5 hours ago
Monday, 10 August 2009
The controversy over Baitullah Mehsud's death persists
The Pakistani government says it intends to provide conclusive proof that Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, is dead.
"All the credible intelligence I have from that area does finally confirm [his death]," Interior Minister Rehman Malik told the BBC.
But the government says it hopes to get DNA evidence to back up its claims.
Baitullah Mehsud was reported to have been killed in a US missile strike last week in his remote tribal stronghold.
The BBC's Aleem Maqbool in Islamabad says that the Pakistani government is growing increasingly confident that it will soon be able to prove that Baitullah Mehsud was killed in the attack.
In Washington, US National Security Adviser Jim Jones put the level of US certainty that he had been killed "in the 90% category".
But Taliban sources have denied these claims, insisting he is still alive.
DNA efforts
Mr Malik said the government was working to obtain DNA evidence to establish that the Taliban commander had been killed.
See a map of the region
The government had previously said that it would be extremely difficult to get DNA proof of his death.
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But Mr Malik told the BBC's Urdu service that they did have DNA from Mr Mehsud's brother, who was killed a few months ago.
However, correspondents say that getting hold of Baitullah Mehsud's body in the remote and hostile terrain of South Waziristan could prove to be a stumbling block.
The Pakistani interior minister has challenged the Taliban to prove its leaders are still alive - something the Taliban commanders dismissed as a ploy to flush them out into the open
Taliban turmoil
On Sunday a key aide of the militant commander said that Baitullah Mehsud was gravely ill and had not been injured in the missile attack.
It is thought that in making the statement the Taliban are preparing the ground for an announcement that Pakistan's most wanted man is in fact dead, correspondents say.
But the fate of the entire leadership of the Pakistani Taliban is subject to intense speculation, after days of conflicting reports.
Profile: Baitullah Mehsud
Mr Malik said that intelligence sources indicated that the next tier of Taliban leadership was in turmoil after it was reported that up to two potential successors were killed in a gun battle.
"There was a scuffle and there have been some deaths and they are now in disarray and I think with this action their back has been broken," Mr Malik said.
"I feel that after killing of Baitullah Mehsud, the whole Tehreek-e-Taliban is in disarray," he said.
Senior Taliban commander Hakimullah Mehsud contacted the BBC on Saturday to say his chief was alive and well.
But officials in Islamabad later said that Hakimullah was himself one of those killed in the reported fight over succession.
The area is extremely remote and officials have constantly emphasised the difficulty of getting accurate information from the region.
The interior minister said the government was determined to pursue the remaining Taliban leaders encamped in the area.
"We are not going to stop our law enforcement action until the last Talib is flushed out. They have no option except to get killed or surrender," he said.
But Mr Malik expressed concern about the possibility of al-Qaeda moving in to fill any void that might have been left by the death of senior Taliban commanders.
"They are trying to find someone to install him as chief terrorist in area," he said.
Taliban is expanding aggressively in Afghanistan
General Stanley McChrystal said aggressive Taliban tactics meant he would have to move troops from remote regions to the country's cities, and warned international casualties would remain high.
His comments came as a prominent US military analyst said the the US must send an additional 45,000 troops to Afghanistan and dramatically expand the country's army. Anthony Cordesman recently presented his views after working on a 60-day review of the war for General McChrystal.
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In July, United States and British forces had their bloodiest month yet in the eight-year campaign to stabliise Afghanistan.
He added that he would also do everything necessary to secure Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban, and would send more US troops there.
He told the Wall street Journal: "It's a very aggressive enemy right now," "We've got to stop their momentum, stop their initiative. It's hard work."
The Taliban are spreading from their traditional heartlands in southern Afghanistan into formerly stable areas of the north and west he said.
Barack Obama has sent 21,000 extra troops to the country this year, which will take the total number of US forces to 68,000 by the end of 2009.
General McChrystal's 60-day review of the situation in Afghanistan is widely expected to call for still more troops.
He said he would direct a "very significant" expansion of the Afghan army and national police, which could double in size under plans being discussed by senior US military officers, the paper said.
"The insurgents may have lost virtually every tactical clash (against Nato troops), but they have expanded their areas of influence from a presence in some 30 of Afghanistan's 364 districts in 2003 to one in some 160 districts by the end of 2008, while insurgent attacks increased by 60 per cent during October 2008 to April 2009 alone," Mr Cordesman wrote. "Nato must change its strategy and tactics after years in which member countries, particularly the United States, failed to react to the seriousness of the emerging insurgency."
Sunday, 9 August 2009
Taliban Leader in Pakistan Is Reportedly Killed
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH, SABRINA TAVERNISE and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: August 7, 2009
By Pir Zubair Shah, Sabrina Tavernise and Mark Mazzetti
A. Majeed/A.F.P. — Getty Images
Baitullah Mehsud, right, in 2004 in South Waziristan.
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press Television News
A 2008 video showed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of Pakistan’s Taliban, at a news conference in Pakistan near the Afghan border. Mr. Mehsud was apparently killed Wednesday by a drone.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — American and Pakistani officials said Friday they were increasingly convinced that an American drone strike two days earlier had killed Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s enemy No.1 and the leader of its feared Taliban movement.
While Mr. Mehsud was a pivotal figure who held together the loose and disparate network of militants in Pakistan, experts said his death would not end the violent Taliban insurgency, its ties to Al Qaeda or its push for Pakistani territory.
Mr. Mehsud, a militant in his 30s who made attacks inside Pakistan his top priority, was blamed for the assassination of the former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and scores of suicide bombings, including at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed more than 50 people last September.
The drone attack was the result of months of closer cooperation by the Pakistani and American intelligence agencies. But his death would raise questions about how far the Pakistani authorities are now willing to go to crush the remnants of the Pakistani Taliban — and how hard the Obama administration would continue to push them. The Taliban insurgency across the border in Afghanistan was not expected to be affected.
The Mehsud network in fact appeared to have weak links, as officials confirmed Friday that the intelligence about Mr. Mehsud’s whereabouts had come partly from informants inside the Mehsud network who had been bought off by Pakistani spies.
Pakistanis who knew Mr. Mehsud said he had become less of an active operator since a serious kidney illness had become more acute. Several analysts also noted a tendency for military officials to focus excessively on one person — like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, whose death in 2006 did nothing to halt the violence in Iraq.
“The war will not finish,” Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi, former director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, said in an interview. “The rest of his group is still intact; the man who prepared the suicide bombers is still alive. Army action is still necessary to take them out.”
The missile strike on Wednesday, from a C.I.A. drone, took place as Mr. Mehsud, a diabetic, was on a drip infusion for his kidney ailment, according to two Taliban fighters reached by telephone on Friday.
He was being tended to by one of his wives, the fighters said, and according to Pakistani security officials who had viewed American video of the attack, apparently from the drone, they were together on the roof.
They were both at the house of his father-in-law, Mulvi Ikramuddin, in the village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan. Mr. Ikramuddin’s brother, a medical practitioner, was treating him, the Taliban fighters said.
“He was clearly visible with his wife,” said a senior security official, who had seen the video. “His torso remained, while half of the body was blown up.”
A Pakistani counterterrorism official said that 12 people were confirmed to have been killed in the strike, including Mr. Mehsud, his wife, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, one unidentified commander and seven bodyguards.
Wednesday’s strike, according to American and Pakistani officials, was the result of steady intelligence-sharing between the countries’ intelligence services. The cooperation improved around the time of a secret visit to Washington in April by Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, to meet his C.I.A. counterpart, Leon E. Panetta.
At the meeting, the two sides agreed, among other things, to focus attention on striking the Mehsud network, the officials said.
The accuracy of American drone strikes against the Mehsud network improved soon afterward: the result of information gleaned by Pakistani intelligence operatives using informants inside the network, communications intercepts, and satellite imagery shared by the American and Pakistani intelligence services, according to the officials.
While Pakistani officials had yet to confirm the death publicly on Friday — Interior Minister Rehman Malik said they were waiting for proof, like a personal belonging — behind the scenes they were planning their next step. “This is 100 percent,” a senior Pakistani intelligence official said. “He is dead and buried.”
American officials still would not say definitively on Friday that Mr. Mehsud was dead, in part because of the difficulty of getting forensic evidence to bolster their assessment. Yet they were clearly confident that the militant leader had been killed by Wednesday’s strike.
“While it’s not 100 percent confirmed, there’s real confidence that Mehsud is dead,” one American counterterrorism official said. “If he is gone, his death would offer a great opening to press the offensive against his organization and his Al Qaeda allies.”
American officials said the Obama administration would be eager to exploit Mr. Mehsud’s death in several ways. The United States is likely to press the Pakistani government to take more aggressive action against militant groups that use havens in Pakistan to launch attacks into Afghanistan.
These groups include the Haqqani network, which is blamed for the attack against the Indian Embassy in Kabul last year; and the Afghan Taliban leadership, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, around the Pakistani city of Quetta.
