On Aug. 26, a suicide bomber in a crowd outside the Kabul Airport in Afghanistan killed and injured hundreds of innocents. Among the dead were 13 U.S. servicemen and women, mostly Marines. The speculation is that U.S. casualties were the bomber’s primary motivation since we were undertaking a hazardous and chaotic evacuation from the capital city’s airport.
The airlift evacuation was complete a few days later without any further tragic bombings like the Aug. 26 incident, however bombings in Kabul and other Afghan cities have continued since that date, slaughtering more innocent bystanders.
Suicide bombings are not a new phenomenon. As Victor Davis Hansen points out in “Ripples of Battle” (Anchor Books, 2003), suicide missions have been used for centuries as a way for an inferior military force to strike terror into a more superior invader. Hansen recounts how the Japanese used the “kamikaze” (for divine wind) tactic to attack the American fleet off Okinawa in the late spring of 1945. More than five thousand sailors died in these attacks, yet no capital ship (fleet carrier or battleship) was sunk from these suicide attacks.
The primary tactic for these kamikaze missions was to have a pilot fly a fueled aircraft carrying a five hundred pound bomb in a crash dive into an enemy ship, spreading fire and explosive destruction. In order to do this, the very young and indoctrinated pilots were minimally trained to fly their aircraft. The leaders who devised this last-ditch plan and trained the pilots for their one-way mission did not lead the missions or sacrifice their lives. Instead, they convinced young people who were frequently drugged to make the supreme sacrifice while they avoided this fate. As someone who believes in ‘leadership by example,’ this seems very hypocritical to me.
The same ‘suicide bomber’ strategy led to the 9/11 attacks 20 years ago. How does al-Qaeda attack American wealth and power from the other side of the world? They send a handful of young fanatics on a one-way mission to hijack four airliners and fly them at high speed into buildings that represent our wealth and power. It was highly effective as 19 hijackers caused the death of nearly three thousand innocents, as well as enormous economic damage.
It seems to me that we’re going to have to deal with this suicide bomber strategy for as long as I can foresee. It is too easy and cheap for our weaker enemies to abandon. It is easier to protect the homeland than targets overseas. It is hard for me to see how we can stop the recruitment and indoctrination phase that begins this process. There are too many fanatical candidates and their zealotry is too deep-seeded. Their leaders are Svengali-like. Instead, we have to stop them before they get through checkpoints and into crowded areas.
For example, imagine a suicide bomber making his or her way into a crowded football stadium with an explosive filled vest under their shirt. The damage would be devastating. Imagine a suicide driver wheeling an 18-wheeler at 60 mph into a crowded pedestrian area. That scenario hasn’t happened in America yet to my knowledge, but it did happen in Europe a couple of years ago. Let your imagination run free and you can devise many different horrific scenarios. So can our enemies.
We simply have to be smarter than our enemies and “head them off at the pass.” When you think of the damage a single fanatic can do on a one-way suicide mission, we have to out-imagine the bad guys. We can do this just like the U.S. Navy did in the waters off Okinawa in 1945. We cannot afford to be complaisant, as a people or with our superior intelligence agencies. Being caught unaware and unprepared is unacceptable.