Asks William Saletan over on Slate. Actually he raises a number of questions about whether suicide bombings are increasing around the world, why they might be and if so what can we do about it. The stats are revealing. According to
an article by Robin Wright of the Washington Post last week:
Suicide bombers conducted 658 attacks around the world last year … more than double the number in any of the past 25 years … More than four-fifths of the suicide bombings over that period have occurred in the past seven years, the data show. The bombings have spread to dozens of countries on five continents, killed more than 21,350 people and injured about 50,000 since 1983 … [S]ince 1983, bombers in more than 50 groups from Argentina to Algeria, Croatia to China and India to Indonesia have adapted car bombs to make explosive belts, vests, toys, motorcycles, bikes, boats, backpacks and false-pregnancy stomachs. Of 1,840 incidents in the past 25 years, more than 86 percent have occurred since 2001, and the highest annual numbers have occurred in the past four years.
To make sense of these numbers Saletan suggests we need to understand how they connect to recent developments in military technology. In a nutshell the US military is focusing on how machines will win the next generation of conflicts and there are four reasons for this:
1. Morality is expensive. It’s easier to destroy things than to preserve or build them. It’s even easier when you don’t care whom you kill. In Iraq, a major purpose of suicide bombings and “improvised explosive devices” has been to kill enough Americans with enough regularity to make the public demand that our troops come home. The bombers have the edge because they care less about death than we do.
2. Machines are crucial to defeating terrorism. The main advantage of machines isn’t that they’re brilliant. It’s that they don’t bleed. We can’t stand death, so we replace our soldiers with lifeless proxies. Nobody demands a pullout because some bomb-defusing gizmo got blown up in Baghdad today. And in general, the ideal mode of warfare is hunting our enemies in their own territory at little or no risk to ourselves.
3. Machines are still primitive. The process of engineering machines to see and move the way we do is moving along slowly. In the case of IEDs, the United States has found that humans, particularly those who have hunting experience, are more agile and discerning.
4. Machines can be combined with animals. Animals have the agility and sensory precision that machines lack. Animals have hunting experience. Animals, like machines, are regarded as morally expendable. That’s why the military has explored remote control of IED-sniffing dogs through radio receivers attached to their collars.
And the logic of suicide bombings?
The logic of these bombings is that they exploit the moral and technical dynamics we just discussed. If you’re not particular about which people you kill, or how many, IEDs and suicide bombs give you the biggest bang for the buck. The more people you kill, the more you demoralize the infidel because the infidel is too weak to tolerate the shedding of blood. But not you. You’re strong. You’re willing to guarantee, not just risk, the deaths of your followers to deliver the bombs. And they’re willing to die. You don’t have to tether your mechanism to a dog or mongoose and hope the dumb beast does its job. You’ve got much smarter animals at your disposal: human beings. This is scariest thing about the proliferation of suicide bombings: It’s perfectly rational. Furthermore, the disadvantage it exploits—and thereby pressures us to reduce—is our valuation of human life.
There is some good news…(though not if your in Iraq and Afghanistan)
The equation includes an additional variable that can complicate the logic of bombing. The United States vs. al-Qaida isn’t a two-player game. It’s a multiplayer game, with lots of Muslims watching and weighing. And many of them don’t like what they’re seeing from al-Qaida because they care about the murder of innocents, even if Osama Bin Laden doesn’t.
Four days ago, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story by Josh Meyer about al-Qaida losing Muslim support over civilian casualties caused by its suicide attacks. A former al-Qaida theologian, a senior Saudi cleric, and many other Muslims have confronted the group with messages of dismay.
This is our most plausible hope of deterring suicide bombings: not some high-tech gizmo, but the real-world costs of sheer moral intolerance. If you take the U.S. war zones out of the picture—Iraq and Afghanistan—the data show a significant increase only from 2006 to 2007. If you discount Pakistan as an annex of the Afghan war, the increase disappears. The only notable increases elsewhere are in Algeria and Sri Lanka, and the combined 2007 total for those two countries was 10 attacks—less than 2 percent of the worldwide total. In other countries, the numbers have actually declined. I’m not saying the surge of bombings in the war zones is no big deal. But at least the cancer hasn’t spread.
