Posted on 12/31/2009 5:35:58 AM PST by EBH
A suicide bomber penetrated a foreign army base in Afghanistan to kill eight U.S. CIA employees on Wednesday, one of the spy agency's largest death tolls, and a separate attack killed four Canadian troops and a journalist.
(Excerpt) Read more at wtam.com ...
Dangerous, dangerous work.
Man, this hurts. My guess is at least a few of those CIA guys were “shooters” and those guys are good at what they do.
Story about the female journalist killed in the attack
One of the least understood dangers in dealing with Muslims is the concept of ummah - the community of believers.
Pre-Islamic Arabic tradition which we would call chivalry, expected that foes would be treated well and exchanged for ransoms. Arab warfare was essentially deathless mostly stealing goods, livestock or women from competing tribes with occasional blood-feuds or man-to-man combats resulting in death. For the most part things like this were settled with payment and at least the “eye for an eye” concept was honored in that no over-killing/revenge was acceptable.
Muhammad changed all that with his concept of ummah. Honor, honesty, fairness are all due those within the ummah. Those outside of it deserve nothing. Honesty is a matter of convenience, not religious duty. Treachery is the watchword.
Muhammad used terror from the start - political assassination, massacre, and targeted genocides. This philosophy underlies the Islamist movement our good guys are in harms way 24/7 over there. Trust is personal and even that can be subjective.
WTAM is now reporting that the Taliban is on what appears to be a rampage. They are beheading families that are cooperating with the government. (Just a radio report, nothing up on their site yet)
Every one of these attacks needs to be answered by a devastating attack on one of the areas known to harbor those who direct these attacks. Unleash the hounds of hell on the area. A couple of those and the locals will decide it’s better to abandon the area, or turn in the bad guys, than to continue paying a price for something they didn’t do.
I know it sounds terrible, but our hesitation to employ tactics that will affect behavior just assures the madness will continue.
The indigenous population in these areas is dirt poor, uneducated and totally at the mercy of the armed thugs who come into a village and take it over, killing anyone who opposes them. The population doesn’t stand a snow ball’s chance in hell of stopping them, so they have no choice but to go along with them. The answer is to take the control out of the hands of the insurgents and give it back to the locals. You do this by showing everyone involved that, as bad as the insurgents are, the alternative is worse.
It’s sad that we’re put in a position to have to resort to such tactics, but we are left with little choice. We’ve tried the others ways, and all they do is get both locals and American fighting forces killed. We can’t stop the locals from being killed, but we can damned sure reduce the danger of our brave people dying.
Until we impose a heavier price on the bad guys than they extract from us it will never change.
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