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Do political murders achieve their objectives?

“A man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know,” wrote G. Frank in 1963 , “must believe one thing only — that by his act he will change the course of history.”

Ever since former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder in December, scholars and security professionals are focussing on the content and character of political assassinations in South Asia. Some commentators have raised fears that the Pakistani state and political system might be overwhelmed by armies of committed Islamist assassins willing to sacrifice their lives for their cause. Similar concerns have been raised in other theatres of conflict.

Just what is it that drives assassins such as the members of the al-Qaeda-linked hit squad that killed Benazir? Given the obvious difficulties involved in conducting sociological research on would-be assassins, no one knows for certain. And what work there is has thrown up mixed results.

A 2003 study by anthropologist Scott Atran, for example, found that suicide bombers were “fairly well educated [and] mostly from the middle class.” Research conducted by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan last year, though, suggested that suicide bombers were typically poor, socially-insecure seminary students, brainwashed with promises of other-world paradise. No full appraisal of suicide bombers and assassins has been conducted in India, where perpetrators have come from all major religions and social classes. But the evidence does seem to bear out Frank’s half-century-old assertion. Faith drives assassins — not faith in a particular religion or cause but faith that their action will transform the world.

Does it? Back in 1982, academic Thomas Snitch attempted to answer the question through a rigorous analysis of 721 successful and attempted assassinations carried out between 1968 and 1980 in 123 countries. His findings, published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, identified assassinations as key catalysts for cycles of violence which often worked to the advantage of their perpetrators.

Snitch wrote: “The terrorist campaign begins with a major event, such as an assassination, or it may take the form of continuous violent harassment. This precipitates media coverage and recognition of the terrorists’ philosophy. By attempting to respond to the terrorists, the government thereby grants the group a type of temporary legitimacy.”

Put simply, theatrical acts of violence — howsoever repugnant societies find them, and however illegitimate the cause that underpins them might be — compel acknowledgment of, and engagement with, the causes of their perpetrators.

In a provocative 1972 assessment for the International Studies Quarterly, Harvard University’s J. Bowyer Bell discussed the impact of assassinations carried out by Zionist terror groups fighting for the creation of Israel.

“While no one can rearrange the pieces of past history and replay the game,” Bell argued, “there is very little to indicate that the British intended to withdraw from the Palestine Mandate after 1945.” In the wake of the Zionist terror campaign, though, they changed course. This was not, Bell wrote, because terrorism forced “the British to withdraw, the triumph of a handful against an Empire. Nor alone did American pressure or the state of the British economy or any one of several factors force the eventual British evacuation of Palestine.” But “without terror the British might well have been willing to remain entangled in the Palestine problem or at least to postpone withdrawal for strategic reasons.”

His conclusion was stark: “Popular rhetoric contends that terror does not pay; but the weight of evidence in this case study indicates that a minimum number of men can have a disproportionate effect on established policy — although they cannot necessarily either determine that policy or win on their own.”

It is clear, though, that assassinations do not help to meet their perpetrators’ ends in all historical circumstances. In June 1914, assassins seeking to carve off a Greater Serbia from the Austro-Hungarian Empire assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife. While the murders sparked off a chain of events that led to World War I, they did nothing to realise the assassins’ political ambitions. Assassinations carried out by both the Italian Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army eventually contributed to the de-legitimisation of their causes.

Neither the assassination of Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1948 nor Pakistan Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan’s murder in 1951, similarly, helped the fortunes of the religious right in either country. Chief Minister Sardar Beant Singh’s assassination by the Babbar Khalsa International did nothing to revive the Khalistan movement. And while Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination reshaped the terms of Indian involvement in Sri Lanka, it led to the isolation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the region and outside of it — an outcome most within the organisation concede was disastrous.

Are assassinations, then, always mindless, irrational acts? No more, history suggests, than other acts of war.

