PARIS, March 6: The United States has failed to understand the mentality of suicide attackers, and the billions of dollars lavished on “homeland security” offer no realistic shield against this form of terrorism, a study published in a leading science journal says.

President George W. Bush’s administration has blundered by dismissing suicide attackers as “evil cowards” or lunatics, and US media portrayals of these people as dupes, sucked into terrorism through poverty, ignorance or despair, are equally false, it says.

The study, published on Friday in the US weekly Science, is written by an American sociologist, Scott Atran, who is a researcher at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as well as professor at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Atran refers to the psychological profile and personal history of the September 11 attackers and to interviews by an Israeli psychologist, Ariel Merari with the families of 32 Palestinian suicide bombers, surviving attackers or captured recruiters.

These assailants were typically young men in their early twenties who came from a broad range of social and professional backgrounds and were at least as well-educated and as well-off as the general population.

Before recruitment, these people usually were only moderately religious, according to this evidence.

That changed, though, after they entered the institution of the terror organisation, with its hermetic cell-like structure and psychological manipulation, often gaining tacit support or acquiescence from friends and relatives.

It is the recruiter’s task to deepen the bomber’s faith, to imbue him with the notion that religion guarantees a place in the afterlife and sanctions the taking of life if this is done in a war against injustice.

To misunderstand how the Mideast kamikazes perceive the world and how this perception is moulded, and to dismiss them as disgruntled loners or madmen, could seriously cramp security efforts, Atran told AFP in an interview.

Billions of dollars being spent by the US Department of Homeland Security to protect airports and other sensitive installations from attack may be a colossal waste, he argues.

“This last line of defence is probably easiest to breach,” he writes, noting that there are innumerable soft targets in America for a suicide bomber to select, and his weapons can be bought at a hardware store.

It is extremely difficult for troops or police to combat a secretive, well-organised group that is silently supported by the host community, says Atran.

As the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has shown, “coercive policies alone may not achieve lasting relief from attack, and can exacerbate the problem over time.”

There are other options, such as strengthening moderates in the community, providing funding for civic education and debate and building bridges between the religious faiths.

But, Atran’s study says, “a first line of defence is to prevent people from becoming terrorists.”

A strategy that the United States and its allies could pursue is “to change behaviour by directly addressing and lessening sentiments of grievance and humiliation, especially in Palestine.”

Images of daily violence there have made the Palestinian issue the focus of Muslims around the world, he says.

That provides the raw emotional force which lures young men to become suicide bombers and makes the community around them accomplices or supporters in their act.

Al Qaeda “seeks no compromise. But most people who currently sympathise with it might.”

Atran adds that suicide attacks have ancient roots. Two thousand years ago there was a branch of the Jewish sect called the Zealots, who carried out suicide attacks against targets in Roman-occupied Judea.

That region is today better known as as the West Bank, the home of some of the Palestinian suicide bombers of today.—AFP