Quote:
Originally Posted by Oberon
Those 19 well trained operatives did more to change America than most nations have ever managed, and the beauty of the plan was that America did most of the work for them.
I imagine that Daesh, if it has any sense, is busy working on a similar plan right now for America, and the other beauty of it is that it doesn't even have to be 9/11 scale any more, a shooting spree under the current social and political conditions in America will be a massive victory for Daesh, because all they need to do is create the snowball and America will push it into the avalanche for them. The same thing is gradually happening across Europe too. Small attacks here and there make big changes. It's not like some kind of mass air bombing raid, or another 9/11...in the grand scheme of things more people are killed by cars or themselves, but the great fear is terrorism when globally more people die from diarrhea or smoking.
So, terrorism, it works, it really works...and so it'll keep on being used.
|
It all depends of course on what one means by effective.
The NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were a result of 911 and in truth so was the Coalition invasion and occupation of Iraq. If memory serves the total Western death toll from those two wars was no more than 8,000 and probably about three times that many wounded. Nasty business, but nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners (of all four segments I'm sure) who were killed and the millions who were either wounded or turned into refugees. The West accomplished this with both hands tied behind its back and a set of rules of engagement that sound more like they were suited for riot control than for warfare.
The question which has to be kept in mind by all is, whether the West is in fact--no longer capable of unbridled savagery--as the events of 2002 through 2015 might suggest. One would have thought that 911 was a "Pearl Harbor" which gave America sufficient resolve to get the job done, but that was most certainly not the case. Even setting aside the Iraq war as adventurism, the deployments to Afghanistan were ridiculous, and the expectations of how long the occupation would need to persist also ridiculous.
One could easily conclude that both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were tactical victories but strategy losses; honestly I don't see how you could conclude they were anything better, and possibly even worse. Which goes a long way toward explaining the apparent surge of enthusiasm which Sunni groups like IS enjoyed since 2012 or thereabouts.
The playbook which the evil geniuses in charge of Al Qaeda/IS/Islamic Brotherhood seem to follow is essentially Mao's Communist Manifesto, albeit with communism being replaced with the notion of Sunni hegemony. One of Mao's central points is that: guerrilla forces win not by traditional Western European methods of routing the enemy and occupying the valuable territory, but by occupying the hinterlands, annoying and harassing the more powerful enemy and never being defeated. This strategy has proven successful numerous times now, so it does seem to have some merit, at least for those societies which meet the prerequisites to follow the doctrine. Large populations of willing foot soldiers is the only make-or-break requirement for this sort of "national" military strategy to be feasible, though a unifying ideology helps too. You've got to be able to throw away 10, 20, 50 or more of your own people in exchange for the life of even one of the enemy, but if a society is in a position to do that, then Mao's approach can work.
The Sunni Islamic world has both cheap lives and a powerful unifying ideology. Moreover, the notion of dying for the cause is deep in the heart of that unifying ideology. Naturally the full gamut of murderous supremacist movements exemplified by Islamic State find it apparently easy to recruit and maintain some combat effectiveness, even while they are being assailed by the air power of multiple 3rd Generation nation states.
There is no doubt that the problem is NOT going to just "go away" and there is a big question as to whether "the West" will ever have enough resolve to do what it might take to "defeat" the problem . . . indeed it is an open question as to whether it is even possible for secular humanist Western democracies to "defeat" such a diffuse, elusive, obscure and clandestine thing as "pan-national murderous Islamic supremacism." Even Russia hasn't exactly exterminated its troublesome Islamic warlords--merely bought them out--and Chechnya is one of the most war torn nations on the planet.
I suppose if the goal of Sunni Islamic terror is in fact to continue the struggle which _might_ eventually lead to a global caliphate, then yes terrorism works.