“Behind closed doors, the Americans will be saying, O.K., we’ve done you a big favor, now what can you do about Haqqani and the Quetta shura?” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council in Washington, referring to the Taliban council.
The Pakistani military now must decide whether to take advantage of the likely disarray within the Pakistani Taliban’s ranks to conduct a long-promised ground offensive into South Waziristan.
In recent interviews with senior Pakistani Army and intelligence officials, however, few commanders said they wanted to carry out what almost certainly would be a bloody ground war in the mountainous, unruly tribal areas, preferring to continue to rely on helicopter gunship attacks, artillery barrages and F-16 airstrikes to pound the militants into submission.
“This will be a real test of Pakistan’s intentions,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a former South Asia intelligence analyst for the State Department. “Is this a threat to be contained or something to be eliminated?”
Taliban fighters said a meeting was under way to choose a successor from among Mr. Mehsud’s top deputies.
Among the possible successors were the No.2, Hakimullah Mehsud, a young, brash and aggressive commander, once a driver, who until recently oversaw operations in the tribal regions of Khyber, Orakzai and Kurram, and who was credited with disrupting NATO supply lines to Afghanistan.
“Baitullah had groomed him well for the task,” a senior Pakistani military official said. “He could be a natural choice, but his shooting-from-the-hip attitude may actually down his chances.”
Another possibility, Waliur Rehman, who became Mr. Mehsud’s right-hand man, is the most likely to succeed, several Pakistani officials said.
The third is a man identified by Pakistani officials as Azmatullah Mehsud.
The decision will be influenced by another militant group in Waziristan, the Haqqanis, with close ties to the Afghan militant leader, Mullah Omar.
No matter who is chosen, the Pakistani Taliban is not likely to change its mission of attacking Pakistan.
While Mr. Mehsud was clearly responsible for a wide range of attacks inside Pakistan, some Pakistani security officials believed that his network became so entwined with Al Qaeda and Punjabi groups that it was difficult to tell who was responsible for what.
Mr. Mehsud’s group said it had carried out two recent attacks in Punjab — one aimed at the intelligence headquarters in Lahore and another against the Sri Lankan cricket team — but a lead investigator said evidence had pointed instead to Al Qaeda.
“They used him as a brand to project their power across Pakistan,” the investigator said. “He didn’t have the power, the skills or the money. It was Al Qaeda that did. They used him as a prop.”
The investigator added, however, that Mr. Mehsud was involved in two other attacks in Lahore, and cooperated with Al Qaeda by providing support and sanctuary in Waziristan.
“We have a long way to go,” Kamran Zaman Qaira, Pakistan’s information minister, said in a television interview. “Only killing one leader doesn’t mean the other miscreants will go away.”
A senior Pakistani counterterrorism official said his death would give Pakistan an opportunity to exploit the power vacuum, but the chance would be very fleeting.
“My only apprehension is that the new leader, to prove that the Taliban is alive and kicking and to boost the morale of the rank and file, might launch a couple of spectacular terrorist acts,” the official said.
Published: August 7, 2009
By Pir Zubair Shah, Sabrina Tavernise and Mark Mazzetti
A. Majeed/A.F.P. — Getty Images
Baitullah Mehsud, right, in 2004 in South Waziristan.
Enlarge This Image
Associated Press Television News
A 2008 video showed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of Pakistan’s Taliban, at a news conference in Pakistan near the Afghan border. Mr. Mehsud was apparently killed Wednesday by a drone.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — American and Pakistani officials said Friday they were increasingly convinced that an American drone strike two days earlier had killed Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan’s enemy No.1 and the leader of its feared Taliban movement.
While Mr. Mehsud was a pivotal figure who held together the loose and disparate network of militants in Pakistan, experts said his death would not end the violent Taliban insurgency, its ties to Al Qaeda or its push for Pakistani territory.
Mr. Mehsud, a militant in his 30s who made attacks inside Pakistan his top priority, was blamed for the assassination of the former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and scores of suicide bombings, including at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed more than 50 people last September.
The drone attack was the result of months of closer cooperation by the Pakistani and American intelligence agencies. But his death would raise questions about how far the Pakistani authorities are now willing to go to crush the remnants of the Pakistani Taliban — and how hard the Obama administration would continue to push them. The Taliban insurgency across the border in Afghanistan was not expected to be affected.
The Mehsud network in fact appeared to have weak links, as officials confirmed Friday that the intelligence about Mr. Mehsud’s whereabouts had come partly from informants inside the Mehsud network who had been bought off by Pakistani spies.
Pakistanis who knew Mr. Mehsud said he had become less of an active operator since a serious kidney illness had become more acute. Several analysts also noted a tendency for military officials to focus excessively on one person — like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, whose death in 2006 did nothing to halt the violence in Iraq.
“The war will not finish,” Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi, former director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, said in an interview. “The rest of his group is still intact; the man who prepared the suicide bombers is still alive. Army action is still necessary to take them out.”
The missile strike on Wednesday, from a C.I.A. drone, took place as Mr. Mehsud, a diabetic, was on a drip infusion for his kidney ailment, according to two Taliban fighters reached by telephone on Friday.
He was being tended to by one of his wives, the fighters said, and according to Pakistani security officials who had viewed American video of the attack, apparently from the drone, they were together on the roof.
They were both at the house of his father-in-law, Mulvi Ikramuddin, in the village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan. Mr. Ikramuddin’s brother, a medical practitioner, was treating him, the Taliban fighters said.
“He was clearly visible with his wife,” said a senior security official, who had seen the video. “His torso remained, while half of the body was blown up.”
A Pakistani counterterrorism official said that 12 people were confirmed to have been killed in the strike, including Mr. Mehsud, his wife, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, one unidentified commander and seven bodyguards.
Wednesday’s strike, according to American and Pakistani officials, was the result of steady intelligence-sharing between the countries’ intelligence services. The cooperation improved around the time of a secret visit to Washington in April by Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, to meet his C.I.A. counterpart, Leon E. Panetta.
At the meeting, the two sides agreed, among other things, to focus attention on striking the Mehsud network, the officials said.
The accuracy of American drone strikes against the Mehsud network improved soon afterward: the result of information gleaned by Pakistani intelligence operatives using informants inside the network, communications intercepts, and satellite imagery shared by the American and Pakistani intelligence services, according to the officials.
While Pakistani officials had yet to confirm the death publicly on Friday — Interior Minister Rehman Malik said they were waiting for proof, like a personal belonging — behind the scenes they were planning their next step. “This is 100 percent,” a senior Pakistani intelligence official said. “He is dead and buried.”
American officials still would not say definitively on Friday that Mr. Mehsud was dead, in part because of the difficulty of getting forensic evidence to bolster their assessment. Yet they were clearly confident that the militant leader had been killed by Wednesday’s strike.
“While it’s not 100 percent confirmed, there’s real confidence that Mehsud is dead,” one American counterterrorism official said. “If he is gone, his death would offer a great opening to press the offensive against his organization and his Al Qaeda allies.”
American officials said the Obama administration would be eager to exploit Mr. Mehsud’s death in several ways. The United States is likely to press the Pakistani government to take more aggressive action against militant groups that use havens in Pakistan to launch attacks into Afghanistan.
These groups include the Haqqani network, which is blamed for the attack against the Indian Embassy in Kabul last year; and the Afghan Taliban leadership, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, around the Pakistani city of Quetta.
“Behind closed doors, the Americans will be saying, O.K., we’ve done you a big favor, now what can you do about Haqqani and the Quetta shura?” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council in Washington, referring to the Taliban council.
The Pakistani military now must decide whether to take advantage of the likely disarray within the Pakistani Taliban’s ranks to conduct a long-promised ground offensive into South Waziristan.
In recent interviews with senior Pakistani Army and intelligence officials, however, few commanders said they wanted to carry out what almost certainly would be a bloody ground war in the mountainous, unruly tribal areas, preferring to continue to rely on helicopter gunship attacks, artillery barrages and F-16 airstrikes to pound the militants into submission.
“This will be a real test of Pakistan’s intentions,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a former South Asia intelligence analyst for the State Department. “Is this a threat to be contained or something to be eliminated?”
Taliban fighters said a meeting was under way to choose a successor from among Mr. Mehsud’s top deputies.
Among the possible successors were the No.2, Hakimullah Mehsud, a young, brash and aggressive commander, once a driver, who until recently oversaw operations in the tribal regions of Khyber, Orakzai and Kurram, and who was credited with disrupting NATO supply lines to Afghanistan.
“Baitullah had groomed him well for the task,” a senior Pakistani military official said. “He could be a natural choice, but his shooting-from-the-hip attitude may actually down his chances.”
Another possibility, Waliur Rehman, who became Mr. Mehsud’s right-hand man, is the most likely to succeed, several Pakistani officials said.
The third is a man identified by Pakistani officials as Azmatullah Mehsud.
