Dangerous

Well, I was flicking through Tom Barry's Guerilla War In Ireland on the bog this morning, because parts of the news reminded me of some details from that tale - viz the attacks on police stations by insurgents in Pakistan.

This is bad, if they are strong enough and feel they have enough support to be able to attack their opponents civil forces of social control, they are well on their way to full scale insurgency (and maybe further than that). It's especially worrying as.

They recently attacked the army (with no come back from their own support base - and the army is a central pillar of what is Pakistan).

There appears to be no civil force to counteract them, no labour movement, or anything on the streets.

This is bad on a stick. Meanwhile the efforts to get to a plausible victory condition in Afghanistan are redoubling, while the chances of just plunging the whole region into chaos continue to grow. British ministers try and say that the war was fought to stop planning, preparation and training of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan/Pakistan - but in reality they have turned the whole area into one vast training camp for guerillas - it was a hot war like this that trained Bin Laden, lets not forget. The veterans of this war will haunt the battle fields of Earth for thirty years to come.

Inspiring dread

I've held off making some of these comments, lest I give people ideas. I've often wondered why Al Qaeda terrorists have gone to such convoluted means to make their terror attack - gas cylinders, exploding shoes, whatever, when a couple of blokes in a crossfire with handguns could do more damage and instill more terror by running round for hours afterwards.

Just like they have just done in Mumbai to such horrific and spectacular success. After all, Virginia Tech, Colombine High, kids have shown the way to spread mayhem and terror with a couple of semi-automatics, a planned team job hitting the right targets can, we now know, do much more. Including killing the chief of Mumbai anti-terror police.

The biggest danger is that mickey mouse outfits clock on to what a good trick this is, it is perfect asymmetric warfare, cheap tiger/flea tactics.

I think today is a very bad day indeed for the world.