DUBNER: So considering that conclusion, how do you start to think about addressing the problem? Maybe it’s not a problem we should talk about in terms of solving, because many problems never get solved, but considering that the root cause is based on an occupation of one kind or another which has happened in the past, even if you’ve, you know, de-occupied, the initial cause still exists in the minds of those who are agitated by it, how do you begin to think about dealing with the aftermath if you’re the kind of country like us, or like France, or like Britain that carries out its national security in the ways that it does, and perhaps inspires people to hold this kind of grudge? PAPE: There’s really two things that we need to do, Stephen. First is not make the problem worse. Before the invasion of Iraq, there were about 50 suicide attacks occurring around the world in 2001 and 2002 and only a handful of those were anti-American. Then we thought we’d fix the problem of terrorism by going into Iraq and essentially wringing the Islamic fundamentalism out of the Middle East by democratizing it. Well what happened by 2007 is that there were over 500 suicide attacks that year, over 300 of them in Iraq, which had never experienced a suicide attack before. So we made the problem dramatically worse. And in fact, the roots of ISIS and as I just told you the Paris attack, go back to the American occupation, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib. These are the ingredients, the cocktail of what we’re living with today. So if we were to then respond to the terrorism that we see by putting another massive army in either Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, these are very big countries, very big populations. 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. The second thing is we should be focusing on especially empowering moderates in local communities to compete head-to-head with terrorists. We did this in Iraq, starting in 2000- late 2006 and 2007 and 2008 in the Sunni community when we started to foment and foster and empower the Anbar Awakening. This was essentially 100,000 Sunnis, many of them connected with local Sunni tribes, where the United States paid individuals $300 a month to do just one thing: Don’t kill us. Don’t shoot at us. Some of these had been shooting us before. This was a controversial thing when the Bush administration did it. But this had a dramatic effect in weakening suicide terrorism, the most important effect of anything that we did. We should be doing this as we go forward in Iraq. We should be doing this as we go forward in Yemen. And in fact from what I can see of the Obama administration, they are moving in this direction. DUBNER: Given what the U.S. and others have spent on the war on terror, how would you characterize the ROI? PAPE: I would say that, unfortunately, it’s quite negative. Harkening back to Rumsfeld in 2005, he had a famous line where he asked publicly, ‘Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?” And the answer was in 2005 we were. We not only had invaded and occupied Iraq—most of the public will know about Abu Ghraib and the torture scandal, but in addition to that, we were imprisoning thousands of Iraqis that we thought were connected with the insurgency that was growing. In 2004, the insurgency was estimated to be just 5,000. And then we started to imprison and arrest and we ended up imprisoning almost 20,000 over the next year and half. And then we started to kill insurgents. We ended up killing 18,000 over the next year and half. So that what we did is we thought we were going to go and stamp out the problem with toppling Saddam, changing the political system. When that didn’t work, we thought we’d go and stamp out the problem with vicious behavior on sort of the hornet’s nest of some of the insurgents, like Fallujah. And what those policies did by 2005 is they just made the problem dramatically worse. And Rumsfeld himself saw that. DUBNER: And let me ask you the flip question then, how would you characterize the ROI for terrorists? And let’s not limit this to Islamic fundamentalists in the last 10 or 15 years; let’s talk about terrorism generally. It seems as though they force their enemies to spend billions, perhaps trillions of dollars—there are all kinds of less easily measured costs than dollars—all by investing a relative pittance of their own. I mean, it’s hard for me to think of a movement or an action, an activity, that has a larger ROI frankly, horribly, than terrorism. It works, doesn’t it? PAPE: You’re exactly right, Stephen. 9/11 by all estimates, including the 9/11 Commission, cost Al Qaeda less than a half million dollars and it produced many billions of dollars of damage, not just in the loss of air traffic over the next year and a half, but in launching two major wars, one of which, in Iraq, turned out to be extremely expensive, extremely costly. And so there is absolutely no doubt that terrorists have an enormous return on their investment, that terrorists are doing terrorism because they think it pays, and there’s evidence that it pays. But that wouldn’t work if we wouldn’t overreact and help terrorists increase their return on investment. We have smarter approaches to the problem than just simply reacting on the basis of fear and anger, and hitting back. DUBNER: Give me an example of a government that you feel understands and handles – deals with terrorism well. PAPE: I’ll give you two examples. One is the Basque government. So we used to have in Spain a Basque terrorism problem. That terrorism problem has essentially gone away. It was a major problem for several decades in Europe. And in the early stages like many governments, the government tries heavy-handed military force to try to deal with the issue. Publics, of course, are afraid and fearful. The publics like to see tough talk and tough action. But that just made the problem worse. And then basically through a series of education and demographic policies, the Basque separatists, basically that political movement disappeared. And it disappeared because the Spanish government stopped treating the underlying Basque community as a separate community and started to have more integrationist and assimilationist policies. In the case of Northern Ireland with the IRA, the British had an enormous problem with the IRA that really was just awful, thousands of people dying in the early 1970’s. And the British at first tried to deal with this problem by being very tough. And Maggie Thatcher, who was a very conservative leader of Britain in the 1980’s, was known as being a very tough woman. Well she’s the one who started the secret talks with the IRA leaders, which the public didn’t know about at the time, but ended up leading to the Good Friday accords in 1998 that essentially cut a deal for a tremendous amount of political autonomy for the local communities in Northern Ireland, which effectively ended, virtually ended, I guess I would say, terrorism that had gone on for decades. So what we have see is we have seen a pattern. And we’ve seen a pattern where states who face terrorism initially want to react with very heavy-handed force—some force, of course, is necessary, I’m not saying none—but often overreact, make the problem worse, and then over time learn.