The decision will be influenced by another militant group in Waziristan, the Haqqanis, with close ties to the Afghan militant leader, Mullah Omar.
No matter who is chosen, the Pakistani Taliban is not likely to change its mission of attacking Pakistan.
While Mr. Mehsud was clearly responsible for a wide range of attacks inside Pakistan, some Pakistani security officials believed that his network became so entwined with Al Qaeda and Punjabi groups that it was difficult to tell who was responsible for what.
Mr. Mehsud’s group said it had carried out two recent attacks in Punjab — one aimed at the intelligence headquarters in Lahore and another against the Sri Lankan cricket team — but a lead investigator said evidence had pointed instead to Al Qaeda.
“They used him as a brand to project their power across Pakistan,” the investigator said. “He didn’t have the power, the skills or the money. It was Al Qaeda that did. They used him as a prop.”
The investigator added, however, that Mr. Mehsud was involved in two other attacks in Lahore, and cooperated with Al Qaeda by providing support and sanctuary in Waziristan.
“We have a long way to go,” Kamran Zaman Qaira, Pakistan’s information minister, said in a television interview. “Only killing one leader doesn’t mean the other miscreants will go away.”
A senior Pakistani counterterrorism official said his death would give Pakistan an opportunity to exploit the power vacuum, but the chance would be very fleeting.
“My only apprehension is that the new leader, to prove that the Taliban is alive and kicking and to boost the morale of the rank and file, might launch a couple of spectacular terrorist acts,” the official said.
History of Suicide bombing
The actor Will Smith is no one’s image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor. And yet, surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of that film, Smith clasps a live grenade to his chest and throws himself at the enemy in a final burst of heroic sacrifice.
Wait a second: surely that wasn’t a suicide bombing. Will Smith wasn’t reciting suras from the Koran. He wasn’t sporting one of those rising sun headbands that the Japanese kamikaze wore for their suicide missions. He wasn’t playing a religious fanatic or a political extremist. Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how could he be a suicide bomber? After all, he’s one of us, isn’t he?
As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. “We” are the powerful, developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern for individual liberties and individual lives. “We” form a moral archipelago that encompasses the United States, Europe, Israel, present-day Japan, and occasionally Russia. Whether in real war stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and movies, our lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland, democracy, or simply their band of brothers. Admittedly, these men weren’t expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn’t make film records of their last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have received just as much praise and recognition as “their” martyrs.
The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of these studies focus on why those other people do such terrible things, sometimes against their own compatriots but mainly against us. According to the popular view, Shiite or Tamil or Chechen suicide martyrs have a fundamentally different attitude toward life and death.
If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers — and our own unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military campaigns — how different can these attitudes really be?
Western Jihad
In America’s first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished in the incident were among the U.S. military’s first missing in action.
It was September 4, 1804. The United States was at war with the Barbary pirates along the North African coast. The U.S. Navy was desperate to penetrate the enemy defenses. Commodore Edward Preble, who headed up the Third Mediterranean Squadron, chose an unusual stratagem: sending a booby-trapped U.S.S. Intrepid into the bay at Tripoli, one of the Barbary states of the Ottoman empire, to blow up as many of the enemy’s ships as possible. U.S. sailors packed 10,000 pounds of gunpowder into the boat along with 150 shells.
When Lieutenant Richard Sommers, who commanded the vessel, addressed his crew on the eve of the mission, a midshipman recorded his words:
“‘No man need accompany him, who had not come to the resolution to blow himself up, rather than be captured; and that such was fully his own determination!’ Three cheers was the only reply. The gallant crew rose, as a single man, with the resolution yielding up their lives, sooner than surrender to their enemies: while each stepped forth, and begged as a favor, that he might be permitted to apply the match!”
The crew of the boat then guided the Intrepid into the bay at night. So as not to be captured and lose so much valuable gunpowder to the enemy, they chose to blow themselves up with the boat. The explosion didn’t do much damage — at most, one Tripolitan ship went down — but the crew was killed just as surely as the two men who plowed a ship piled high with explosives into the U.S.S. Cole in the Gulf of Aden nearly 200 years later.
Despite the failure of the mission, Preble received much praise for his strategies. “A few brave men have been sacrificed, but they could not have fallen in a better cause,” opined a British navy commander. The Pope went further: “The American commander, with a small force and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christiandom have done for ages!”
Preble chose his tactic because his American forces were outgunned. It was a Hail Mary attempt to level the playing field. The bravery of his men and the reaction of his supporters could be easily transposed to the present day, when “fanatics” fighting against similar odds beg to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Islam and garner the praise of at least some of their religious leaders.
The blowing up of the Intrepid was not the only act of suicidal heroism in U.S. military history. We routinely celebrate the brave sacrifices of soldiers who knowingly give up their lives in order to save their unit or achieve a larger military mission. We commemorate the sacrifice of the defenders of the Alamo, who could have, after all, slunk away to save themselves and fight another day. The poetry of the Civil War is rich in the language of sacrifice. In Phoebe Cary’s poem “Ready” from 1861, a black sailor, “no slavish soul had he,” volunteers for certain death to push a boat to safety.
The heroic sacrifices of the twentieth century are, of course, commemorated in film. Today, you can buy several videos devoted to the “suicide missions” of American soldiers.
Our World War II propaganda films — er, wartime entertainments — often featured brave soldiers facing certain death. In Flying Tigers (1942), for example, pilot Woody Jason anticipates the Japanese kamikaze by several years by flying a plane into a bridge to prevent a cargo train from reaching the enemy. In Bataan (1943), Robert Taylor leads a crew of 13 men in what they know will be the suicidal defense of a critical position against the Japanese. With remarkable sangfroid, the soldiers keep up the fight as they are picked off one by one until only Taylor is left. The film ends with him manning a machine gun against wave upon wave of oncoming Japanese.
Our warrior culture continues to celebrate the heroism of these larger-than-life figures from World War II by taking real-life stories and turning them into Hollywood-style entertainments. For his series of “war stories” on Fox News, for instance, Oliver North narrates an episode on the Doolittle raid, an all-volunteer mission to bomb Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since the bombers didn’t have enough fuel to return to their bases, the 80 pilots committed to what they expected to be a suicide mission. Most of them survived, miraculously, but they had been prepared for the ultimate sacrifice — and that is how they are billed today. “These are the men who restored the confidence of a shaken nation and changed the course of the Second World War,” the promotional material for the episode rather grandly reports. Tokyo had the same hopes for its kamikaze pilots a few years later.
Why Suicide Missions?
America did not, of course, dream up suicide missions. They form a rich vein in the Western tradition. In the Bible, Samson sacrificed himself in bringing down the temple on the Philistine leadership, killing more through his death than he did during his life. The Spartans, at Thermopylae, faced down the Persians, knowing that the doomed effort would nevertheless delay the invading army long enough to give the Athenians time to prepare Greek defenses. In the first century AD in the Roman province of Judea, Jewish Zealots and Sicarians (”dagger men”) launched suicide missions, mostly against Jewish moderates, to provoke an uprising against Roman rule.
Later, suicide missions played a key role in European history. “Books written in the post-9/11 period tend to place suicide bombings only in the context of Eastern history and limit them to the exotic rebels against modernism,” writes Niccolo Caldararo in an essay on suicide bombers. “A study of the late 19th century and early 20th would provide a spate of examples of suicide bombers and assassins in the heart of Europe.” These included various European nationalists, Russian anarchists, and other early practitioners of terrorism.
Given the plethora of suicide missions in the Western tradition, it should be difficult to argue that the tactic is unique to Islam or to fundamentalists. Yet some scholars enjoy constructing a restrictive genealogy for such missions that connects the Assassin sect (which went after the great sultan Saladin in the Levant in the twelfth century) to Muslim suicide guerrillas of the Philippines (first against the Spanish and then, in the early twentieth century, against Americans). They take this genealogy all the way up to more recent suicide campaigns by Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic rebels in the Russian province of Chechnya. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who used suicide bombers in a profligate fashion, are ordinarily the only major non-Muslim outlier included in this series.
Uniting our suicide attackers and theirs, however, are the reasons behind the missions. Three salient common factors stand out. First, suicidal attacks, including suicide bombings, are a “weapon of the weak,” designed to level the playing field. Second, they are usually used against an occupying force. And third, they are cheap and often brutally effective.
