Countering Suicide Terrorism
I just got this from the Proteus mailing list. It's worth looking at.
Quote:
Countering Suicide Terrorism
In February 2000, The International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) conducted its second international conference at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. The conference dealt with the phenomenon of suicide attacks and was attended by many world-renowned scholars, such as Ehud Shprinzak, Martha Crenshaw, Rohan Gunarathna and others. The lecturers provided historical perspective and addressed the phenomenon of suicide attacks in different regions of the world, while giving special focus to suicide attacks in Israel, Sri-Lanka, India, Lebanon, and Turkey. As a product of the conference, ICT published one of the first books on the phenomenon of suicide terrorism - Countering Suicide Terrorism.
Since the year 2000, the phenomenon of suicide attacks has spread all over the world and many countries have found themselves suffering the effects of this growing terrorist modus operandi. Suicide terrorism's increasing threat, global spread, lethality, special characteristics and the enormous challenge of countering it have raised special scholarly interest in the subject. Many articles and books have been written in recent years on this phenomenon, some of them with contradicting conclusions. As the Countering Suicide Terrorism books were sold out and due to the growing interest in this subject, ICT decided to republish this book in a digital format that can be downloaded from its website. Some of the articles in the digital version were left as they were in the original book while other articles were updated or rewritten. We believe that these articles can contribute to the existing scholarly effort in understanding the growing threat of Suicide terrorism.
In order to draw your attention, ICT published my updated article "The Rationality of the Islamic Radical Suicide attack phenomenon" on March 21, 2007 on our website <
http://ict.org.il/apage/11290.php> . This article serves as an introduction to the subject.
Please download your copy of the reversed ICT publication of "Countering Suicide Terrorism"
<
http://www.ict.org.il/var/119/51563-Countering%20Suicide%20Terrorism.pdf>
Marc
suicide attacks grow in afghanistan
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070617/...fghan_violence
suicide attacks grow in afghanistan, what is the driver, the end state of this style of warfare, it generates fear, resentment and casualties its extreme means gains press coverage but the strategic end goal has to be more than this. It seems from some angles to be counterproductive. In cultures that value 'honor and justice' I don't see much true justice in killing civilians, the honor, I question the honor of the attacks but that is a cultural bias.
Talal Asad on Suicide Bombing
How do you defeat this ideology?
Perhaps death is a better alternative to living in a refugee camp? Or perhaps an easily influenced young man who believes American Imperialists are out to destroy his religion is easily persuaded to kill himself? The suicide bomber does believe he is going have a much better life awaiting him on the other side, so how do you defeat this? We as Americans value our lives and self-preservation is a common characterstic, so how do we defeat people who believe in an ideology that says it is acceptable and respected to strap on explosives or drive a vehicle laden with explosives into a crowd of people, or a convoy, or a public bus? I am not ready to blame the media for reporting it, the internet for allowing them to post the vidoes, nor am I going to blame foreign or military policy...this tactic is medieval and runs counter to our culture so what do you do?
PT
The human ordinance attacks
As a tactic against military units these operations have been very ineffective. In Iraq they have been primarily aimed at creating mass casualties among non combatants. This has caused a shrinking of support for these operations in almost all Muslim countries other than among the Palestinians.
One way to further shrink that support for these operations is to have more focus on the fact that the attacks are a war crime and a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions. This would have the effect of further delegitimizing the tactic and reducing its effectiveness.