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The author would like to thank Iain Johnston, Stephanie Kaplan, Ed Mansfield, Stephen P. Rosen, Erin Simpson, and Allan Stam for their helpful comments and feedback. All remaining errors are the author's. Appendices available at: http://sites.google.com/site/michaelchorowitz/.
In the mid-1990s, after the first World Trade Center attack, Osama Bin Laden apparently made an important decision about the future of the burgeoning terrorist group now known as Al Qaeda. Up until the mid-1990s, Al Qaeda had played a major role in Salafi Jihadi terrorist operations around the world, but its involvement was mostly behind the scenes. Al Qaeda provided financing for operations, trained fighters from affiliated groups, and smuggled weapons to sympathetic parties. However, Bin Laden, the group's leader, determined that it was time for Al Qaeda itself to engage in a major attack and step out of the shadows. When planning began for the operation that was to become the East African embassy bombings of 1998, Bin Laden sent some of Al Qaeda's top military commanders and operatives, including some in the Kenya cell, to Hezbollah to learn from one of the most successful terrorist groups of the last twenty years. Even though Bin Laden's Sunni Salafi beliefs led him to clear theological disagreements with the Shia-affiliated Hezbollah, and Hezbollah had not actually conducted a suicide attack in years, Bin Laden considered them the experts and sent his people to learn. Furthermore, Bin Laden purportedly told his operatives to specifically study the Hezbollah suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in 1983. His operatives went, took careful notes, and returned with the operational concepts and knowledge necessary for the 1998 embassy bombings.1
This story illustrates key concepts related to nonstate actors, innovation, and diffusion in the suicide attack case. First, sometimes desire is not enough to adopt an innovation. Even though Al Qaeda had money, committed members, and weapons, it sent its members to Hezbollah, a suicide attack innovator, to pick up the tacit knowledge necessary to conduct its own operations. Second, organizational capacity matters. Al Qaeda lacked a prior operational history, making them extremely flexible when it came to designing the embassy bombings. Without an operational past that caused them to privilege certain attack strategies,...