We commonly associate suicide missions with terrorists. But states and their armies, when outnumbered, will also launch such missions against their enemies, as Preble did against Tripoli or the Japanese attempted near the end of World War II. To make up for its technological disadvantages, the Iranian regime sent waves of young volunteers, some unarmed and some reportedly as young as nine years old, against the then-U.S.-backed Iraqi army in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
Non-state actors are even more prone to launch suicide missions against occupying forces. Remove the occupying force, as Robert Pape argues in his groundbreaking book on suicide bombers, Dying to Win, and the suicide missions disappear. It is not a stretch, then, to conclude that we, the occupiers (the United States, Russia, Israel), through our actions, have played a significant part in fomenting the very suicide missions that we now find so alien and incomprehensible in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
The archetypal modern suicide bomber first emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s, a response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of the country. “The Shiite suicide bomber,” writes Mike Davis in his book on the history of the car bomb, Buda’s Wagon, “was largely a Frankenstein monster of [Israeli Defense Minister] Ariel Sharon’s deliberate creation.” Not only did U.S. and Israeli occupation policies create the conditions that gave birth to these missions, but the United States even trained some of the perpetrators. The U.S. funded Pakistan’s intelligence service to run a veritable insurgency training school that processed 35,000 foreign Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Charlie Wilson’s War, the book and movie that celebrated U.S. assistance to the mujihadeen, could be subtitled: Suicide Bombers We Have Known and Funded.
Finally, the technique “works.” Suicide bombers kill 12 times more people per incident than conventional terrorism, national security specialist Mohammed Hafez points out. The U.S. military has often publicized the “precision” of its airborne weaponry, of its “smart” bombs and missiles. But in truth, suicide bombers are the “smartest” bombers because they can zero in on their target in a way no missile can — from close up — and so make last-minute corrections for accuracy. In addition, by blasting themselves to smithereens, suicide bombers can’t give away any information about their organization or its methods after the act, thus preserving the security of the group. You can’t argue with success, however bloodstained it might be. Only when the tactic itself becomes less effective or counterproductive, does it recede into the background, as seems to be the case today among armed Palestinian groups.
Individual motives for becoming a suicide bomber or attacker have, when studied, proved to be surprisingly diverse. We tend to ascribe heroism to our soldiers when, against the odds, they sacrifice themselves for us, while we assume a glassy-eyed fanaticism on the part of those who go up against us. But close studies of suicide bombers suggest that they are generally not crazy, nor — another popular explanation — just acting out of abysmal poverty or economic desperation (though, as in the case of the sole surviving Mumbai suicide attacker put on trial in India recently, this seems to have been the motivation). “Not only do they generally not have economic problems, but most of the suicide bombers also do not have an emotional disturbance that prevents them from differentiating between reality and imagination,” writes Anat Berko in her careful analysis of the topic, The Path to Paradise. Despite suggestions from Iraqi and U.S. officials that suicide bombers in Iraq have been coerced into participating in their missions, scholars have yet to record such cases.
Perhaps, however, this reflects a narrow understanding of coercion. After all, our soldiers are indoctrinated into a culture of heroic sacrifice just as are the suicide bombers of Hamas. The indoctrination doesn’t always work: scores of U.S. soldiers go AWOL or join the peace movement just as some suicide bombers give up at the last minute. But the basic-training techniques of instilling the instinct to kill, the readiness to follow orders, and a willingness to sacrifice one’s life are part of the warrior ethic everywhere.
Suicide missions are, then, a military technique that armies use when outmatched and that guerrilla movements use, especially in occupied countries, to achieve specific objectives. Those who volunteer for such missions, whether in Iraq today or on board the Intrepid in 1804, are usually placing a larger goal — liberty, national self-determination, ethnic or religious survival — above their own lives.
But wait: surely I’m not equating soldiers going on suicide missions against other soldiers with terrorists who blow up civilians in a public place. Indeed, these are two distinct categories. And yet much has happened in the history of modern warfare — in which civilians have increasingly become the victims of combat — to blur these distinctions.
Terror and Civilians
The conventional picture of today’s suicide bomber is a young man or woman, usually of Arab extraction, who makes a video proclamation of faith, straps on a vest of high explosives, and detonates him or herself in a crowded pizzeria, bus, marketplace, mosque, or church. But we must expand this picture. The September 11th hijackers targeted high-profile locations, including a military target, the Pentagon. Hezbollah’s suicidal truck driver destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, killing 241 U.S. soldiers. Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a female Tamil suicide bomber, assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
Suicide bombers, in other words, have targeted civilians, military installations, non-military sites of great significance, and political leaders. In suicide attacks, Hezbollah, Tamil Tiger, and Chechen suicide bombers have generally focused on military and police targets: 88%, 71%, and 61% of the time, respectively. Hamas, on the other hand, has largely targeted civilians (74% of the time). Sometimes, in response to public opinion, such movements will shift focus — and targets. After a 1996 attack killed 91 civilians and created a serious image problem, the Tamil Tigers deliberately began chosing military, police, and government targets for their suicide attacks. “We don’t go after kids in Pizza Hut,” one Tiger leader told researcher Mia Bloom, referring to a Hamas attack on a Sbarro outlet in Jerusalem that killed 15 civilians in 2001.
We have been conditioned into thinking of suicide bombers as targeting civilians and so putting themselves beyond the established conventions of war. As it happens, however, the nature of war has changed in our time. In the twentieth century, armies began to target civilians as a way of destroying the will of the population, and so bringing down the leadership of the enemy country. Japanese atrocities in China in the 1930s, the Nazi air war against Britain in World War II, Allied fire bombings of German and Japanese cities, the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. carpet bombing in Cambodia and Laos, and the targeted assassinations of the Phoenix program during the Vietnam War, Russian depredations in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the tremendous civilian casualties during the Iraq War: all this has made the idea of conventional armies clashing in an area far from civilian life a quaint legacy of the past.
Terrorist attacks against civilians, particularly September 11th, prompted military historian Caleb Carr to back the Bush administration’s declaration of a war against terror. “War can only be answered with war,” he wrote in his best-selling The Lessons of Terror. “And it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything terrorists can contrive.” This more imaginative, decisive, and humane style of war has, in fact, consisted of stepped-up aerial bombing, beefed-up Special Forces (to, in part, carry out targeted assassinations globally), and recently, the widespread use of unmanned aerial drones like the Predator and the Reaper, both in the American arsenal and in 24/7 use today over the Pakistani tribal borderlands. “Predators can become a modern army’s answer to the suicide bomber,” Carr wrote.
Carr’s argument is revealing. As the U.S. military and Washington see it, the ideal use of Predator or Reaper drones, armed as they are with Hellfire missiles, is to pick off terrorist leaders; in other words, a mirror image of what that Tamil Tiger suicide bomber (who picked off the Indian prime minister) did somewhat more cost effectively. According to Carr, such a strategy with our robot planes is an effective and legitimate military tactic. In reality, though, such drone attacks regularly result in significant civilian casualties, usually referred to as “collateral damage.” According to researcher Daniel Byman, the drones kill 10 civilians for every suspected militant. As Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com writes, “In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country.”
So, the dichotomy between a “just war,” or even simply a war of any sort, and the unjust, brutal targeting of civilians by terrorists has long been blurring, thanks to the constant civilian casualties that now result from conventional war-fighting and the narrow military targets of many terrorist organizations.
Moral Relativism?
We have our suicide bombers — we call them heroes. We have our culture of indoctrination — we call it basic training. We kill civilians — we call it collateral damage.
Is this, then, the moral relativism that so outrages conservatives? Of course not. I’ve been drawing these comparisons not to excuse the actions of suicide bombers, but to point out the hypocrisy of our black-and-white depictions of our noble efforts and their barbarous acts, of our worthy goals and their despicable ends. We — the inhabitants of an archipelago of supposedly enlightened warfare — have been indoctrinated to view the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a legitimate military target and September 11th as a heinous crime against humanity. We have been trained to see acts like the attack in Tripoli as American heroism and the U.S.S. Cole attack as rank barbarism. Explosive vests are a sign of extremism; Predator missiles, of advanced sensibility.
It would be far better if we opened our eyes when it came to our own world and looked at what we were actually doing. Yes, “they” sometimes have dismaying cults of sacrifice and martyrdom, but we do too. And who is to say that ending occupation is any less noble than making the world free for democracy? Will Smith, in I Am Legend, was willing to sacrifice himself to end the occupation of vampires. We should realize that our soldiers in the countries we now occupy may look no less menacing and unintelligible than those obviously malevolent, science-fiction creatures. And the presence of our occupying soldiers sometimes inspires similar, Will Smith-like acts of desperation and, dare I say it, courage.
The fact is: Were we to end our occupation policies, we would go a long way toward eliminating “their” suicide bombers. But when and how will we end our own cult of martyrdom?
Wait a second: surely that wasn’t a suicide bombing. Will Smith wasn’t reciting suras from the Koran. He wasn’t sporting one of those rising sun headbands that the Japanese kamikaze wore for their suicide missions. He wasn’t playing a religious fanatic or a political extremist. Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how could he be a suicide bomber? After all, he’s one of us, isn’t he?
As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. “We” are the powerful, developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern for individual liberties and individual lives. “We” form a moral archipelago that encompasses the United States, Europe, Israel, present-day Japan, and occasionally Russia. Whether in real war stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and movies, our lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland, democracy, or simply their band of brothers. Admittedly, these men weren’t expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn’t make film records of their last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have received just as much praise and recognition as “their” martyrs.