Consider, for example, the case of the hashishin: perhaps the most successful terror group in history. Set up in 1090 by Hasan Ibn al-Sabah, the hashishin waged a ruthless covert war for the restoration of a Shia caliphate, relying on targeted, spectacular killings to disrupt the established political order. One single assassination, the killing of the Turkish monarch, Nizam al-Mulk, precipitated the disintegration of the Sunni Seljuk Empire.

For al-Sabah, the historian Amin Maalouf recorded in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, “murder was not merely a means to disposing of an enemy, but was intended primarily as a twofold lesson for the public: first, the punishment of the victim and, second, the heroic sacrifice of the executioner, who was called the fida’i [plural fida’in, or fedayeen], or ‘suicide commando,’ because he was almost always cut down on the spot.”

For most of history, assassination was viewed with moral equanimity. Before the mid-17th century, historian Hans Morgenthau has recorded, such methods “were used without moral scruples and as a matter of course.”

Between 1415 and 1525, Morgenthau found, the Republic of Venice “planned or attempted about two hundred assassinations for purposes of its foreign policy.” Venice’s ruling council publicly solicited proposals for the elimination of domestic and overseas enemies from aspiring assassins. One clergyman-assassin, Brother John of Ragusa, made this offer in response: “For the Grand Turk, 500 ducats; for the King of Spain (exclusive of travelling expenses), 150 ducats; for the Duke of Milan, 60 ducats; for the Marquis of Mantua, 50 ducats; for his Holiness, only 100 ducats.”

During the 16th century, religious fractures generated by the Reformation allowed political enemies to be deemed heretics, and vested assassination with the moral imprimatur of god. Philip II of Spain, one of the architects of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, placed a price on the head of Holland’s William of Orange, and sponsored several plots against Queen Elizabeth I of England. In the decade after 1570, Elizabeth I was the target of at least 20 known assassination plots and, in turn, sponsored several operations against her adversaries overseas. In 1516, Thomas Moore extolled the practice, deeming it a moral imperative — moral, that is, since it spared ordinary people the hardships of wars for which their leaders were responsible.

As the wars of the 18th century wound down, though, and the new nation-state system stabilised, a consensus against assassination developed. In essence, nation-states had little interest in vesting a system which empowered the weak against the strong with moral legitimacy.

By 1789, the United States’ Thomas Jefferson was able to describe “assassination, poison and perjury” as “legitimate principles [only] in the dark ages which intervened between ancient and modern civilisations.” In 1806, British Foreign Secretary Charles Fox not only rejected a plan to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte but also had its would-be perpetrator jailed. Both the U.S. Army’s Lieber code of 1863 and the Hague Convention of 1907 codified the emerging moral consensus against assassinations. In 1938, the United Kingdom vetoed plans put together by its military attachÈ in Berlin, Lieutenant-General Noel McFarlen, for assassinating Adolf Hitler, and thus possibly sparing the world the horrors of the 1939-1945 war: it was, official records show, deemed “un-sportsmanlike.”

With some notable exceptions — witness the U.S.’ sponsorship of attempts on the life of Cuba’s Fidel Castro or Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi — the taboo against targeting the legitimate heads of nation-states other than in wartime has stood.

During the Cold War, neither the Soviet Union’s KGB nor the U.S.’ CIA made efforts to target each other’s political leaders — even though third world leaders deemed illegitimate by one side or the other were sometimes eliminated. Neither India nor Pakistan, despite the history of bitter fighting, has sponsored assassination attempts against each other’s head of state. And in a 1991 article, the Israeli intelligence expert, Yossi Melman, recorded the existence of a “tacit understanding [that] has been reached between Arab states and Israel — if you don’t kill our leaders, we won’t kill yours.”

States have obvious interests in making deals of these kinds. Their enemies — with no means of matching the military capabilities of established regimes — don’t. Wherever asymmetric enemies are pitted against each other, the weaker combatant will take the chance that terrorism, including assassination, might just change the probable outcome: certain defeat.

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