9-11 Nine Years Later: America Finds Itself

photo from Reuters

"It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this.  If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists.  Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel.  At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader.  Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world." - Osama bin Laden

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Justified Homicide: Drone Warfare

Drone Attacks in PakistanThe Telegraph published results from a study by the New America Foundation that estimates that 32% of deaths caused by drones attacks in Pakistan since 2004 were civilians.

Their report, The Year of the Drone, studied 114 drone raids in which more than 1200 people were killed. Of those, between 549 and 849 were reliably reported to be militant fighters, while the rest were civilians.

"The true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 per cent," the foundation reported.

The actual study demonstrates how difficult it is to reliably ascertain who was killed by the attacks, as the confirmed number killed varies from 834 to 1,216.  If just the total casualty count varies by that much it's hard to imagine that knowing who exactly is included in the deaths is all that precise.  Nevertheless, the ratio of combatants to fatalities in either the low (34%) or the high (30%) estimate are close enough that their figure passes the smell test.

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Osama bin Laden is Conan and America is NBC

The upcoming trial of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed should be used to redefine the War on Terror as being about bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice.

The Washington Post recently reported that al Qaeda Grand Poohbah, Osama bin Laden, has endorsed the failed Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound jet:

The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of the Sept. 11," he said of the Nigerian suspect in the Dec. 25 botched attack.

"If our messages had been able to reach you through words we wouldn't have been delivering them through planes."

Directing his statements at President Barack Obama - "from Osama to Obama," he said - bin Laden added: "America will never dream of security unless we will have it in reality in Palestine."

While bin Laden would seemingly make a perfect Bond villain, this is a non-story.

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Book Review: David Loyn - In Afghanistan

In a new reoccurring feature, The Inductive will review relevant policy books.

David Loyn's In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation tells the story of history forgotten and repeated.  Afghanistan has never been important in and of itself, but it touches so many important things, geographically, strategically, politically and religiously, that the great powers sought to possess it and had to pay again and again to learn that it will not be ruled.  Peppered with references to current battles in its descriptions of the violence of antiquity and as it reaches the modern day the locations reveal the permanent violence that we continue.  I felt overwhelmed by the sense that our current war there was not even the culmination of history, but its pathetic continuation as a lesson forever unlearned.  

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Bombay: One Year Later

A landmark burns.It has been almost a year since "India's 9/11", the terrorist murders in Bombay – a fitting description considering the similarities.  Both attacks were perpetrated by low-level foot soldiers of larger extremist Muslim conspiracies, spreading out in small teams to maximize the carnage inflicted on the population to achieving the goal of massive destruction and loss of life and paralyze the respective countries with fear.  

The level of technological sophistication employed in organizing and carrying out the attacks was striking.  The terrorists used modern gadgets to coordinate their violence.  Blackberries, anonymous email accounts, GPS tracking systems, and satellite phones all contributed to the methodical precision with which the attacks were executed. A few months after the attack, the Indian government released the transcripts of cell phone conversations between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan.  These conversations raise tough questions about the ease with which these attackers were able to enter the country undetected, aided only by common technology and the chilling instructions of their handler.  How difficult is it really to carry out a terrorist attack like the one in Mumbai?

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