BY TAYLOR MARSH
No doubt, the 21st century Pearl, 9/11, reminds us how different warfare is in an age of asymmetric threats. Segue to Richard Clarke:
Rawalpindi is a military city, home to Pakistan’s senior officers and retired military men. That would seem to make it an unlikely place for the world’s most wanted terrorists, the people whom U.S. officials call “high-value targets,” to meet. But Rawalpindi is where the ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, hid, precisely because no one would think of looking for him there. Perhaps the leaders of al-Qaeda, the Taliban movement that is again on the march in Afghanistan and some Pakistani terrorist groups obsessed with Kashmir would also come together there — say, in a safe house owned by a sympathetic retired Pakistani leader of the country’s powerful and shadowy military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI).
Thinking of how to alter our current challenges, we’ll never move the world forward unless we alter our thinking about outreach towards aid, balancing military with economic and educational financing, offering alternatives to madrassas and poverty, in areas of the world like Pakistan and Central Asia, the places of primary threat to us all. Where extremists live, plan and plot in the absence of hope and future for themselves and their families. That the world is now watching these once unknown regions, thanks to technological advancements, makes their desperation greater, as this is the last gasp for those refusing to accept the modern era and a world they can no longer bend to their will through religious violence without people rising up and declaring enough.
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