When I heard about the bombings in Jakarta yesterday, my first thought was, what do these terrorists hope to achieve? Long term, I mean.
If you look at the various terrorist acts in the last decade or two -- the World Trade Center, the Madrid train station, the hotels in Mumbai, any place you wanna pick in the Middle East -- they have not been effective at all in changing policies of the companies and/or countries they have attacked. I know that most of the people recruited to carry out these suicide missions are poor and desperate, but somewhere up the chain, the supposedly-smarter decision makers had an agenda they hope to achieve.
These Muslim extremists must not have a rearview mirror because, while they're very good at blowing things up and instilling fear in the short-term, the long-term policy-change failure rate seems to be 100%.Labels: war/terrorism