The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of these studies focus on why those other people do such terrible things, sometimes against their own compatriots but mainly against us. According to the popular view, Shiite or Tamil or Chechen suicide martyrs have a fundamentally different attitude toward life and death.
If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers — and our own unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military campaigns — how different can these attitudes really be?
Western Jihad
In America’s first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished in the incident were among the U.S. military’s first missing in action.
It was September 4, 1804. The United States was at war with the Barbary pirates along the North African coast. The U.S. Navy was desperate to penetrate the enemy defenses. Commodore Edward Preble, who headed up the Third Mediterranean Squadron, chose an unusual stratagem: sending a booby-trapped U.S.S. Intrepid into the bay at Tripoli, one of the Barbary states of the Ottoman empire, to blow up as many of the enemy’s ships as possible. U.S. sailors packed 10,000 pounds of gunpowder into the boat along with 150 shells.
When Lieutenant Richard Sommers, who commanded the vessel, addressed his crew on the eve of the mission, a midshipman recorded his words:
“‘No man need accompany him, who had not come to the resolution to blow himself up, rather than be captured; and that such was fully his own determination!’ Three cheers was the only reply. The gallant crew rose, as a single man, with the resolution yielding up their lives, sooner than surrender to their enemies: while each stepped forth, and begged as a favor, that he might be permitted to apply the match!”
The crew of the boat then guided the Intrepid into the bay at night. So as not to be captured and lose so much valuable gunpowder to the enemy, they chose to blow themselves up with the boat. The explosion didn’t do much damage — at most, one Tripolitan ship went down — but the crew was killed just as surely as the two men who plowed a ship piled high with explosives into the U.S.S. Cole in the Gulf of Aden nearly 200 years later.
Despite the failure of the mission, Preble received much praise for his strategies. “A few brave men have been sacrificed, but they could not have fallen in a better cause,” opined a British navy commander. The Pope went further: “The American commander, with a small force and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christiandom have done for ages!”
Preble chose his tactic because his American forces were outgunned. It was a Hail Mary attempt to level the playing field. The bravery of his men and the reaction of his supporters could be easily transposed to the present day, when “fanatics” fighting against similar odds beg to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Islam and garner the praise of at least some of their religious leaders.
The blowing up of the Intrepid was not the only act of suicidal heroism in U.S. military history. We routinely celebrate the brave sacrifices of soldiers who knowingly give up their lives in order to save their unit or achieve a larger military mission. We commemorate the sacrifice of the defenders of the Alamo, who could have, after all, slunk away to save themselves and fight another day. The poetry of the Civil War is rich in the language of sacrifice. In Phoebe Cary’s poem “Ready” from 1861, a black sailor, “no slavish soul had he,” volunteers for certain death to push a boat to safety.
The heroic sacrifices of the twentieth century are, of course, commemorated in film. Today, you can buy several videos devoted to the “suicide missions” of American soldiers.
Our World War II propaganda films — er, wartime entertainments — often featured brave soldiers facing certain death. In Flying Tigers (1942), for example, pilot Woody Jason anticipates the Japanese kamikaze by several years by flying a plane into a bridge to prevent a cargo train from reaching the enemy. In Bataan (1943), Robert Taylor leads a crew of 13 men in what they know will be the suicidal defense of a critical position against the Japanese. With remarkable sangfroid, the soldiers keep up the fight as they are picked off one by one until only Taylor is left. The film ends with him manning a machine gun against wave upon wave of oncoming Japanese.
Our warrior culture continues to celebrate the heroism of these larger-than-life figures from World War II by taking real-life stories and turning them into Hollywood-style entertainments. For his series of “war stories” on Fox News, for instance, Oliver North narrates an episode on the Doolittle raid, an all-volunteer mission to bomb Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since the bombers didn’t have enough fuel to return to their bases, the 80 pilots committed to what they expected to be a suicide mission. Most of them survived, miraculously, but they had been prepared for the ultimate sacrifice — and that is how they are billed today. “These are the men who restored the confidence of a shaken nation and changed the course of the Second World War,” the promotional material for the episode rather grandly reports. Tokyo had the same hopes for its kamikaze pilots a few years later.
Why Suicide Missions?
America did not, of course, dream up suicide missions. They form a rich vein in the Western tradition. In the Bible, Samson sacrificed himself in bringing down the temple on the Philistine leadership, killing more through his death than he did during his life. The Spartans, at Thermopylae, faced down the Persians, knowing that the doomed effort would nevertheless delay the invading army long enough to give the Athenians time to prepare Greek defenses. In the first century AD in the Roman province of Judea, Jewish Zealots and Sicarians (”dagger men”) launched suicide missions, mostly against Jewish moderates, to provoke an uprising against Roman rule.
Later, suicide missions played a key role in European history. “Books written in the post-9/11 period tend to place suicide bombings only in the context of Eastern history and limit them to the exotic rebels against modernism,” writes Niccolo Caldararo in an essay on suicide bombers. “A study of the late 19th century and early 20th would provide a spate of examples of suicide bombers and assassins in the heart of Europe.” These included various European nationalists, Russian anarchists, and other early practitioners of terrorism.
Given the plethora of suicide missions in the Western tradition, it should be difficult to argue that the tactic is unique to Islam or to fundamentalists. Yet some scholars enjoy constructing a restrictive genealogy for such missions that connects the Assassin sect (which went after the great sultan Saladin in the Levant in the twelfth century) to Muslim suicide guerrillas of the Philippines (first against the Spanish and then, in the early twentieth century, against Americans). They take this genealogy all the way up to more recent suicide campaigns by Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic rebels in the Russian province of Chechnya. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who used suicide bombers in a profligate fashion, are ordinarily the only major non-Muslim outlier included in this series.
Uniting our suicide attackers and theirs, however, are the reasons behind the missions. Three salient common factors stand out. First, suicidal attacks, including suicide bombings, are a “weapon of the weak,” designed to level the playing field. Second, they are usually used against an occupying force. And third, they are cheap and often brutally effective.
We commonly associate suicide missions with terrorists. But states and their armies, when outnumbered, will also launch such missions against their enemies, as Preble did against Tripoli or the Japanese attempted near the end of World War II. To make up for its technological disadvantages, the Iranian regime sent waves of young volunteers, some unarmed and some reportedly as young as nine years old, against the then-U.S.-backed Iraqi army in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
Non-state actors are even more prone to launch suicide missions against occupying forces. Remove the occupying force, as Robert Pape argues in his groundbreaking book on suicide bombers, Dying to Win, and the suicide missions disappear. It is not a stretch, then, to conclude that we, the occupiers (the United States, Russia, Israel), through our actions, have played a significant part in fomenting the very suicide missions that we now find so alien and incomprehensible in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
The archetypal modern suicide bomber first emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s, a response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of the country. “The Shiite suicide bomber,” writes Mike Davis in his book on the history of the car bomb, Buda’s Wagon, “was largely a Frankenstein monster of [Israeli Defense Minister] Ariel Sharon’s deliberate creation.” Not only did U.S. and Israeli occupation policies create the conditions that gave birth to these missions, but the United States even trained some of the perpetrators. The U.S. funded Pakistan’s intelligence service to run a veritable insurgency training school that processed 35,000 foreign Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Charlie Wilson’s War, the book and movie that celebrated U.S. assistance to the mujihadeen, could be subtitled: Suicide Bombers We Have Known and Funded.
Finally, the technique “works.” Suicide bombers kill 12 times more people per incident than conventional terrorism, national security specialist Mohammed Hafez points out. The U.S. military has often publicized the “precision” of its airborne weaponry, of its “smart” bombs and missiles. But in truth, suicide bombers are the “smartest” bombers because they can zero in on their target in a way no missile can — from close up — and so make last-minute corrections for accuracy. In addition, by blasting themselves to smithereens, suicide bombers can’t give away any information about their organization or its methods after the act, thus preserving the security of the group. You can’t argue with success, however bloodstained it might be. Only when the tactic itself becomes less effective or counterproductive, does it recede into the background, as seems to be the case today among armed Palestinian groups.
Individual motives for becoming a suicide bomber or attacker have, when studied, proved to be surprisingly diverse. We tend to ascribe heroism to our soldiers when, against the odds, they sacrifice themselves for us, while we assume a glassy-eyed fanaticism on the part of those who go up against us. But close studies of suicide bombers suggest that they are generally not crazy, nor — another popular explanation — just acting out of abysmal poverty or economic desperation (though, as in the case of the sole surviving Mumbai suicide attacker put on trial in India recently, this seems to have been the motivation). “Not only do they generally not have economic problems, but most of the suicide bombers also do not have an emotional disturbance that prevents them from differentiating between reality and imagination,” writes Anat Berko in her careful analysis of the topic, The Path to Paradise. Despite suggestions from Iraqi and U.S. officials that suicide bombers in Iraq have been coerced into participating in their missions, scholars have yet to record such cases.
