THE most effective weapon terrorists have found to wield against us isn’t the headline-grabbing suicide bomber or even the deadly roadside bomb, the IED.
Such weapons can harm us, but they can’t stop us. Terror’s super-weapon is the lie.
Lying about civilian casualties is the one sure way to impede or even halt US (or Israeli) operations, to force such tight restrictions on our troops that they can’t win.
The casualty con’s so effective as both propaganda and tactic that terrorists everywhere have adopted the technique. It’s been so successful that our enemies long ago transitioned to the next phase: creating civilian casualties and blaming us.
It works. The media love the charge. Our troops and pilots are always guilty — even if proven innocent. Because so many on the left want us to be guilty.
Few journalists bother to investigate. If the Taliban, al Qaeda, Hezbollah or Hamas says it, it must be so. In Media Wonderland, terrorists never lie. Now every successful strike on a Taliban target generates the instant claim that the dead were all civilians.
And it isn’t just the media who back the Taliban. The Obama administration — a case study in instant foreign-policy ineptitude — signs up, too.
This week, Taliban terrorists publicly beheaded three civilians in Afghanistan’s Farah province, then herded women and children into compounds from which they fought government forces and US advisers.
With a vicious ground battle under way, the Talibs knew attack aircraft would appear. According to military sources, they set up the target. And, just in case, they slaughtered those women and children with grenades before any aircraft appeared. The entire massacre was a planned media event.
And who gets blamed? Not the Taliban. Before the smoke cleared, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was apologizing. (Apologizing is one thing this administration does with real enthusiasm.)
Our SecState played right into the Taliban’s hands. It was instinctive on her part. Clinton and her new Cabinet peers know that our military’s evil. No need to say a single word about the Taliban’s atrocity.
A few hours later, President Obama stepped up to his mike and read a prewritten statement about his meeting with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s bookie-in-chief, President Asif Ali Zardari.
We’d need to comb the historical records, but it’s just possible that no American president ever read a statement so out of touch with on-the-ground reality. The platitudes were thick, the substance was thin and the vision was pure fantasy.
No criticism of Karzai for consistently playing the populist card and backing Taliban claims. No criticism of Zardari for cowering while the Taliban overruns his country and its huge military twiddles its thumbs, dreaming of a war with India.
No, our president announced that he’s going to bring civilian resources to bear now, sending $1.5 billion a year to Pakistan. Yet self-impoverished Pakistan has more than 170 million angry Muslims. Our president’s going to make them our pals for an annual nine bucks a head?
It wouldn’t matter if we poured in $90K for every Pak. Multi-year development projects are useless against an insurgency that’s 60 miles from the capital. We’re turning a home fire extinguisher on an inferno.
The Pakistanis have to fight. If they’re not willing to fight to save their own country, there’s nothing we can do.
Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan, the Taliban strategy of creating civilian casualties — and lying about who the casualties are — is undercutting any potential effectiveness of the 21,000 more troops we’re sending to that worthless, hopeless country.
At the end of the day, the Taliban strategy works because our own government sides with the terrorists against our troops.
Instead of begging for forgiveness, Clinton needed to take a firm position. She should have said: “The deaths in Farah province were entirely the fault of the Taliban. To punish these terrorists and better protect Afghan civilians, we’re loosening our rules of engagement. We will not tolerate this cynical use of women and children as unwilling weapons of war. These war criminals will be hunted down and killed.”
Instead, Hillary blamed our military. Again.
This is war, Madame Secretary. Tragic mistakes happen, but the incident in Farah province wasn’t an error — it was a brutal, cynical set-up. And you stabbed our troops in the back. Again.
If the Obama administration doesn’t want to fight, it should bring our troops home now. And let’s see how much good those civilian-aid workers do.
Ralph Peters is Fox News’ strategic analyst and the author of “Looking for Trouble.”