If you ever wondered what a Taliban suicide bomber looks like, examine the boy on the left. Aged 14, Rafiqullah was caught with a suicide vest but pardoned by President Karzai. However, this did not dent the suicide bombing campaign which yesterday claimed the lives of another three British servicemen. The suicide bombers intercepted are invariably Pakistanti – which is why an increasing number of Afghans regard this not as an insurgency but an Afghan-Pakistan war. The bombers are plucked from orphanages or madrasahs in al-Qaeda’s new bolthole, the quasi-autonomous northwest tribal areas of Pakistan. Referred to as FATA (federally administered tribal areas) this is the source of the IEDs, the Taleban agents and, alas, the suicide bombers.
Producing IEDs has become something of a cottage industry in FATA but the end result is nowhere near as deadly as the infra-red activated Iranian-made devices laid for the British in Basra. Similarly the youth of the suicide bombers means they are far more easily intercepted than their Palestinian counterparts. When I was in Lashkar Gah last month, I heard about how one suicide bomber killed himself within feet of a British serviceman who lost only his helmet: the insurgent had not put any ball bearings next to his explosive and succeeded only in killing himself. Yet for all the crudeness of the Taliban’s tactics, they have in FATA an unpoliced and seemingly neverending supply of people and weapons.
The main victim of suicide bombers are Afghans, which is why the Taliban are using this tactic in desperation. Two years ago, their strategy depended on being seen as some kind of Pashtun national liberation army. Hard to do now their bombs routinely kill, maim and terrorise Pashtunis in Helmand. The recent execution of an Afghan journalist working for the BBC World Service’s Pashto station can be seen as the Taliban’s hatred of losing the information war. The BBC connects mainly illiterate Pashtun villages to the world outside – and allows them to learn about the tactics deployed by those who claim to be the heirs to the mujahedeen.
Until four years ago, suicide bombing had never been seen in Afghanistan. It was a tactic utterly alien to even this war-addled country. Its emergence now adds to the feeling (regularly aired in the Kabul-based press) that this is not a domestic insurgency but a Pakistan-inspired attack.
This has obvious challenges for British forces in Helmand – for example, I learned that they need and have requested more anti-IED units. But the situation in Helmand is vastly better than the hellhole described in 3 Para, the brilliant account of the first Afghan deployment two years ago by Patrick Bishop. After counting 6,000 dead last year, the Taliban seem to have accepted that cannot defeat us on the ground. The IEDs and suicide bombers are a sign of their retreat, not a sign of our failure.
As I said in my post yesterday, the Taliban cannot outfight us but think they can outlast us. Their main hope – and that of al-Qaeda – is that the Western democracies will no longer tolerate the casualties which inevitably accompany long-term deployments. So these suicide bombs are aimed not so much at British soldiers – the strategic advantage is limited. The wider aim of these bombs is to erode support for the war in Britain, so that a new government is elected on a “troops out” platform. It is a credit to David Cameron and Liam Fox that they are yielding not one bit to this temptation.
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