Perhaps, however, this reflects a narrow understanding of coercion. After all, our soldiers are indoctrinated into a culture of heroic sacrifice just as are the suicide bombers of Hamas. The indoctrination doesn’t always work: scores of U.S. soldiers go AWOL or join the peace movement just as some suicide bombers give up at the last minute. But the basic-training techniques of instilling the instinct to kill, the readiness to follow orders, and a willingness to sacrifice one’s life are part of the warrior ethic everywhere.
Suicide missions are, then, a military technique that armies use when outmatched and that guerrilla movements use, especially in occupied countries, to achieve specific objectives. Those who volunteer for such missions, whether in Iraq today or on board the Intrepid in 1804, are usually placing a larger goal — liberty, national self-determination, ethnic or religious survival — above their own lives.
But wait: surely I’m not equating soldiers going on suicide missions against other soldiers with terrorists who blow up civilians in a public place. Indeed, these are two distinct categories. And yet much has happened in the history of modern warfare — in which civilians have increasingly become the victims of combat — to blur these distinctions.
Terror and Civilians
The conventional picture of today’s suicide bomber is a young man or woman, usually of Arab extraction, who makes a video proclamation of faith, straps on a vest of high explosives, and detonates him or herself in a crowded pizzeria, bus, marketplace, mosque, or church. But we must expand this picture. The September 11th hijackers targeted high-profile locations, including a military target, the Pentagon. Hezbollah’s suicidal truck driver destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, killing 241 U.S. soldiers. Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a female Tamil suicide bomber, assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
Suicide bombers, in other words, have targeted civilians, military installations, non-military sites of great significance, and political leaders. In suicide attacks, Hezbollah, Tamil Tiger, and Chechen suicide bombers have generally focused on military and police targets: 88%, 71%, and 61% of the time, respectively. Hamas, on the other hand, has largely targeted civilians (74% of the time). Sometimes, in response to public opinion, such movements will shift focus — and targets. After a 1996 attack killed 91 civilians and created a serious image problem, the Tamil Tigers deliberately began chosing military, police, and government targets for their suicide attacks. “We don’t go after kids in Pizza Hut,” one Tiger leader told researcher Mia Bloom, referring to a Hamas attack on a Sbarro outlet in Jerusalem that killed 15 civilians in 2001.
We have been conditioned into thinking of suicide bombers as targeting civilians and so putting themselves beyond the established conventions of war. As it happens, however, the nature of war has changed in our time. In the twentieth century, armies began to target civilians as a way of destroying the will of the population, and so bringing down the leadership of the enemy country. Japanese atrocities in China in the 1930s, the Nazi air war against Britain in World War II, Allied fire bombings of German and Japanese cities, the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. carpet bombing in Cambodia and Laos, and the targeted assassinations of the Phoenix program during the Vietnam War, Russian depredations in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the tremendous civilian casualties during the Iraq War: all this has made the idea of conventional armies clashing in an area far from civilian life a quaint legacy of the past.
Terrorist attacks against civilians, particularly September 11th, prompted military historian Caleb Carr to back the Bush administration’s declaration of a war against terror. “War can only be answered with war,” he wrote in his best-selling The Lessons of Terror. “And it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything terrorists can contrive.” This more imaginative, decisive, and humane style of war has, in fact, consisted of stepped-up aerial bombing, beefed-up Special Forces (to, in part, carry out targeted assassinations globally), and recently, the widespread use of unmanned aerial drones like the Predator and the Reaper, both in the American arsenal and in 24/7 use today over the Pakistani tribal borderlands. “Predators can become a modern army’s answer to the suicide bomber,” Carr wrote.
Carr’s argument is revealing. As the U.S. military and Washington see it, the ideal use of Predator or Reaper drones, armed as they are with Hellfire missiles, is to pick off terrorist leaders; in other words, a mirror image of what that Tamil Tiger suicide bomber (who picked off the Indian prime minister) did somewhat more cost effectively. According to Carr, such a strategy with our robot planes is an effective and legitimate military tactic. In reality, though, such drone attacks regularly result in significant civilian casualties, usually referred to as “collateral damage.” According to researcher Daniel Byman, the drones kill 10 civilians for every suspected militant. As Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com writes, “In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country.”
So, the dichotomy between a “just war,” or even simply a war of any sort, and the unjust, brutal targeting of civilians by terrorists has long been blurring, thanks to the constant civilian casualties that now result from conventional war-fighting and the narrow military targets of many terrorist organizations.
Moral Relativism?
We have our suicide bombers — we call them heroes. We have our culture of indoctrination — we call it basic training. We kill civilians — we call it collateral damage.
Is this, then, the moral relativism that so outrages conservatives? Of course not. I’ve been drawing these comparisons not to excuse the actions of suicide bombers, but to point out the hypocrisy of our black-and-white depictions of our noble efforts and their barbarous acts, of our worthy goals and their despicable ends. We — the inhabitants of an archipelago of supposedly enlightened warfare — have been indoctrinated to view the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a legitimate military target and September 11th as a heinous crime against humanity. We have been trained to see acts like the attack in Tripoli as American heroism and the U.S.S. Cole attack as rank barbarism. Explosive vests are a sign of extremism; Predator missiles, of advanced sensibility.
It would be far better if we opened our eyes when it came to our own world and looked at what we were actually doing. Yes, “they” sometimes have dismaying cults of sacrifice and martyrdom, but we do too. And who is to say that ending occupation is any less noble than making the world free for democracy? Will Smith, in I Am Legend, was willing to sacrifice himself to end the occupation of vampires. We should realize that our soldiers in the countries we now occupy may look no less menacing and unintelligible than those obviously malevolent, science-fiction creatures. And the presence of our occupying soldiers sometimes inspires similar, Will Smith-like acts of desperation and, dare I say it, courage.
The fact is: Were we to end our occupation policies, we would go a long way toward eliminating “their” suicide bombers. But when and how will we end our own cult of martyrdom?
Saturday, 8 August 2009
Indian hand in Balochistan unrest to be exposed
By Myra Imran
ISLAMABAD: Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Friday said the government would disclose evidence regarding India’s involvement in Balochistan diplomatically at the right time.
He was talking to journalists after delivering a speech on the ìRelationship with the Neighbouring Countries — India and Afghanistan,î to the Youth Parliament Pakistan.
The minister said during the meeting between two prime ministers in Sharm el-Sheikh, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani effectively raised the issue of threats in Balochistan.
To a question about induction of over 1,000 Marines by the US embassy into Islamabad, the minister said: “The US embassy is reinforcing its personnel for strengthening its security.” He said it should be taken as a message from the US that it wanted long-term relationship with Pakistan.
Earlier, the minister answered comprehensively the tricky queries by Youth Parliament members and explained the challenges faced by the country on the diplomatic front and strategies adopted by the government to improve its relationship with its neighbours.
He said Pakistan had been seeking to develop ties with India based on equality, mutual respect and non-interference.
“We are convinced that the composite dialogue process provides the framework for discussion on all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir.”
Terming it diplomatic success, Qureshi said the joint statement issued at the conference recognised the need of separating terrorism from the peace dialogue between the two countries.
“This statement is a shift from the position adopted by the Indian government after the Mumbai attacks,” he noted.
He said issues of water, security and terrorism had been forcefully raised with India in interactions at all levels.
He urged the international community to play a role in ensuring that the composite dialogue process was restarted.
Commenting on Pakistan-Afghan relations, the minister said unstable Afghanistan would continue to export extremism, narcotics and instability across the vast Asian landmass, and beyond. He said stable Afghanistan would allow the trans-regional corridors of energy and infrastructure to emerge.
About the Kashmir issue, he said Pakistan’s stance was very clear that the will of the Kashmiri people should prevail.
ISLAMABAD: Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Friday said the government would disclose evidence regarding India’s involvement in Balochistan diplomatically at the right time.
He was talking to journalists after delivering a speech on the ìRelationship with the Neighbouring Countries — India and Afghanistan,î to the Youth Parliament Pakistan.
The minister said during the meeting between two prime ministers in Sharm el-Sheikh, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani effectively raised the issue of threats in Balochistan.
To a question about induction of over 1,000 Marines by the US embassy into Islamabad, the minister said: “The US embassy is reinforcing its personnel for strengthening its security.” He said it should be taken as a message from the US that it wanted long-term relationship with Pakistan.
Earlier, the minister answered comprehensively the tricky queries by Youth Parliament members and explained the challenges faced by the country on the diplomatic front and strategies adopted by the government to improve its relationship with its neighbours.
He said Pakistan had been seeking to develop ties with India based on equality, mutual respect and non-interference.
“We are convinced that the composite dialogue process provides the framework for discussion on all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir.”
Terming it diplomatic success, Qureshi said the joint statement issued at the conference recognised the need of separating terrorism from the peace dialogue between the two countries.
“This statement is a shift from the position adopted by the Indian government after the Mumbai attacks,” he noted.
