"terrorist don't necessarily want to kill large numbers of ppl. killing large numbers of people backfires: it creates solidarity among those attacked, it encourages their resolve to fight back and resist the demands of the attackers. smart terrorists will do things to make their enemy's lives miserable, like mail random envelopes containing anthrax--which worked well after a spectacular attack like S11 to get the message across."
I agree with this, and this is a sound reason to stop bombing Afghanistan. Trouble, though, is that terrorists don't always want to behave "rationally". It doesn't pay off the US military to behave "rationally" - wild outbursts of violence here and there make it harder for the folks planning terror attacks to work out what the consequences of their actions are. It's a bit like a game of chicken, except the US drives a gigantic armored lorry and is willing to accept a wipe-out every once in a while to make sure the other guy always swerves.
(...)
As for Max's Wager itself.
The point I made before is not that Max has made a naive wager that he is likely to loose. I, for one, really hope he wins. The problem is rather that if he wins, that doesn't mean he is any more justified in supporting the war and, correct me if I am wrong, that was what the whole point of this. All this talk has gone on for a little while, but I think he made a bold statement of a pro-bombing position which is quite popular. The proposition was more or less like this:
"If you believe "the war isn't going to work" to be a falsifiable proposition, then accept that if for X number of years after the arbitrary victory date (assumed to be sometime next spring) there have been no major terrorist attacks, then you were wrong and I was right, and the war worked."
My answer to this is that I would take the bet, if Max was willing to specify what a "major terrorist attack" was and the precise number of years. This he did. He writes off little terror attackslike the anthrax thing, so presumably he writes off terror attacks with, say, up to 30 victims unless it is against a US military target like the USS Cole. He's talking big ones, like the embassy bombings, the Lockerbie thing or Oklahoma. He gives two years as the time period.
Let's assume that historically there has been one major attack of this kind on the US every two years - a massive overestimation, in my opinion. The odds for any given year would be .5 Then the probability that any two years will have no attacks is 0.25. So, there is a 25% chance that Max has won the wager on luck alone. This is ignoring the fact that lots of nonwar antiterrorist measures are currently being pursued, which increase the chance that it wasn't the war that created the hypothetical lull.
Even if we stretched the lull to be five years, you'd still have 1/32 odds that it was luck. Would you play russian roulette on 1/32 odds? How about killing thousands? This isn't "overheated" at all - there is a 1/32 chance that, by Max's lights, the death of thousands was unjustified - IF, that is, he wins the bet over five years. I might start thinking twice about it if it was 10 years, or 1/1024 - but would Max be willing to gamble over that sort of time, remembering that we're talking about those terrorist attacks that have ex hypothesi happened every second year so far?
Alternatively, he says there wont' be an attack of the scale of 9/11 for then next five years. Let's be generous and give him fifteen years. In fact, you can give him one hundred and fifty years and it makes no difference. There has been no other attack of the scale of 9/11 before, and it is statistically meaningless to attribute a "lull" in such attacks to the war. For all we know, such attacks happen once every fifty years. Let's hope he wins the wager, but it doesn't mean that support for the war is justified. Neither is acquiescence, since the cost of acquiescence is huge - for other people to pay, of course. Also, the further out you go - say ten years - the greater the influence of unforeseen future events, which makes everything rather gloomy for the chances Max's sucesfull wager could be valid justification for the war.
The point of this is not to say Max's wager is daft. Rather, it is just that he is too likely to win for reasons other than the war being effective; or alternatively, there is just no way of even working out the odds.
The fundamental problem for a bet like that is that Max has to hope there was a high yearly probability of terror in the past and a long lull in the future to obtain a statistically significant result "that the war worked". But the higher the yearly probability and the longer the lull, the shakier it gets for Max's Wager. So we see him restricting the scale of terror to the big ones, which is like lowering the yearly probability. While this makes good betting sense, it also makes the results of our little historical experiement inconclusive.
Thiago "mountains from molehills" Oppermann.
In message <3BE33750.2070207 at sprintmail.com>, Gar Lipow <lipowg at sprintmail.com> writes
>
>I still say that probabilities (unfortunately not certainties, but
>probabilities) are that while there are lots of way they can kill
>dozens, and a few they might kill hundreds, there are no easy ways left
>to kill thousand. (I'm talking about the anti-U.S. terrorists of
>course. (The U.S. not only can but will kill tens, and perhaps
>hundreds of thousands through starvation.)
>
>In fact I will make a similar wager to Max. No attack by terrorists
>will kill anything close to a thousand people. My wager starts now,
>unlike Max who waits until some months after the Afghanistan winter is
>over. The problem is if no attack killing thouands happens, how do you
>know whether my explanation of Max's is the right one?
>
>Ultimately, short term (3 years or less) prevention of terrorism will
>depend mostly on whether we actually do stuff that makes terrorism
>inside the U.S. harder to commit and easier to detect (as opposed to
>simply repealing the constitution).U.S. foreign policy (including wars)
>will have a long term effect - but will do almost nothing in the short
>term. I know we agree that the current bombing is doing nothing in this
>regard except helping to create the next generation of anti-US
terrorists.
>
- -- James Heartfield