Can it be that American military bases abroad, usually thought of as "stabilizers" in tough neighborhoods, are really the primary cause of radical terrorism against the US and its allies? That is what Robert Pape and James K. Feldman compellingly argue in their new book released this week titled Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.
Most war planners and geo-strategists conceive of US military bases abroad as if they are anchors of stability in unstable regions. Over the last six decades, while there have been occasional protests, sometimes violent, targeting these foreign bases by rebellious students or groups affiliated with socialist or communist parties in governments hosting these US troops, most of the political system in these respective governments strongly support the American bases, usually as a cheap way to deter aggression from neighbors.
But what once worked in Germany, Japan, Turkey, the Philippines, South Korea, the UK doesn't seem to be working so well in the Middle East or South Asia today and frankly may be eroding even in these traditional base-hosting countries where jihadist terrorism hasn't been a factor.
When terrorist tracker and New America Foundation Counter-Terrorism Initiative director Peter Bergen was invited to interview Osama bin Laden in 1997, bin Laden told Bergen point blank that America had become an arrogant nation in the wake of its victory in the Cold War and that the basing of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the home of the two Holy Mosques, had made the US a target for al Qaeda. It is also true that the Saudi government invited in and agreed to host on a temporary basis US forces in order to help deter Iraq's Saddam Hussein. But after ten years, the phrase "temporary bases" actually shifted in then Defense Secretary William Cohen's remarks to "semi-permanent."
The shift was noticed by media, government officials, and incensed Islamists throughout the region - though hardly noted at all by American strategists that only saw one side of the cost-benefit ledger.
War planners have tended only to consider the upside opportunities in projecting force through foreign-deployed military bases rather than calculating downsides as well. During the Cold War, the seven hundred plus US military installations abroad helped give the United States unparalleled capacity in intelligence and power projection that no other nation in the world other than the Soviet Union could match. And with the collapse of the USSR, America stood unrivaled, reifying a core belief that this global network of foreign bases had in part been vital to American success and strength.
While Bergen was tracking down bin Laden and taking the pulse of an increasingly restless Middle East, I was watching growing protests and anti-American anger take hold in another part of the world where American bases had long been situated - Japan and South Korea. Believing that the US was impeding normalization efforts between North and South Korea and had been a supporter of military crackdowns against pro-democracy efforts, students directed violent, flame-throwing protests at American military installations in South Korea.
In Japan, the situation was less violent but politically more severe. In September 1995, three American military servicemen brutally raped a 12-year old Okinawan girl. The senior US Commander in the region remarked that the soldiers should have just procured a prostitute triggering the largest anti-American protests in Japan since 1960. Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, nonetheless hosts the majority of America's military capacity in Japan - with 39 distinct U.S. military facilities on the island. During the Cold War, the sacrifice made by Okinawa in "carrying the burden" of hosting these bases and US personnel was more easily justified. Since then, the rationale has shifted from everything from deterring North Korea to being a bulwark against growing Chinese power - anything to keep the huge land assets of the Pentagon in the Pacific in place.
When I spoke to South Koreans and Okinawans at the time, I regularly heard comments that they felt "occupied". Indeed, before a revision in security guidelines between the US and Japan after the rape incident, the US controlled more than 80% of Okinawa's air space. One senior activist told me that while the protests of the Okinawans would be peaceful for the most part, the US had to worry in the long run about groups self-organizing and possibly beginning to throw Molotov cocktails at US trucks and installations - and threatening personnel and their dependents. This didn't happen, or hasn't happened yet, but counting on docility 'permanently' may be a major blind spot of Pentagon planners.
What was brewing in Okinawa was not suicide terrorism - but the impulse to reject the logic of large-scale, long term basing of US troops on Japanese soil was growing.
In parts of the world less accustomed to US military personnel, the reaction has been more virulent.
Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago and the director of the new website mega-data base on suicide terrorism titled the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism (CPOST) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, has been putting on a lot of United Airlines miles between DC and Chicago not because progressives and liberals who might have a thing against America's global network of foreign military bases want to hear him - but the highest levels of America's military and intelligence bureaucracies are seeking him out.
The Pentagon's leadership prides itself on hearing not just material that supports its current course but is open to alternative scenarios to consider military threats - and the Pentagon is most easily convinced by solid empirical data.
Pape and his co-author Feldman have broken down every recorded suicide terrorist incident since 1980 and noted an eruption of such incidents since 2004. From 1980-2003, there were 350 suicide attacks in the world, only 15% of which were anti-American.
