Posts Tagged ‘Fareed Zakaria’
How the enemy needs war to stay alive
Tags: 11262008, 2008, Al-Qaeda, America, Fareed Zakaria, John McCain, Mumbai, Politics, Terrorism, War
When watching GPS with Fareed Zakaria on the Mumbai massacre I was struck by a testimony in his feature.
Mumbai attacks
A young terrorist is instructed by his controller in Pakistan to set a room ablaze. The controller understood that if the Taj Mahal was on fire, this would offer a more dramatic visual. The visual of Taj Mahal on fire would garner media attention and strike fear in the heart of the West, witnessing the might of this one terrorist cell.
It struck me that the controller had not ended with corrupting the mind of this young terrorist, brainwashing him to kill dozens of innocent people before deliberately giving his own life to his ‘cause’. He was also intending to stir up feelings of hatred and fear in the hearts of the Indians who watched this on television.
It reminded me of an Al-Qaeda statement posted on the al-Hesbah Web site during the presidential elections. It said if al-Qaeda wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, ‘impetuous’ Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
‘This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier,’ the message said.
‘Then, al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush.
When a small group chooses to attack a behemoth, nothing much can happen when the behemoth decides to simply ignore the small group and keeps it at arms length. The only hope the smaller group has is that the behemoth starts chasing it, and that the smaller group can stay alive long enough to exhaust the behemoth and then strike it when it is weak.
Al-Qaeda can never win from the US in a conventional way. But it can trick us into wearing down our military personnel, exhausting moral and depleting the coffers as we fight a financially imprudent war.
Perhaps it isn’t just the young peasants who are brainwashed to become jihadists. Perhaps we are all ‘brainwashed’ to enter into a full-blown war against a small number of enemies who have strategically positioned themselves in 7 countries that the US could never truly tame nor occupy without fatal costs to its economy or standing in the world. And perhaps, when we rely on the prudent way to dealing with this ‘small enemy’ by choosing to fight it through intelligence agencies alone, Al-Qaeda will step up its efforts to produce a terrorist attack on American soil again, because it knows it can only win when it can get the behemoth to chase it instead of having the Behemoth keep it at arms length.
Tags: 11262008, 2008, Al-Qaeda, America, Fareed Zakaria, John McCain, Mumbai, Politics, Terrorism, War