The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,212

to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias.

The numbers confirm the impressions. In his 2006 article “Why Terrorism Does Not Work,” the political scientist Max Abrahms examined the twenty-eight groups designated by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist organizations in 2001, most of which had been active for several decades. Putting aside purely tactical victories (such as media attention, new supporters, freed prisoners, and ransom), he found that only 3 of them (7 percent) had attained their goals: Hezbollah expelled multinational peacekeepers and Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 1984 and 2000, and the Tamil Tigers won control over the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka in 1990. Even that victory was reversed by Sri Lanka’s rout of the Tigers in 2009, leaving the terrorist success rate at 2 for 42, less than 5 percent. The success rate is well below that of other forms of political pressure such as economic sanctions, which work about a third of the time. Reviewing its recent history, Abrahms noted that terrorism occasionally succeeds when it has limited territorial goals, like evicting a foreign power from land it had gotten tired of occupying, such as the European powers who in the 1950s and 1960s withdrew from their colonies en masse, terrorism or no terrorism.195 But it never attains maximalist goals such as imposing an ideology on a state or annihilating it outright. Abrahms also found that the few successes came from campaigns in which the groups targeted military forces rather than civilians and thus were closer to being guerrillas than pure terrorists. Campaigns that primarily targeted civilians always failed.

In her book How Terrorism Ends, the political scientist Audrey Cronin examined a larger dataset: 457 terrorist campaigns that had been active since 1968. Like Abrahms, she found that terrorism virtually never works. Terrorist groups die off exponentially over time, lasting, on average, between five and nine years. Cronin points out that “states have a degree of immortality in the international system; groups do not.”196

Nor do they get what they want. No small terrorist organization has ever taken over a state, and 94 percent fail to achieve any of their strategic aims.197 Terrorist campaigns meet their end when their leaders are killed or captured, when they are rooted out by states, and when they morph into guerrilla or political movements. Many burn out through internal squabbling, a failure of the founders to replace themselves, and the defection of young firebrands to the pleasures of civilian and family life.

Terrorist groups immolate themselves in another way. As they become frustrated by their lack of progress and their audiences start to get bored, they escalate their tactics. They start to target victims who are more newsworthy because they are famous, respected, or simply numerous. That certainly gets people’s attention, but not in the way the terrorists intend. Supporters are repulsed by the “senseless violence” and withdraw their money, their safe havens, and their reluctance to cooperate with the police. The Red Brigades in Italy, for example, self-destructed in 1978 when they kidnapped the beloved former prime minister Aldo Moro, kept him in captivity for two months, shot him eleven times, and left his body in the trunk of a car. Earlier the FLQ overplayed its hand during the October Crisis of 1970 when it kidnapped Québec labor minister Pierre Laporte and strangled him with his rosary, also leaving his body in a trunk. McVeigh’s killing of 165 people (including 19 children) in the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 took the stuffing out of the right-wing antigovernment militia movement in the United States. As Cronin puts it, “Violence has an international language, but so does decency.”198

Attacks on civilians can doom terrorists not just by alienating potential sympathizers but by galvanizing the public into supporting an all-out crackdown. Abrahms tracked public opinion during terrorist campaigns in Israel, Russia, and the United States and found that after a major attack on civilians, attitudes toward the group lurched downward. Any willingness to compromise with the group or to recognize the legitimacy of their grievance evaporated. The public now believed that the