ParisTampaBlog

9/11 made it become a priority for us, the threat of Al Qaeda taking precedence, at least for a time, over health care, education, illegal immigrants, and global warming, and we set our sights on terrorists and terrorism. And so far we’ve successfully confined the threat, or at least the attacks, to foreign soil.

Will Pakistan’s leaders, undergoing their own seemingly unending 9/11, as they are attacked by Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, not on foreign soil, but at home, and repeatedly, most recently in Lahore in the Punjab in the very heart of their country, finally unite in opposition to the threat and destroy their attackers? Still an open question.

The attackers, more and more of them, are all too ready and willing to give up their own lives in order to destroy one or more of their enemies by their own self destruction. And so far no one seems to have an answer for them.

Instead bombers have it for the most part all going their own blown-up way. Or at least nothing we do seems to get in their way. (The Israeli army does seem to have slowed them down, or at least kept them out of Israel proper.)

Afghanistan illustrates perfectly how the suicide threat grows and grows, almost as a direct function of the increasing number of soldiers sent out against it. For the principal effect of more soldiers is more suicide attackers and more homemade bombs. You’d think we would keep our soldiers home, as Vice-President Biden advises!

In an op ed piece in today’s Times Robert A. Pape, with a lot of numbers, makes the situation clear. Let’s hope that the Pakistan military, as it scales up its own war with the Taliban, will not undergo our own experience, creating almost a new bomber with each new soldier sent out into the field.

And the bomber, of course, is at an advantage, having nothing to lose, or rather nothing he or she wants to hold on to.

Here is Robert Pape in his own words:

“….Then, in 2005, the United States and NATO began to systematically extend their military presence across Afghanistan. The goals were to defeat the tiny insurgency that did exist at the time, eradicate poppy crops and encourage local support for the central government. Western forces were deployed in all major regions, including the Pashtun areas in the south and east, and today have ballooned to more than 100,000 troops.

“As Western occupation grew, the use of the two most worrisome forms of terrorism in Afghanistan — suicide attacks and homemade bombs — escalated in parallel. There were no recorded suicide attacks in Afghanistan before 2001. According to data I have collected, in the immediate aftermath of America’s conquest, the nation experienced only a small number: none in 2002, two in 2003, five in 2004 and nine in 2005.

“But in 2006, suicide attacks began to increase by an order of magnitude — with 97 in 2006, 142 in 2007, 148 in 2008 and more than 60 in the first half of 2009. Moreover, the overwhelming percentage of the suicide attacks (80 percent) has been against United States and allied troops or their bases rather than Afghan civilians, and nearly all (95 percent) carried out by Afghans.

“The pattern for other terrorist attacks is almost the same. The most deadly involve roadside bombs that detonate on contact or are set off by remote control. Although these weapons were a relatively minor nuisance in the early years of the occupation, with 782 attacks in 2005, their use has shot up since — to 1,739 in 2006, nearly 2,000 in 2007 and more than 3,200 last year. Again, these attacks have for the most part been carried out against Western combat forces, not Afghan targets.”

This entry was posted on October 15, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under Current Affairs. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.