the campaigns directed against the same country (Israel). More important, Pape does not examine whether the terrorist campaigns achieved their core policy objectives. In his assessment of Palestinian terrorist campaigns, for example, he counts the limited withdrawals of the Israel Defense Forces from parts of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 199432ya as two separate terrorist victories, ignoring the 167% increase in the number of Israeli settlers during this period-the most visible sign of Israeli occupation. Similarly, he counts as a victory the Israeli decision to release Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin from prison in October 199729ya, ignoring the hundreds of imprisonments and targeted assassinations of Palestinian terrorists throughout the Oslo “peace process.” Pape’s data therefore reveal only that select terrorist campaigns have occasionally scored tactical victories, not that terrorism is an effective strategy for groups to achieve their policy objectives.

Another is that this is an essentially statistical argument, over dozens or hundreds of terrorist groups. Adumbrating 4 somewhat successful groups would invalidate an assertion along the lines of “All terrorist groups are unsuccessful”, but of course no one is making that claim. (Just that most are.)

The previously quoted 0% success rate figure is a bit low. “Why Terrorism Doesn’t Work” backtracks a little, and considers a larger group (42, not 20). This larger group has a 7% success rate.

As frequently noted, Hezbollah successfully coerced the multinational peacekeepers and Israelis from southern Lebanon in 198442ya and 200026ya, and the Tamil Tigers [1976–33200917ya] won control over the northern and eastern coastal areas of Sri Lanka from 199036ya on. In the aggregate, however, the terrorist groups achieved their main policy objectives only 3 out of 42 times–a 7% success rate. Within the coercion literature, this rate of success is considered extremely low. It is substantially lower, for example, than even the success rate of economic sanctions, which are widely regarded as only minimally effective.

…This study analyzes the political plights of 28 terrorist groups–the complete list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) as designated by the U.S. Department of State since 200125ya. The data yield two unexpected findings. First, the groups accomplished their 42 policy objectives only 7% of the time.

(For one parallel in regular politics, consider Gilens & Page2014.)

Perhaps these studies are simply too harsh and demanding?

Using this list provides a check against selecting cases on the dependent variable, which would artificially inflate the success rate because the most well known policy outcomes involve terrorist victories (eg. the U.S. withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 198425). Furthermore, because all of the terrorist groups have remained active since 200125ya, ample time has been allowed for each group to make progress on achieving its policy goals, thereby reducing the possibility of artificially deflating the success rate through too small a time frame. In fact, the terrorist groups have had significantly more time than five years to accomplish their policy objectives: the groups, on average, have been active since 197848ya; the majority has practiced terrorism since the 1960s and 1970s; and only four were established after 199036ya.

A third counters the appeal with Pape’s authority with the observation that “terrorism doesn’t work” is an old vein of thought; in 197650ya, Walter Laqueur argued in “The Futility of Terrorism” that terrorism is an ineffective strategy, and Thomas Schelling said it “almost never appears to accomplish anything politically significant.”26, and Loren Lomasky concurs in this pessimistic take27; Lomasky goes so far as to argue that terrorism is outright counterproductive in strengthening the targeted government.

One last consideration is that the listed groups may not’ve been very successful at all.

Hitting the Broad Side

The follow quotes are from Wikipedia, about the previously cited groups. Where possible, I quote the summary of that group’s aims.

  1. The IRA’s stated objective is to end “British rule in Ireland,” and according to its constitution, it wants “to establish an Irish Socialist Republic, based on the Proclamation of 1916110ya.” Until the 199828ya Belfast Agreement, it sought to end Northern Ireland’s status within the United Kingdom and bring about a united Ireland by force of arms and political persuasion.

  2. In 198838ya, the PLO officially endorsed a two-state solution, with Israel and Palestine living side by side contingent on specific terms such as making East Jerusalem capital of the Palestinian state and giving Palestinians the right of return to land occupied by Palestinians prior to the 194878ya and 196759ya wars with Israel.

  3. Hamas wants to create an Islamic state in the West Bank and the Gaza strip, a goal which combines Palestinian nationalism with Islamist objectives. Hamas’s1988 charter calls for the replacement of Israel and the Palestinian Territories with an Islamic Palestinian state.

  4. Hezbollah’s1985 manifesto listed its three main goals as “putting an end to any colonialist entity” in Lebanon, bringing the Phalangists to justice for “the crimes they [had] perpetrated,” and the establishment of an Islamic regime in Lebanon. Recently, however, Hezbollah has made little mention of establishing an Islamic state, and forged alliances across religious lines. Hezbollah leaders have also made numerous statements calling for the destruction of Israel, which they refer to as a “Zionist entity… built on lands wrested from their owners.”

