SYMMETRY

The minutia of life as it is lived; you are sitting in your home, driving in your car, eating in a restaurant or going to the market. The next second you’re dead. Brought to you by a passerby, a woman at the next market stall, a man on a bicycle, a fellow pilgrim praying alongside. All of these people have the ability to instantly slaughter you and everyone else near you. Armed with a few dollars worth of explosives and electronics, the suicide bomber can reshape the reality of any conflict. The largest military presence, the most costly of weapons, the highest of high tech gear cannot prevent the devastating and destabilizing blows that random death brings. Ask the Iraqis, the Shri Lankans, the Pakistanis, the Spanish or the Israelis.

The use of suicide bombers and other random death bombs against a conventional military presence is known as asymmetrical warfare. For years the Palestinians have utilized this form of war against the Israelis, justifying it by saying that they don’t have F 16s or Merkava tanks, so this “evens the score.” They were right. So devastating to the society is the effect of random death bombing that the Israelis reinvaded the west bank and built a costly disfiguring wall across the country.

There was a general sense of hopelessness in the Israeli society about how to stop this asymmetrical warfare. It seemed easy to do and formidable to prevent. Studying this strategic tool, the Muslim world has really expanded random death bombing from the shores of the Mediterranean to the rivers of Iraq. The devastating Shia, Sunni civil war with an Al-Qaeda overlay that continues to play out in Iraq, has utilized random death bombing to horrific effect. Now it’s the cities of Pakistan that are under attack.

Over in Afghanistan, the Taliban have imported this method of warfare to a devastating effect. Against all religious or human decency considerations, the Taliban are utilizing their sanctuaries in the Pakistani tribal areas of Waziristan and Oralezi, to send waves of suicide bombers on foot, bicycle and in cars into Afghanistan to kill anyone and everyone trying to go to school or a market or join in any government sponsored activity.

Yet now there is a new technology that changes everything, there is a mirror tactic that makes the warfare symmetrical. Once known as the “Predator”, now with a second generation called the “Reaper”; good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity has figured out a blowback to random terror. It is the missile-armed drone.

Think about this for a minute. You’re a Pashtune tribesman in a very remote lawless valley in Pakistan. There is no electricity or running water, your house is made from dry mud. You’re dressed in a traditional manner; balloon pants, loose long shirt, bandoliers of bullets crisscross your torso. You’re sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor with your Taliban friends eating a savory meal of rice and lamb with your fingers. You’re planning a suicide bicycle attack on a girl’s school over the boarder on Kandahar. It’s a cold clear evening and there is almost total silence, save for a few cars on a roadway in the distance. The next thing you’re dead. Just like that, all gone. You, your friends, your family, your house, everything.

Some U.S soldier half way around the world utilizing a computer joystick has from thousands of feet up, released a guided missile from an unmanned airplane you cannot see or hear, and this ends your life. No lookouts can ever warn you. No uniformed soldiers ever foolishly tried to fight their way to your hideout. No armored cars or tanks crashed over the boarder giving you warning.

That is the new symmetrical warfare. The battle between the random death receivers and the random death deliverers is evened. Are civilians in harms way? Of course, but wasn’t that the plan of the Taliban? Of every random death bomber? Can mistakes be made, the wrong target hit? Of course, but do the Taliban care if one of their bombers blows himself up early and kills school children? Not really. The absolute savage brutality, the pitiless slaughter of death without warning has, like a boomerang, come back to the Muslim world thanks to General Atomic, the California maker of the “Predator” and “Raptor.”

The entire world is now within their sights. These drones have been used in Yemen (see Syriana the movie) as well as Iraq. It is hard to fathom the potency and tactical change a weapon like this can bring. Its reach global, its evasion difficult, its surprise complete.

Yet there is more! As in Gaza, Pakistani tribal area clan and family feuds, economic rivalries and political divisions are deep and deadly. Hatreds and revenge between Muslim neighboring tribes and family groups make the Sicilians look like U.N mediators. An injustice five hundred years ago is remembered as yesterday. Everyone living in these tribal areas knows that there “neighbors” are only too happy to inform the drone intelligence agents as to their activities and whereabouts with the hope of eliminating them… evening out an ancient slight. Cash too goes a long way in Oralezi. For a few Rupees, reporting the location of local or foreign Taliban fighters can be a good source of income.

Even more unbelievable is that it is deniable. U.S. intelligence doesn’t even have to acknowledge the strike. It could have been a “work accident” as Hamas used to term it when they blew themselves up preparing a suicide bomb belt, or even something as pedestrian as a cooking gas explosion. Wow, that’s harsh, your enemy kills you and your entire family and destroys your house and doesn’t even acknowledge it.

No wonder the local population will be encouraged to march and protest these drone attacks. Retaliatory suicide bomb attacks are already taking place in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Islamic militants must stop these drones at all costs because they are a game changer. Every Mosque bombing will now be in protest against the drones. The drone/suicide bombing retaliation in Pakistan has already become a tit for tat replay of the Israeli Gaza rocket/drone war.

We’re of the opinion that this new form of warfare has the ability to a create symmetry that was lacking before. Now random death plotting has a return address, and the war on Islamic fundamentalism takes a new path.