Daily Times Editorial Dec 4, 2009

We are all threatened now

A suicide bomber in the guise of a veiled woman succeeded in sneaking into a graduation ceremony in a Mogadishu hotel and killed at least 19 people, including three Somali ministers. Though not the first attack of its kind in the troubled Horn of Africa country, it was the worst atrocity since June this year, when the Al Shabaab extremist group killed the security minister and at least 30 others in a suicide bombing at a hotel in Baladwayne. In September the same group struck at the heart of the main African Union peacekeeping force’s military base in Mogadishu with twin suicide car bombs in September, killing 17 peacekeepers, including the deputy force commander. Considering these earlier incidents and similar attacks that show the extremists’ ability to strike the government at will, it is surprising the ease with which the latest human bomb was able to penetrate into a high profile gathering. Part of the reason in Muslim countries at least would appear to be the disarming effect of traditional dress such as the veil, which offers enormous leeway to determined extremists to carry out their missions even in high security areas. As though this camouflage technique was not bad enough, not so long ago we heard of a suicide bomber in Saudi Arabia who had inserted explosives inside his body to escape detection. The bombers are getting more and more creative, while their targets are yet to catch up in terms of new security methods.
For us in Pakistan this incident will have great resonance on two accounts. First, we and the Somalis share the experience of being on the receiving end of the suicide bombers’ unwanted attention. Pakistan in particular, ever since the Laal Masjid incident in 2007 and the subsequent military offensives in Swat and South Waziristan, has been bloodied by the extremists who are not afraid to die because they think they are going straight to heaven. In the case of Somalia and Yemen, it has been reported that al Qaeda and allied extremist groups are active there, having suffered reverses in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. A regional strategy of spreading out into as many troubled countries as possible makes eminent sense from Osama bin Laden’s point of view, since it helps take pressure off the hub wherever he is located. It also causes attention to be diverted whenever necessary to countries in the region away from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where al Qaeda is thought to be headquartered. All this could be described as a diversionary guerrilla strategy.
A suicide bomber is virtually impossible to stop once he or she embarks on the mission in hand. The only way such tactics can be scotched is if good intelligence and police work succeeds in pre-empting the mission. Reactive beefing up of security after every such incident, something we in Pakistan (and arguably elsewhere) are wedded to, and which soon falls prey to normal inertia, cannot be the answer. Good intelligence and police work implies infiltration of the extremist groups to head off plans before they mature and using an aware citizenry as the eyes and ears of the security forces. Without the involvement of the citizen of every threatened country, the security forces will remain on the back foot, hampered by the forbidding task of seeking out the potential bombers before they are launched. To slay the by now many-headed hydra of terrorism, merely military force will not do.