One striking thing about the goals of these groups is how few of them have been accomplished, and how often they seem to have sabotaged and undone real progress towards resolution of their grievances. Anyone even slightly familiar with Palestine and Israel in particular must wonder whether Hamas or the PLO have helped the Palestinian cause more than they’ve hurt (an observation equally applicable to Ireland).

Biases

These ideas and analyses can make people quite angry. They view the previously mentioned organizations, as well as al-Qaeda, as being such obvious examples that anyone suggesting that terrorism may be useless is seen as being a naive idiot or perhaps being dishonest. The level of emotion seems quite unwarranted, and makes me think that there may be cognitive biases at play.

The availability heuristic (when “people base their prediction of the frequency of an event or the proportion within a population based on how easily an example can be brought to mind”) seems to apply here. It is much easier to think of claimed attacks than anonymous ones, even though it was hinted at the beginning that terrorist attacks for which the group claims responsibility are actually in the minority! This very counter-intuitive claim seems to be borne out:

Since the emergence of modern terrorism in 196858ya, 64% of worldwide terrorist attacks have been carried out by unknown perpetrators. Anonymous terrorism has been rising, with 3 out of 4 attacks going unclaimed since September 11, 200125ya. Anonymous terrorism is particularly prevalent in Iraq, where the US military has struggled to determine whether the violence was perpetrated by Shiite or Sunni groups with vastly different political platforms.28

(Inasmuch as people read about identified attacks and ignore anonymous attacks, there may also be some confirmation bias at work as well.)

It’s about Feeling Better

Isn’t it possible that many terrorist acts are really for the purpose of making the terrorists feel better about themselves and their in-groups? Like teenagers playing pranks, only with often-lethal consequences.

This is somewhat different from the suggestion that terrorists join for a group to spend time with; this hypothesis is about social networks, self-esteem, and repairing injuries to it. Terrorists are not mad293031 (despite an occupation conducive to it32), nor are they demonic agents of destruction.

That said, the data on terrorist recruitment suggests that prestige & power of the group or prominent members has more to do with the attractiveness of being a terrorist than whether a recruit’s ingroup has recently been humiliated by an outgroup. Consider the 9/11 attacks. Were Muslims deeply offended by the economic embargoes directed against Saddam Hussein (and the consequent Iraqi suffering and deaths), or by the Palestinian situation, then logically they would join before 9/11 so as to aid al-Qaeda in striking back against the USA. Of course, recruitment picked up after 9/11, in the face of enormous international pressure on anything that even was rumored to have Al Qaeda links33. Promising young students drop their studies to go fight in Somalia—as a group, not one by one.34 This is perfectly logical and even predicted by both the prestige and social-ties theories, but it is harder to make it consistent with the self-esteem theory.

Social networks can also be woven through the Internet. It can be easy to miss this even when the evidence is staring one in the face. From Foreign Policy, “The World of Holy Warcraft: How al Qaeda is using online game theory to recruit the masses”:

The counterterrorism community has spent years trying to determine why so many people are engaged in online jihadi communities in such a meaningful way. After all, the life of an online administrator for a hard-line Islamist forum is not as exciting as one might expect. You don’t get paid, and you spend most of your time posting links and videos, commenting on other people’s links and videos, and then commenting on other people’s comments. So why do people like Abumubarak spend weeks and months and years of their time doing it? Explanations from scholars have ranged from the inherently compulsive and violent quality of Islam to the psychology of terrorists.

But no one seems to have noticed that the fervor of online jihadists is actually quite similar to the fervor of any other online group. The online world of Islamic extremists, like all the other worlds of the Internet, operates on a subtly psychological level that does a brilliant job at keeping people like Abumubarak clicking and posting away—and amassing all the rankings, scores, badges, and levels to prove it…It turns out that what drives online jihadists is pretty much exactly what drives Internet trolls, airline ticket consumers, and World of Warcraft players: competition…Points can result in an array of seemingly trivial rewards, including a change in the color of a member’s username, the ability to display an avatar, access to private groups, and even a change in status level from, say, “peasant” to “VIP.” In the context of the gamified system, however, these paltry incentives really matter.

But for a select few, the addiction to winning bleeds over into physical space to the point where those same incentives begin to shape the way they act in the real world. These individuals strive to live up to their virtual identities, in the way that teens have re-created the video game Grand Theft Auto in real life, carrying out robberies and murders.

