I never thought I would actually laugh out loud reading anything from The Jamestown Foundation. Are the Taliban really this inept? Yes, they are. No wonder they have to resort to murdering hostages--they're own suicide bombers can't get it right!

You really have to read these key findings:

An analysis of the attacks carried out in the last two years reveals a curious fact. In 43% of the bombings conducted last year and in 26 of the 57 [=46%] bombings traced in this study up to June 15, the only death caused by the bombing was that of the bomber himself. Astoundingly, approximately 90 suicide bombers in this two year period succeeded in killing only themselves. This number exceeds 100 when you factor in those who succeeded in killing only one person in addition to themselves. There was one period in the spring of 2006 (February 20 to June 21) when a stunning 26 of the 36 suicide bombers in Afghanistan (72%) only killed themselves.....

The cause for the Afghan suicide bombers' underwhelming performance, [Afghan police and soldiers] claimed, lay in the ineptitude of the people the Taliban were recruiting as fedayeen (suicide) bombers. Afghan officials continually told stories of lower class people who had been seduced, bribed, tricked, manipulated or coerced into blowing themselves up as "weapons of God" or "Mullah Omar's missiles." Afghan NDS officials also spoke of apprehended bombers who were deranged, retarded, mentally unstable or on drugs.

In one case, they told of a mentally deranged man who threw his vest at an Afghan patrol, assuming it would explode on its own .... Others, including a Taliban bomber who was arrested while pushing his explosives-laden car toward its target after it ran out of gas, appear to be inept beyond belief ... Coalition troops who have spoken of seeing bombers blow themselves up far from their convoys have characterized it as the act of drugged or mentally unstable bombers.

Of course, not everything in the report is funny:

There have been several widely reported instances of the Taliban recruiting school children to be suicide bombers in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP)... 'As many as 30 students from each of the four government schools in Tank enlisted.' A similar number have also joined from private schools. The ages of those taken are between 11 to 15 years." ... The age of these bombers would explain why one of the courses in Taliban suicide camps teaches students how to drive a car....

In the video that was obtained by ABC, boys as young as 12 are shown "graduating" from a suicide bombing camp run by Mullah Dadullah Mansour, the successor to his brother, the recently slain Mullah Dadullah (ABC News, June 22).

In an incident that caused tears of fury among local villagers, a six year-old street urchin approached an Afghan security checkpoint and claimed that he had been cornered by the Taliban and fitted with a suicide bomber vest.

Posted by: Rusty at 04:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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