In the short five-year period since, from 2004-2009, there have been 1,833 suicide attacks, 92% of which were anti-American.
Pape argues that the key factor in determining spikes of suicide terrorism is not the prevalence or profile of radical Islamic clerics or mental sickness but rather the garrisoning of foreign troops, most often US troops or its allies, in these respective countries.
Pape and Feldman show for example that even in war-torn, beleaguered Afghanistan, suicide attacks surged from just a handful a year to more than 100 per year in early 2006 when US and military deployments began to extend to the Pashtun southern and eastern regions of the country beginning in late 2005. Pakistan also deployed forces against Pashtun sections of western Pakistan, which Pape and Feldman note also saw large spikes in suicide attacks.
Pape is not a pacifist and is not calling on the US government and Pentagon to appease dictators and terror masters, but he is making an argument that a new, better strategy is needed. He and his co-author make a compelling case - much like Donald Rumsfeld once pondered in his famous memo on terrorism - that we are creating much of our own problem and animating and feeding fuel to the enemy of America's and its allies' interests.
I once asked Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott whether he thought that America would have problems managing its empire of bases and whether those nations hosting them would feel the burden too heavy in a post-Soviet world. Talbott responded that he believed - as did most of the national security community - that "US bases are anchors of instability in unstable regions."
This may not be the case any longer -- or at least not to the same degree as used to be the case.
Pape and Feldman, in their new book Cutting the Fuse, suggest that the US military would better secure its key foreign policy interests with a posture of "offshore balancing" - relying on military alliances and "offshore air, naval, and rapidly deployable ground forces rather than heavy onshore combat power."
I bet Pape's first calls were from the Air Force and Navy -- but their interests aside, Pape sees that the future needs to be more high flex, smaller footprint, more nimble -- and less toxic and anti-body generating than the large-scale, clunky, unsuccessful force deployments that characterize America's deployments to Afghanistan today.
Robert Pape is working from the data upward in formulating a smart strategy for military organization - rather than working from the top down and repeating mistakes made by those whose thinking is conventional, incremental, and who tie what they do tomorrow much by what they did yesterday.
Pape sees a chance to neutralize the forces that could otherwise yield another generation of hardened terrorists, many of whom are willing to engage in suicide attacks.
I know the Pentagon is listening -- and this impresses me. Others should be too.
-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note. Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons
Follow Steve Clemons on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SCClemons
"Well, I'm an optimist. I believe that peace can be avoided."
Of course, many US bases (like those in Germany) are simply a source of money (for Germany) and a sink of money (for US). And Germany has a surplus in its balance of trade, while we have a deficit. Go figure!
Thanks to the US miltitary intervention, Kuwait is what it is today. Saudis are living in peace & amassing wealth. Wouldn't be different today had Saddam taken over Eastern Province? They owe the survival to US!
Many favoured the 'invasion' then. So 'occupation ' theory is a conspiracy theory.
Can someone please explain to me how it is that the US military has "key foreign policy interests"?
I had long assumed that the military was one of several tools used by the administration to advance AMERICAN foreign policy interests. Perhaps that was a naivete on my part.
Either way, NGOs don't stick around once the shooting starts, making them sunshine saviors at best. Missguided at worst.
It is easy to look at a conflict and draw a connection between the precense of soldiers and the existence of conflict. But that is like drawing a connection between a forest fire and the presence of fire fighters.
So the soldiers and the bases will stay. Either figure out how to use NGOs in a fire fight, or find a better way to integrate their use in nation building and providing disaster relief with NGOs. Or just read the COIN doctrine.
US bases have really only proliferated since the end of WWII. I wonder what excuse the authors of the study, and of this article, would make for Islam's terrorism between the 7th and 19th centuries?!
Semper fi
The US culture is so filled with denial and unmentionables on left, middle, right that an honest encounter is impossible.
Continuing our policy of killing for peace seems so much easier than the pain of facing our imperialistic proclivities.
"Department of Defense"? Absurd!
They hate the fact we eat pork, that we have nudity abundent online, That we can go to the store and buy wine or beer. They hate our life style and things we take for granted in our lives.
Hardly uprising. Global Jihad will attempt to disarm anything and anyone standing in the way of its 'righteous struggle to bring submission to Allah to the heathen,' One of the last serious bastions standing in its path is the United States of America and, dare I mouth the dreaded word, Israel.
I do think it is was past time Europe and Japan defend themselves. For far too long the US military has enabled European socialism to flourish. They haven't had to worry about having more than the minimal military, and do little in R&D. It is time they eliminate the cradle to grave socialism and put that money into military build up. If they don't the Jihadists will smell victory there.