One man in particular has been able to take advantage of the incentives of online gamification to pursue real-life terrorist recruits: Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al Qaeda cleric hiding in Yemen, famous for having helped encourage a number of Western-based would-be jihadists into action. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter, for example, massacred a dozen soldiers after exchanging a number of emails with Awlaki. Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, admitted Awlaki influenced him, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was one of Awlaki’s students prior to attempting to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day2009…His supporters vie for the right to connect with Awlaki, whether virtually or actually—a powerful incentive that, from our observation, drives many of them into, at the very least, more active language about jihad.

A user who called himself “Belaid” on Awlaki’s now-defunct blog boasted to others about what he perceived to be a response to his email in Awlaki’s latest blog post, saying: “S. Anwar Al-Awlaki i sincerely love u for the Sake of Allah for what you are doing, I think you answered my e-mail by giving us this document.” He then followed up by expressing his desire to transition from virtual communication to real communication. “I ask Allah to make me go visit you so I can see you in real and we in sha Allah go together do jihad insha Allah in our life time!!!” he wrote in January 200917ya.

The right interpretation is almost too obvious to give. World of Warcraft is not about competition any more than those forums are; the literature on MMORPGs and MUDs since the 1980s (and even video games35) in general have concentrated on the social aspects36 of online interactions. It’s a commonplace that long-term players of Ultima Online—no, Everquest, no, World of Warcraft—do so not in order to compete for the highest player level37 but in order to continue playing with their guild. (In line with the following section, marriages between players who met in guilds are far from unheard of; they are no longer even news.)

If we see terrorism as more of a tribal or gang activity than political activism or warfare, then online connections become especially important to our analysis, otherwise we will be fooled by so-called lone wolves. Earlier ‘lone wolves’ like bombers Timothy McVeigh or Eric Robert Rudolph turn out on closer inspection to have ties, social & otherwise, to like-minded people; McVeigh lived with several other extremists and was taught his bomb-making skills by the Nichols, who also built the final bomb with him, while Rudolph remained on the run for several years in a community that wrote songs and sold t-shirts to praise him and was ultimately caught clean-shaven & wearing new sneakers. Lone wolves who genuinely had no contact with their confreres, such as Ted Kaczynski, are vanishingly rare exceptions among the dozens of thousands of terrorist attacks in the 20th century, and as rare exceptions, otherwise implausible explanations like mental disease account for them without trouble.

About the Chicks, Man

One commenter suggested that Abrahms almost has it right. Terrorists are seeking social ties, but only as a substitute for female companionship. The specific example was the American novel/movie Fight Club; certainly, when one thinks about it, it’s hard to not notice that the narrator goes–thanks to leading a terrorist organization–from being a single loser who has to pretend to be ill (mentally and physically) to get any attention or social interaction, to being an incredibly popular guy with dozens of subordinates to hang out with day and night and a girlfriend.

But an even better example might be Fatah’s Black September cell.

In The Atlantic’s “All You Need Is Love”, Bruce Hoffman writes that a senior Fatah general told him of how they decided that Black September had outlived its usefulness, and needed to be dissolved. But that was problematic. Black September likely would not take dissolution lying down:

‘It was the most elite unit we had. The members were suicidal—not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their lives to ascend to heaven but in the sense that we could send them anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to do it. No question. No hesitation. They were absolutely dedicated and absolutely ruthless.’

What, then, did Fatah do in 197353ya? They must’ve succeeded; we all know Black September is ancient history.

My host, who was one of Abu Iyad’s most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.

Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men—the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO—a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.

And it worked!

So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $14,644.04$3,0001973; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $24,406.74$5,0001973.

Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family…the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had—that is, being deprived of their wives and children. ‘And so’, my host told me, ‘that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.’

Of course, the base rate for becoming a dispossessed young man becoming a terrorist is so low that it wouldn’t be a good use of young women to try to prevent terrorism by marrying them off, while if you can target the marriages to known terrorists, you have enough information that you would be better off just imprisoning or executing them. Similarly, cases of women falling in love with jihadis online or through Twitter and traveling in groups to the Middle East are not important in an absolute numbers sense but for the implications about their psychology.

Black September is interesting for what the effect of marriage says about the motivations of their members, not as a prototype of a useful suppression strategy—most countries do not have the same relation to terrorist groups that Fatah had to Black September, and can adopt more effective strategies.

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