Militant Islam’s 2014 March by Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times
Year after year, the acts of Islamic militants grow more terrifying. Witness the 2012 point-blank shooting of Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai and the random slayings a year later of 60-plus shoppers at an upscale mall in Kenya.
The year 2014 was no exception. The newly dominant zealots calling themselves Islamic State produced gruesome videos of their beheading of aid workers, journalists and captured fighters. In April, Boko Haram abducted more than 270 Nigerian girls and dispatched them to sexual enslavement. As the year drew to a close, the Pakistani Taliban slaughtered nearly 150 students and staff at a military school in Peshawar.
It is a virtual certainty that freshly incomprehensible horrors are looming in 2015…
Comments
I appreciate the impulse, but I doubt we can bring the region into modernity by bombing it into the stone age. The problem as I see it is a breakdown or lack of civilization. More specifically, people are choosing to act this way. Either way, we either need a political solution, or we need to forget about solutions and just look to minimize and contain the problem. Raids and bombs might help to contain the problem, but it won't be a solution. William S Lind actually suggested this approach recently, but I dont think its something that fits with an all in mentality.
If we are looking for solutions, that requires politics, sooner or later, and too much bloodshed will only turn potential allies against us. It may even turn (or has turned) more people into violent extremist (and thus could feed into the real problem. I'm not trying to sound like a tree hugger, as much as I do like trees, I just think its better to recognize the limits of what we can actually archive with force, and what the risks are.
Let's say we take your advice. What does success look like? How does this end?
There is something here to be lifted from Vietnam. That is Westmoreland's strategy of attrition. The President has used the words "destroy ISIL" and "counterterrorism", not Counterinsurgency. To the Vietnam strategy of attrition, add methodical and lethal search and destroy tactics. To search and destroy, add overwhelming firepower with all guns cleared in "hot". To firepower, add pile-on until a decision is reached. To all this, add preemption. The GI who can't shoot first does not live very long. Firepower tells the GI that the Chain of Command has his back. Body count was a measure of success. We were criticized for it, but it is time to assist members of ISIS to meet their maker. They will understand B52s in trail (carpet bomb)rearranging everything on the ground and A10s in close air support, as opposed to smart bombs from 30,000 feet. Let these Islamic thugs see the face of their killers. We beat them by destroying them, not by changing their minds or jihadi behavior. It is time to take ISIS serious.