He said issues of water, security and terrorism had been forcefully raised with India in interactions at all levels.
He urged the international community to play a role in ensuring that the composite dialogue process was restarted.
Commenting on Pakistan-Afghan relations, the minister said unstable Afghanistan would continue to export extremism, narcotics and instability across the vast Asian landmass, and beyond. He said stable Afghanistan would allow the trans-regional corridors of energy and infrastructure to emerge.
About the Kashmir issue, he said Pakistan’s stance was very clear that the will of the Kashmiri people should prevail.
Balochistan wants 250mmcfd of Iran gas for Gwadar
ISLAMABAD, Balochistan government has requested the federal government to allocate 250 mmcfd gas for Gwadar port, out of the gas to be imported through Iran-Pakistan (IP) gas pipeline project. In the 8th steering committee/subcommittee meeting of the Economic Co-ordination Committee (ECC), Balochistan Chief Minister requested for allocation of 250 mmcfd gas for Gwadar port, Advisor to Prime Minister on Petroleum and Natural Resources Dr Asim Hussain told National Assembly in a written reply on Friday.
He informed the lower house that the ECC supported the proposal, subject to clearance of price affordability issue, adding that afterwards the matter would be taken up by the ECC and the Cabinet for allocation of additional gas to Gwadar port. Soon after the approval of additional volume, gas would be supplied to the port of Gwadar, the Advisor said responding to a question raised by Maulvi Asmatullah.
He said that the steering committee in its 7th meeting held on January 15, 2009 had decided that the imported gas through IPI pipeline would go to power generation sector. On the royalty issue, he told media that royalty/transit fee is applicable only in case where the gas is transported for a third country such as India which is currently not taking part in the project. Since the imported gas is to be consumed in Pakistan only, no transit fee is applicable for Balochistan.
"As and when India joins the project and a transit fee is negotiated the Balochistan government would be taken on board," the Advisor said. He said that Balochistan Chief Minister is a member of the steering committee and he is actively participating in committee meetings and decision making process. Moreover, having equity stake in the project, the government of Balochistan is an active partner as far as ownership of the project is concerned.
About Saindak project, he said that royalty amounting to Rs 787,268,000 had been paid to Balochistan government by MRDL from 2004 to December 2008, and no amount remained unpaid against the Chinese company. The Chinese company earned Rs 38,989.938 million during last five years, against expenditure of Rs 33,377.14 million.
He said that according to information furnished by Saindak Metals Limited, total amount of Rs 36,580,000 has been spent by Chinese company, MCC, out of its income from Saindak project on the provision of facilities to locals like education, medical, electricity and water. He told National Assembly that oil marketing companies (OMCs) and oil refineries had earned Rs 14770464 during last six months, from December 8 to May 9.
He informed the lower house that the ECC supported the proposal, subject to clearance of price affordability issue, adding that afterwards the matter would be taken up by the ECC and the Cabinet for allocation of additional gas to Gwadar port. Soon after the approval of additional volume, gas would be supplied to the port of Gwadar, the Advisor said responding to a question raised by Maulvi Asmatullah.
He said that the steering committee in its 7th meeting held on January 15, 2009 had decided that the imported gas through IPI pipeline would go to power generation sector. On the royalty issue, he told media that royalty/transit fee is applicable only in case where the gas is transported for a third country such as India which is currently not taking part in the project. Since the imported gas is to be consumed in Pakistan only, no transit fee is applicable for Balochistan.
"As and when India joins the project and a transit fee is negotiated the Balochistan government would be taken on board," the Advisor said. He said that Balochistan Chief Minister is a member of the steering committee and he is actively participating in committee meetings and decision making process. Moreover, having equity stake in the project, the government of Balochistan is an active partner as far as ownership of the project is concerned.
About Saindak project, he said that royalty amounting to Rs 787,268,000 had been paid to Balochistan government by MRDL from 2004 to December 2008, and no amount remained unpaid against the Chinese company. The Chinese company earned Rs 38,989.938 million during last five years, against expenditure of Rs 33,377.14 million.
He said that according to information furnished by Saindak Metals Limited, total amount of Rs 36,580,000 has been spent by Chinese company, MCC, out of its income from Saindak project on the provision of facilities to locals like education, medical, electricity and water. He told National Assembly that oil marketing companies (OMCs) and oil refineries had earned Rs 14770464 during last six months, from December 8 to May 9.
Jewish Activities in Karachi
| کراچی میں یہودیوں کی سرگرمیاں؟ |  |
| منگل, 21 جولائی 2009 21:09 |
