Author: David Von Drehle
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: May 13, 2002
Mideast-Style Suicide Attacks Difficult
to Counter
The sheer number of suicide belt-bombers
attacking Israel this spring, and the diversity of their backgrounds, has
increased fear among terrorism experts that the tactic will be exported
to the United States.
But the belt bomb is a maddeningly
difficult weapon to counter. Concrete barriers might deter truck bombers.
Heightened airport security can challenge hijackers. By comparison, however,
stopping human bombs is "an incredibly difficult business," said Christopher
Langton, an analyst of terrorist threats at the International Institute
for Strategic Studies in London.
"It's cheap," Langton said. "It
has the most accurate guidance system available to mankind. It is easily
concealed. . . . The likelihood of it increasing rather than decreasing
must be taken seriously."
Tuesday's suicide bomb blast in
a pool hall near Tel Aviv, seemingly timed to interrupt Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's visit to Washington, demonstrated the resilience of this
macabre weapon. Although the Israeli army had reoccupied six major West
Bank cities in an effort to destroy what Sharon has called the Palestinians'
"terrorist infrastructure," the suicide bombers have continued to find
their way into Israel to attack civilian targets.
Analysts said the traditional profile
of a suicide bomber has been shattered. Potential bombers are not as hard
to find as some experts once believed. Under the right circumstances, bombers
require little or no persuasion -- in fact, they volunteer. They don't
necessarily need constant supervision.
The attacks of Sept. 11 illustrated
the ability of terrorist groups to plant agents around the United States
in cells needing scant support to keep them on track toward their fatal
missions over months, even years. "Look at Mohamed Atta: his commitment
did not degrade over time," Langton said. "Somebody set his fuse, and that
was all it took -- he carried out his operation."
Seen in this light, what once was
considered a rare, costly gesture -- involving the intensive recruitment
and indoctrination of a human bomb, along with the careful selection of
a target worthy of such a scarce resource -- now looks more like an easily
replenished weapon.
" 'Successful' terror tactics normally
spread when the tools are cheap and not complicated," said David C. Rapoport,
editor of the Journal on Terrorism and Political Violence. Suicide bombers
have used cars, trucks, ships and airplanes on missions against U.S. targets.
"But the human missile is even simpler," Rapoport said. The United States
"ought to be deeply concerned." Tom Ridge, the U.S. director of homeland
security, has said more than once that he believes belt-bombers pose a
threat on American soil, although experts doubt that the same Palestinian
groups behind the bombings in Israel would attack the United States. More
likely, homegrown terrorists, or bombers guided by al Qaeda, could find
inspiration in the effectiveness of the Palestinian tactics.
Last week, while visiting Washington,
the Israeli police commissioner, Shlomo Aharonishki, put shopping malls
high on his list of likely American targets: "pizzerias, discotheques,
restaurants and malls." U.S. government officials have warned vaguely of
possible terrorist attacks on shopping malls.
Aharonishki believes the belt bomb
is a response to Israel's improved defenses against hijacking, car bombs
and other terror tactics. "They moved over to suicide bombing, which is
a very difficult problem for law enforcement agencies to deal with," he
said. "This is like a missile that's been launched. Once it's been launched,
it's nearly impossible to stop."
The flood of willing bombers has
completely undermined efforts to create a useful profile of potential bombers,
according to experts. Initially, belt-bombers in Israel were young, single
men with few ties and fewer prospects, "basically dummies," said police
commissioner Aharonishki. But recent belt-bomb attacks have been carried
out by young women, by well-educated men, by parents.
In the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
"suicide terrorism has become a mass movement," said Bruce Hoffman, director
of the RAND Corporation's Washington office and the author of "Inside Terrorism."
This fact has grave implications for the United States -- "it is a watershed
in the history of terrorism," he said -- because it shows that it is not
as hard to make a suicide bomber as many people have wanted to believe.
This lesson was first demonstrated
thousands of miles from Israel, on the island of Sri Lanka, off the coast
of India. There, beginning in the late 1980s, Tamil nationalists adopted
suicide bombing on a large scale, though they did not generally use it
indiscriminately against civilians. >From a Tamil population of roughly
2.5 million, the guerrillas mounted about 250 suicide missions, and some
of their most audacious attacks were carried out by women, including the
belt-bomb assassination of India's prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991.
What this means, according to Hoffman
and others, is that the conventional way of approaching the subject of
human bombs is wrong. Too much attention is being focused on the psychology
of individual belt-bombers, he said, when it would be more useful to study
them as a major new style of weaponry -- a category alongside missiles
and grenades and land mines.
Langton, a retired British military
officer, agreed. "If you look at this as a weapons system, and see who
has used it and when, its advantages and disadvantages, you can perhaps
think about some countermeasures," he said.
A suicide bomber can make decisions
that an unmanned weapon cannot. Not even the sharpest smart bomb in the
Pentagon's catalogue can pretend to be a pregnant woman or pause at the
target as more potential victims congregate, or choose a better target
at the very last minute.
"It allows you to put a fairly low-signature
weapon on a high-profile target," said Javed Ali, a private consultant
to a U.S. defense strategists. The executive director of the Institute
for Counter-Terrorism in Israel, Boaz Ganor, has also noted that suicide
attacks tend to be highly lethal, "attract wide media coverage, require
no escape plan," and prevent the capture of operatives who might reveal
information about the terrorist group.
Indeed, the belt bomb may be the
most difficult in a long line of suicide weapons to defend against.
American sailors faced kamikaze
pilots in the last days of World War II. Anarchist bomb-throwers of a century
ago frequently risked almost certain death in their attacks. But most experts
date modern suicide tactics to Lebanon in 1982-83. Two militant groups
backed by Iran, Al Dawa ("The Call") and Hezbollah ("Party of God"), attacked
American, French and Iraqi targets using truck bombs steered by doomed
drivers. After the bombing of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks near Beirut
in 1983, in which 241 Americans died, the United States withdrew from Lebanon.
In later years, suicide bombing
spread around the world, from Chechnya to Tanzania to Manhattan. The belt
bomb has one other advantage: Because it can be guided so precisely, and
detonated at a carefully chosen moment, it is a weapon with a message.
In Israel, that message has been: No one is safe, anywhere.
From targeting buses and large markets,
the belt-bombers "shifted to discos and restaurants -- places where attendance
is optional," Hoffman said. "People began to think they could keep themselves
safe by avoiding these optional places -- but then they hit a Passover
seder, an Arab-owned restaurant, a corner grocery store, and so on. People
became afraid even to go out and buy food."
Teenagers have been the targets
of some attacks and grandparents the targets of others. "It is the terrorist
equivalent of strategic bombing," Hoffman said.
Because the United States is 40
times the size of Israel, it might be impossible to achieve the same effect
of "total terror everywhere," as the Israeli police commissioner describes
it. But as the jet-bombs and anthrax spores of September and October showed,
attacks on scattered but symbolically charged targets can be very powerful.
"The practitioners of suicide bombing
realize they are onto something," Hoffman said. "Why should we think we
would be immune?"
He thought a moment.
"In reality, the problem has already
arrived here," he said. "We are just waking up to it." In 1997, Hoffman
recalled, two men in Brooklyn -- one Palestinian and one Lebanese -- were
arrested as they finalized a belt-bomb plot against the New York City subway
system. In other words, "if" may be a less important question now than
"when" and "where."
(Staff writer Bill Miller contributed
to this report.)
