I liked this part of the article "... it’s fair to say that the Taliban employ the world’s worst suicide bombers: one in two manages to kill only himself. And this success rate hasn’t improved at all in the five years they’ve been using suicide bombers, despite the experience of hundreds of attacks—or attempted attacks. "<p>It's hard to find suicide bombers with a good resume of successful attacks.
I was half expecting to see a reference to Chris Morris's recent film Four Lions. That film has been dubbed "controversial" here in the UK precisely because its protagonists are portrayed as nitwits, albeit nitwits with bombs.
"The bombs had been prepared in a Palestine-controlled area, and set to detonate on Daylight Saving Time. But the confused drivers had already switched to Standard Time. When they picked up the bombs, they neglected to ask whose watch was used to set the timing mechanism. As a result, the cars were still en-route when the explosives detonated, delivering the terrorists to their untimely demises."<p><a href="http://www.speakeasy.org/~mamandel/filks/Darwin-notes.html#timebomb" rel="nofollow">http://www.speakeasy.org/~mamandel/filks/Darwin-notes.html#t...</a>
That's the trouble with getting someone to be a suicide bomber: you need someone stupid enough to think that killing themselves is a good idea, yet smart enough to pull it off.
It seems that "the terrorists" just don't have careful leadership. With good leadership, average people can do amazing things, like hijack four planes at the same time and crash three of them into buildings. Pretty scary.<p>Also, why does the article call people "perverts" for looking at porn? Really? People <i>still</i> think that?
the dumb and the evil have always had a lot in common. It takes intelligence in many forms to recognize and practice virtue, to recognize the influence of the crowd over one's thinking and to resist knee jerk reactions and grudges
This article really pisses me off.<p>Who cares how smart your enemy is? You don't need to be intelligent to be dangerous.<p>The author clearly doesn't understand the point of asymmetric warfare. Even if people want to laugh at the fact that 50% of Afghani suicide bombers don't kill people, 50% <i>DO</i> kill people. Suicide bombers aren't doing a cost benefit analysis of their efficacy and then deliberating on whether they're going to blow themselves up or not. Their job is to sow terror, and pierce the idea of safety.<p>In spite of any of the points mentioned in the article, it's still possible to recruit suicide bombers to go blow themselves up for an ideology that's insane.<p>------------------------------------<p>I do honestly believe that we should point out the absurdity of suicide bombing. But the absurdity is <i>not</i> a question of their efficacy, which is undeniably a winning strategy if you've got the man power to throw at it. The absurdity of suicide bombing lay in the ideology, and the goals one seeks to achieve by blowing oneself up.<p>This article is at best naïve, and at worse, dangerously ignorant and besides the point. Fight ideas.