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Stephen J. DUBNER: Next week, the White House is planning to host a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism. It was originally scheduled for last year but got delayed – and then put back on the calendar after the Paris terrorist attacks in January. What should we expect from a summit like this? Jack JACOBS: Alas, very little of a positive nature. I view this principally as a media event. I hope I’m wrong. DUBNER: Just in case the summit does turn out to be primarily a media event, we thought we’d take this podcast – which technically, is a media event – and turn it into a terrorism summit. We’ll talk about what’s known and what’s not known about terrorism; we’ll talk about what’s working and what’s not to prevent it – and what we should be thinking about but aren’t. Now how do we accomplish this? Basically, we asked some people who know a lot about terrorism to tell us what they’d say if they had the ear of President Obama and other world leaders: [MUSIC: Dave Carter, “Moanna” (from Commitment and Change)] Robert PAPE: Many people might think that we couldn’t make the problem worse, oh yes, we can make it much worse very quickly, as we saw with Iraq. Mia BLOOM: The problem is we can never get rid of terrorism 100% in the same way that we can’t get rid of school shooters 100%. So we have to be resilient as a country to be able to recognize that the outlier attack doesn’t mean that it’s doomsday. Nathan MYHRVOLD: Leadership is taking people to a place they wouldn’t have gotten to already. You know, if you see a parade going down the street and you run up in front of it, they’re not actually following you. JACOBS: If you want some bad guys killed, I’m your guy. I’m strongly in favor of that. But what I would like to see is some logic attendant to what our tactical moves are and I don’t see any of that yet. [THEME] [MUSIC: Two Dark Birds; “Start All Over Again” (from Songs For the New)] ANNOUNCER: From WNYC: This is FREAKONOMICS RADIO, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner. DUBNER: Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He teaches economics at the University of Chicago. DUBNER: Hey Levitt, how you doing? Steve LEVITT: I’m doing great. How about you? DUBNER: I’m alright. So, you may have heard, the White House is putting together an international summit to address terrorism. Have you been invited? LEVITT: Maybe my invitation got lost in the mail, but I don’t think so. DUBNER: Levitt admits that his discipline doesn’t necessarily have much to offer on the topic of terrorism. LEVITT: If you turn to economics and what economics has to say about fighting terrorism, it’s a hard problem because economics really centers around incentives. And the kind of incentives we tend to use are things like prices or punishment in prison or whatnot. But when people are willing to pay the ultimate price in the form of suicide to reach a goal, they’re not the kind of folks that we’re used to incentivizing and motivating. DUBNER: So rather than rely on economists for our UnSummit, we reached out to a different set of folks … like Mia Bloom: [MUSIC: Ruby Velle and The Soulphonics, “Longview” (fromIt’s About Time)] BLOOM: So I’m a professor at the University of Massachusetts on the Lowell Campus. I’m a professor of security studies. DUBNER: And … PAPE: My name is Robert Pape. I’m professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism. MYHRVOLD: I’m Nathan Myhrvold. I’m a CEO at Intellectual Ventures, and I’m very interested in catastrophic risks to the planet. JACOBS: I am Jack Jacobs, Colonel Army Retired. DUBNER: Jacobs turns up on TV pretty regularly these days, commenting on national-security issues. It was Jacobs you heard earlier, saying he doesn’t expect much from this White House summit: JACOBS: If the government is convening a conference about this subject, perhaps the government may be amenable to coughing up some resources to solve some of the major problems attendant to it, but, I mean, that’s a scant hope. In actual fact what you need is leadership in order to solve problems about national security, both domestic terrorism, and terrorism from abroad, and it requires a great deal of effort and organization. And if the government is good at things…I can tell you this, they’re not good at this. DUBNER: Alright, so maybe we can lend a hand. A good place to start is what we know, and don’t know, about the root causes of terrorism. It’s natural to react to immediate events, to the emotions and headlines that accompany them. But let’s try to go a bit deeper. We’ll start with Robert Pape. Even though he is a political scientist – a field that most of us associate with theoretical work – Pape is a hardcore empiricist, a data freak. PAPE: Just as big data has come into our life in sports, our life in the media, so too can big data help to inform at least some of the assumptions and therefore policy prescriptions on national-security affairs. DUBNER: Most of Pape’s research has focused on suicide attacks: PAPE: I collected the first complete database of all suicide attacks around the world shortly after 9/11. That data went from the early 1980’s when the modern phenomenon began, to just before the Iraq War, 2003. During that window of time, there were 343 completed suicide attacks where an individual killed himself himself or herself herself on a mission to kill others. DUBNER: All right, so what can these data tell us? PAPE: Well the main risk factor people think it’s associated with suicide attack is Islamic fundamentalism. Religion, and specifically Islamic fundamentalism, because they witness, they observe the attackers on 9/11 were Islamic fundamentalists. Many of the attackers in Iraq, ISIS is an Islamic fundamentalist group. Well what this research found, really for the first time, is that religion is not as prominent a cause of suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader during that 24-year period was not an Islamic group. They were the Tamil tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist group, a secular group, a Hindu group. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka did more suicide attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad. What over 95% of all suicide attacks have in common is not religion, but a specific strategic objective: to compel a democratic state to withdraw combat forces from territory the terrorists see as their homeland or prize. From Lebanon and the West Bank back then to Iraq and Afghanistan today, this idea of military occupation is the leading risk factor producing over 95 percent of the suicide attacks that we see even as we speak. DUBNER: Okay so if occupation then is—I don’t know if it’s appropriate to call it the root cause of the majority— PAPE: I think that’s a great way to think about it, Stephen. Occupation is the root cause. There are additional enabling causes or secondary causes, so I don’t mean to say that this is a mono-causal explanation, but it’s like smoking causing lung cancer is the root cause of much of the lung cancer that we observe. Military occupation is the root cause of suicide terrorism. And there are two types of military occupation. There is a foreign, very distant or external occupation, such as when the United States occupies Iraq. And then there can also be an internal occupation, such as when one group occupies another group, such as in Iraq today. The Shia-dominated government is occupying the Sunni population in Iraq. DUBNER: The reason we’re talking now, the reason that the world has amped up its interest in preventing terrorism lately, is because of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, which were not suicide attacks and were examples of religious extremism or fundamentalism. So that goes against the components of your research in a couple ways, but I’m guessing you still- PAPE: Well I guess I’d like to just stop you there for a moment, Stephen, because there’s no doubt that religion was part of the cocktail, but now that we know more about the biographies of the various attackers, and it’s made possible because we- the French authorities arrested and prosecuted several of the attackers, and actually knew quite a bit about them, so we have depositions about what’s motivating them. And I would just point out, what we know about the Paris attackers is that they were powerfully motivated by the Iraq War, by the Abu Ghraib torture abuse. So this isn’t just simply a matter of religion, this is a matter of individuals being motivated by seeing harm on kindred populations, and wanting to do something to prevent that harm or to ameliorate the harm.