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The modern face of Jihad
When Patton's Third Army was sweeping through Europe, he supposedly saw the retreating wehrmacht troops carting their equipment away in wheelbarrows and wagons and whatever they could find. Nazi Germany, remember, was an industrial menace; they won not through numbers alone, but crushed early opposition w/ith iron discipline, better tactics, and better equipment. They were technological and engineering geniuses; if their business model hadn't included killing off all the Polish and Jewish intellectuals they could find, they might not have even lost at all. So it's understandable when Patton later described this as the moment that he knew Germany had lost the war, when they were reduced to using any iron age technology they could find to cart away their gear.
Islamist terrorist organizations, from Black September to Al-Qaeda, have not been know as much for technological genius. What they have had an abundance of, however, is young would-be martyrs, devout Muslims (however broken their interpretations of Islam) who were ready, willing, even eager to die waging Jihad.
What, then, do we learn from the case of Mohamed Ajmal Kasab? This young Pakistani (21 years; pictured above on the left) was recruited in the Punjab region of Pakistan, given commando training and sent to die, attacking a crowded terminal with another accomplice. His family, he said, would be richly paid on his death. Instead, Kasab faked his death and pleaded with the authorities who captured him for his life. He has apparently given up the names of the ringleaders of the attack, who were captured by Pakistani troops this morning. The message: nuts to your seventy-two virgins.
Something was off about this whole business to begin with, mind you. Jihadists may shave before suicide attacks, of course, but the Versace t-shirt and bowl haircut are a novelty in the realm of Islamist terrorism. There were demands about the treatment of Muslims in India (which, as an aside, it must be said is not without merit; while terrorism is never justified, quite a number of Muslims have been killed by Hindu nationalists in the past several years), but the tactics and the targets (wealthy, affluent visitors and businessmen, British and Americans especially) speak of more nationalist, secular motivations.
The premise behind the opposition to the War on Terror has long been that the Muslim world would provide an indefinite stream of willing martyrs, ready to die in order to take a few Westerners with them. This view has long been strange because the idea that an organization with a horrendous attrition rate can continue indefinitely is at odds with logic and basic arithmetic, and because it supposes that several of the founding concepts of our nation, namely that everyone has a natural and inalienable right to certain things like happiness, the pursuit thereof, and being alive .
(note; inalienable does not, as many think, mean "cannot be separated from", but, "cannot be made alien to". You can enslave someone through threat of force, but the slave never stops desiring freedom).
Granted that Lashkar-e-Taliba is not Al-Qaeda. But if Mohamed Kasab is at all indicative of the type of martyr the Islamist movement is reduced to, it tells us that they're scraping the bottom of the suicide barrel. Between the stick of increasing pressure from the outside world, diminishing report in the Muslim world for tactics that often hurt more of their own people than anyone else's, and the carrot offered by Fareed Zakaria's "Rise of the Rest", the increasing affluence and prosperity brought about in the G-20 nations by internationalist and free market and, yes, globalization efforts, we may be seeing the end of the era of Islamist terrorism. Given the choice between a martyr's robe and a Versace suit in sunny Dubai, you have to figure that most people would go for the latter.
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