http://www.slate.com/id/2249309/
This week's Moscow subway bombings raise several questions, but one of the most mysterious must be: Why hasn't something like this happened here?
There are several plausible explanations, most of them relating to security measures taken since Sept. 11, 2001: terrorist watch lists, detentions, tighter restrictions on visas and immigration, increased surveillance of certain radical groups, clamp-downs on the sale of potentially explosive materials.
But another, broader reason is that suicide bombers are a peculiar lot. They tend to be driven by very specific motives, and those motives don't have much resonance on American soil.
Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, argued in his 2005 book Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism that suicide bombers are motivated not so much by Islamist (or any other kind of religious) fervor but, rather, by anger at foreign troops occupying their land.
Since then, as founding director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, Pape has collected and analyzed a database of 2,668 suicide bombings carried out between 1980 and 2009—which has confirmed, even strengthened, his initial theory.
It turns out, Pape told me in a phone conversation today, that 96 percent of those suicide bombers were engaging in what they saw as acts of nationalist resistance to foreign military occupation; most of them were living within a few miles of where the bombing took place. (The Moscow subway bombers, it has been reported, were probably Muslims fighting for Chechen independence.)
Of the 2,668 suicide bombers in Pape's database, just 255—not quite 10 percent—were "transnational" terrorists, that is, militants who traveled from other countries or who attacked targets in their own countries as violent gestures of sympathy. And 200 of those 255 blew up their bombs, and themselves, in Iraq. (Pape reports his full findings in a book, out this fall, called Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.)
In other words, the United States isn't the sort of place where suicide bombings are likely to take place. It isn't occupied territory. And though terrorist acts have been committed here in protest of U.S. policies elsewhere (mainly in the Middle East, Iraq, or Afghanistan), few of these acts have been suicide bombings.
The 9/11 attacks were, of course, big exceptions. Yet as a result of those attacks, it is now much harder for groups of terrorists to board airplanes at all, much less to do so while carrying weapons of any sort. And in those instances when individual terrorists have tried to set off bombs (Richard Reid in his shoe, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in his underwear), airline attendants and passengers have been alert enough to snuff out their plans.
One can imagine radicals from the Middle East or South Asia coming to the United States, settling in, then one day blowing themselves up in a crowded place. But customs and immigration officials have made it much harder for anyone from those regions to gain entry into this country, precisely because of this worry.
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