”یروشلم پوسٹ“ اسرائیل کا سب سے بڑا اخبار ہے جو دنیا کی 15 مختلف زبانوں میں شائع ہوتا ہے۔ یہ اخبار اتوار سے لے کر جمعہ تک روزانہ شائع ہوتا ہے .... جبکہ ہفتے کا دن چونکہ مذہبی طور پر چھٹی کا دن ہے، اسی لیے اس دن اسرائیل میں کوئی اخبار نہیں چھپتا۔ اس اخبار کی پہلی اشاعت یکم دسمبر 1932ءکے دن ہوئی۔ امریکا کے دوسرے بڑے اخبار ”وال اسٹریٹ جنرل“ کے ایڈیٹر ”ڈیوڈ ہورویٹز“ پہلے یروشلم پوسٹ کے ایڈیٹر رہے۔ 27 فروری 2009ءکو یروشلم پوسٹ نے اپنے پہلے صفحے پرایک خبر کو نمایاں سرخی کے طور پر پیش کیا۔ ”تعجب! یہودی ابھی تک پاکستان میں“ اخبار نے یہ خبر کراچی سے بھیجی گئی ایک ای میل سے لی تھی۔ یہ میل کراچی میں رہنے والے ایک یہودی ڈاکٹر اسحاق موسیٰ اخیری نے بھیجی تھی۔ اسحاق نے اپنا تعلق یہود کے قبیلہ ”سپہردی“ (Sephardi) سے بتایا۔ سپہردی یہودیوں کا اصل تعلق شمال مغربی یورپ میں ”ایبریا“ نامی علاقے سے تھا جو آج کل اسپین اور پرتگال کے سرحد کے کنارے پر واقع ہے۔ ڈاکٹر اسحاق نے بتایا کہ ایک دن پہلے اس نے اپنے گھر پر ”بار میٹزواہ“ (Bar Mitzvah) کی تقریب ہوئی تھی جس میں اس کے 13 سالہ بیٹے نے تورات پڑھ کر مذہب سے وفاداری کا وعدہ کیا۔ اس نے مزید بتایا کہ میں اور میرا خاندان کراچی میں بہت خوش ہے اور ہم یہاں بھرپور زندگی گزار رہے ہیں۔ یہاں کے لوگ سوائے چند ایک کے بہت اچھے ہیں۔ ہم اور ہماری کمیونٹی گھر پر ہی عبادت کرتے ہیں اور کسی تہوار پر کسی ایک یہودی کے گھر اکٹھے ہوجاتے ہیں۔ میرے تعلق کے یہاں دس سے زائد یہودی خاندان آباد ہیں جو کراچی کے مختلف حصوں میں رہتے ہیں۔  اسحاق نے اسرائیل جاکر اپنے مذہبی مقامات دیکھنے کی بھی خواہش کا اظہار کیا اور کہا :” ہم اپنی چھوٹی سی دنیا کو ہی فوقیت دیتے ہیں اور اجنبیت میں رہنا پسند کرتے ہیں۔ ہم نہیں چاہتے کہ کوئی ہمارا سیاس استعمال کرے۔ ہم کراچی میں دو سو سال سے آباد ہیں اور کبھی اسے نہیں چھوڑیںگے۔ڈاکٹر اسحاق اخیری کی یہ میل پڑھ کر مجھے بھی حیرت ہوئی اور جب میں نے کراچی میں یہودی کمیونٹی کی تاریخ کا مطالعہ شروع کیا تو بہت حیرت انگیز انکشافات سامنے آئے۔ سن 1881ءمیں صوبہ سندھ میں صرف 153 یہودی آباد تھے۔ 1919ءمیں یہ تعداد بڑھ کر 650 تک پہنچ گئی۔ 1947ءمیں تقسیم سے پہلے صرف کراچی میں 25 سو سے زائد یہودی خاندان آباد تھے ۔جن میں سے اکثر کا تعلق بنی اسرائیل سے تھا ....جو بھارتی صوبہ مہاراشٹر سے نقل مکانی کرکے کراچی آئے تھے۔ ان میں سے اکثر تاجر، شاعر، فلاسفر اور سول سرونٹ تھے جبکہ کچھ یہودیوں کا تعلق بغداد سے بھی تھا۔ دستیاب ریکارڈ اور مختلف ذرائع سے حاصل کردہ ریکارڈ کے مطابق یہ خاندان مراچی زبان بولتے تھے ۔جس سے معلوم ہوتا ہے کہ ان کا تعلق اسرائیل کے علاقے بین (Bene) سے تھا۔ 1839ءمیں انہوں نے اپنا مذہبی مرکز ”میگن شیلوم“ تعمیر کیا جو 1980ءتک کراچی کے علاقے ”رنچھوڑلائن“ میں قائم رہا۔ 1903ءمیں ”یہودی نوجوان“ کے نام سے ایک تنظیم کا قیام عمل میں آیا ۔جس کا بظاہر مقصد کھیلوں کے علاوہ یہودیوں کی دیگر سرگرمیوں کو فروغ دینا تھا۔ 1918ءمیں بنی اسرائیل ریلیف فنڈ اور یہودی اسنڈیکیٹ (Karachi Jewish Syndicate) کا قیام عمل میں آیا جس کا مقصد غریب یہودیوں کو انتہائی کم کرائے پر گھر فراہم کرنا تھا۔ یہودیوں کے اس مرکز کی خدمات سے مستفید ہونے والے دو خاندانوں کا تعلق پشاور سے بھی بتایا جاتا ہے۔ کراچی میں یہودیوں کا عمل دخل اس قدر بڑھ گیا تھا کہ 1936ءمیں ان کا ایک لیڈر جس کا نام ابراہیم ریوبن بتایا جاتا ہے، کراچی کارپوریشن کا کونسلر بھی منتخب ہوگیا تھا۔ تقسیم ہند کے بعد 500 کے قریب یہودی خاندان ہندوستان نقل مکانی کرگئے۔ لیکن دو ہزار کے قریب نے پاکستان میں ہی رہنے کا فیصلہ کیا۔ سال 1948ءمیں جب اسرائیل کا عمل میں آیا تو کراچی میں موجود یہودیوں کو مسلمانوں میں پائے جانے والے غم وغصے اور ردعمل کو سہنا پڑا اور کراچی کے باسیوں میں پائی جانے والی مذہبی حمیت کے باعث ان یہودی خاندانوں کا مرکز کراچی میں رہنا محال ہوگیا تھا۔ قیام پاکستان کے بعد کراچی میں یہودیوں کا عمل دخل کم ہونا شروع ہوگیاتھا اور جلتی پر تیل کا کام 1948ئ، 1956ءاور 1967ءکی عرب اسرائیل جنگوں نے کیا۔ ایوب خان کے دور میں بہت سے یہودی خاندانوں نے پاکستان کو چھوڑ دیا اور اسرائیل چلے گئے۔ کراچی سے تعلق رکھنے والے یہودیوں کی ایک بڑی اکثریت نے ”رملہ“ میں رہائش اختیار کی ہے اور وہاں اپنا مذہبی مرکز ”میگن شیلوم“ (Magen Shalom) کے نام سے تعمیر کیا جس کو باقاعدہ طور پر کراچی کی یاد سے منسوب کیا گیا۔ آج کراچی میں اس جگہ پر ایک تجارتی مرکز قائم ہے۔ یہودی دنیا کی وہ واحد ”غیرت مند“ قوم ہے جو نقل مکانی سے پہلے اپنی ہر چیز کی قیمت وصول کر لینا چاہتی ہے یہاں تک کہ اپنی عبادت گاہیں اور مقدس مذہبی مقامات کو بھی فروخت کردیتی ہے۔  اسرائیل کے قیام کے بعد دنیا بھر کے یہودیوں کو وہاں بسانے کا انتظام کیا گیا اور دنیا بھر میں موجود یہودیوں نے وہاں کا رخ کیا، لیکن اس کے باوجود یہودیوں کی ایک اچھی خاصی تعداد دیگر اسلامی ممالک میں آباد ہے۔ اسلامی ممالک میں ان کی تعداد کچھ اس طرح ہے۔ مراکش میں ساٹھ ہزار، ایران میں 25 ہزار، ترکی میں سترہ ہزار چار سو پندرہ، عراق میں ایک سو، شام میں تیس، افغانستان میں 4، تنزانیہ میں پندرہ سو، لبنان میں 40 ،مصر میں 100 جبکہ پاکستان میں دو سو کے قریب ہے۔ یہ اعداد یہودیوں کے سنسر بیورو سے حاصل کی گئی ہیں ۔جبکہ عین ممکن ہے کہ فراہم کردہ معلومات سے زائد تعداد میںیہودی ان ممالک میں مقیم ہوں۔ پاکستان میں ان کی تعداد میں کچھ حد تک اضافہ ہوا ہے اور ان کی یہ آمد 2005ءمیں آنے والے زلزلے کے بعد ہوئی ہے۔ سابق صدر پرویز مشرف نے امریکی یہودی کمیونٹی سے خطاب کرتے ہوئے زلزلے میں ان کی مدد اور تعاون پر شکریہ بھی ادا کیا تھا۔ یہ یہودی مختلف این جی اورز کے ہمراہ پاکستان آ ئے اور پھر یہیں مقیم ہوگئے۔ آج پاکستان میں سب سے زیادہ یہودی کراچی شہر میں آباد ہیں۔ غور طلب بات یہ ہے کہ ان کی اکثریت ساحل سمندر کے پاس رہائش پذیر ہیں، جو اسرائیل کے پہلے وزیراعظم اور یہودی تحریک کے سرخیل ڈیوڈ بن گوریان کی نصیحت اور مشورے پر عمل پیرا ہے۔ اس نے 1967ءمیں کہا تھا: ”ہمیں ہمیشہ بھارت کو اپنا دوست رکھنا ہوگا کیوں کہ پاکستان کے خلاف کام کرنے کے لیے بھارت ہمیں ایک مرکز کا کام دے گا۔ اس مقصد کے لیے ضروری تھا کہ بھارت میں یہودیوں کا ایک مضبوط نیٹ ورک موجود ہو اور ان کا پاکستان کے ساتھ رابطہ نہ ٹوٹے۔ اس کے لیے انہوں نے پاکستان سے بھارت جانے والے یہودیوں کو بھارت میں بسانا شروع کردیا اور اس مقصد کے لیے کراچی کا ساحل استعمال کیا گیا۔ یہ روٹ ان کے لیے گلف ریاستوں اور ایران تک رسائی کے علاوہ بھارت پہنچنے کا راستہ تھا۔یہودیوں کے اس خفیہ راستے کو 2000ءمیں ایران نے دریافت کرلیا اور اس پر مکمل پہرہ بٹھا دیا۔ جس کے نتیجے میں وقتی طور پر ان کا یہ سمندری راستہ تو بند ہوگیا مگر بھارت کے ساتھ تعلقات کبھی سرد مہری کا شکار نہ ہوئے۔ آج ممبئی حملوں کو کئی مہینے گزر چکے ہیں مگر ساحل سمندر، بحیرہ عرب کے علاوہ ”سمندری روٹ“ کی بات ختم ہونے کو نہیں آرہی۔ مغربی میڈیا کی تان بار بار سمندری روٹ پر جا کر ٹوٹی ہے۔ جس سے محسوس ہوتا ہے کہ اسرائیل جو بھارت کا قدرتی حلیف بن چکا ہے۔ اس وقت کوئی اور خطرناک کھیل کھیلنے میں مصروف ہے۔ آج کراچی میں موجود زیادہ تر یہودی اپنے آپ کو پارسی ثابت کرتے ہیں تاکہ یہودیوں کی سازشوں کے خلاف مسلمانوں میں پائے جانے والے ردعمل سے بچ سکیں۔ زیادہ تر پارسی پراپرٹی اور بلڈرز ہیں۔ میوہ شاہ قبرستان (کراچی) میں موجود یہودی لیڈر ”سولیمن ڈیوڈ“ کی قبر پر ویرانی کو دیکھ کر یوں محسوس ہوتا ہے جیسے شاید اب یہودی اس شہر سے جاچکے ہیں ....لیکن دوسری طرف جب 82سالہ بوڑھی یہودی خاتون رچل جوزف کو سندھ ہائی کورٹ کی سیڑھیوں پر چلتے دیکھا جائے تو 1980ءمیں بیچے گئے ”میگنی شیلوم“ کو دوبارہ آباد کرانا چاہتی ہے تو اس شہر میں یہودیوں کا عمل دخل اور وجود پھر سے جنم لیتا محسوس ہوتا ہے۔ اسرائیل جیسا ملک ہونے کے باوجود جو بنا ہی ان یہودیوں کو تحفظ فراہم کرنے کے لیے تھا، اسے چھوڑ کر اپنے نظریاتی حریف پاکستان کے فنانشل کراچی میں رہنا اور اسی شہر میں آئے دن حالات کا بگڑنا، لسانی فسادات کی آڑ میں ان دیکھی قوتوں کا فائدہ اٹھا کر ملک کو کمزور کرنا، ان تمام باتوں کے تانے بانے کہیں نہ کہیں ضرور ملتے ہیں اور یہی کراچی کو درپیش اصل خطرہ ہے۔ |
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