When the US brings it's soldiers home, they will have to step up.Soldiers for far too long have subsidized little towns by spending money there. When they come home they can spend money here. They can be trained to be ICE agents and go to the southern border. Two problems solved. No more druggies from the narco-state of Mexico. No more illegals.
Japan can retrofit those "scientific" whaling ships with cannons and they can patrol their own waters. North Korea and China will just have to behave themselves. I'm sure they can handle it, I mean they did invent the WII, they can build missiles instead.
I know without emoicons my comments look snarky. They are not meant that way. I do sincerely want to see our bases closed and those are the reasons why.
Now that's hilarious. And what about those European nations that have no US military presence? "European socialism"? What does that mean? Functioning societies where average people actually matter? The horror...the horror...
Semper fi
Europe did not have to spend money on military, weapons or R&D because the USA covered their butts with our military, missiles, and R&D. The little countries benefit even without American bases. American presence there is enough.
Since they had to have only minimal military, they could spend money elsewhere, hence European Socialism.
Well now it is a horror now isn't it? Riots because they need to raise the retirement age? Ambulance stacking, people having to wait 6 months or longer for open heart surgery, or an MRI.
America cares for its own far better than any other country in the world. The bottom line is Socialism is a failure everywhere it has ever existed.
The evidence speaks for itself. Show me the creativity, innovation, research and development that has come from a socialist country.
There is a reason America is top dog.
First where I think the author has missed the mark.
1.There is an obvious correlation between the Saudis taking control of their oil wealth and the rise in Saudi funded Wahhabi dawah.The Saudis became wealthy overnight in the '80's.
This in turn has fueled( no pun intended) the escalation of attacks on all foreigners, not just Americans. The ideology is the drive on those attacks. OBL is right it is offensive to have Kuffar military on SA soil. Mohamed commanded that it should be for Muslims only.
None of the sheikdoms there had any military to speak of, there was in infrastructure. The USA was invited there and were paid for the service. Kuwait still employs American military since they have only police.
"1980 and noted an eruption of such incidents since 2004. From 1980-2003, there were 350 suicide attacks in the world, only 15% of which were anti-American.
In the short five-year period since, from 2004-2009, there have been 1,833 suicide attacks, 92% of which were anti-American."
Interesting but misleading.
There was minimal American presence in the ME up until 2003. Prior to that is was as peacekeeping essentially. 2004-2009, yes Iraq,Afghanistan, we have a military presence there. Killing by suicide is the preferred method for Jihadists.
You confuse puppet regimes of the Middle East with the politically subjugated people of Middle East countries. People rebel against the regimes; the government unleash brutal repression.
You are subverting the truth, when you say USA is helping Middle East Countries with Military Services. US “help” is foisted on them and forced to pay through the nose. Why does the Saudi King need billion dollar missiles and fighter planes to kill the cave dweller Osama?
You are portraying the peoples liberation struggle as a struggle between Islam and Christianity. The struggle is to resist American occupation. It has nothing to do with religion.
I must ask you whether you are from another planet when you say that until 2003 there was minimal American presence in the Middle East. Don't you know that the Americans collected and dumped the Jews from Europe on Palestine over half century ago, and have been pumping trillions of dollars and the most sophisticated weapons into Israel ever since including nuclear weapons to keep Arabs in subjugation to America? You are ignoring the fact that the creation of Israel as the divinely designated garbage (Jew) dump was the mother of all causes for the Middle East convulsions taking place today.
To the brain-washed American mind this response may be bitter – but it is the truth.
The U.S. never provided material aid to Jews resettling in Israel.
Semper fi
False. Both countries have their own militaries controlled by their own respective countries.
Next time, take a larger world view, and learn your history.
Yes I am familiar with how and why OBL came to be. They were used as proxy fighters against the Soviets.
Yes and no about why terrorism came about. Terrorism as we know it has been happening for a very long time. In the book Krakatoa, it is chronicled that survivors of the blast were hacked to death by Jihadists. Our war with the Barbary Pirates is also that of Jihad.
Terrorism escalated after the oil boom in SA and the flooding of money into that area. Saudi dawah is funded all over the world now, that is Wahhabi Islam.
The Vikings were raiders after wealth primarily. They were not motivated by religion or politics. Unlike Islam which is the motivation of Jihad. The Vikings settled and married into the local communities. DNA testing has proven most English and Irish have Norse heritage.
They assimilated into the communities.
I am a fan of history. Where am I wrong?