[lbo-talk] Russia/foreign policy/ Pakistan

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Mar 1 07:00:45 PST 2005


Ulhas:
> Yes, Pakistan would be obliterated. In case of a full scale India-Pakistan
nuclear exchange,
> 25-30 million Indians will die, while Pakistan (Pop 150 million) will be
wiped out. But
> deterrence would not work with AQ with the outlook of suicide bombers. If
you are willing
> to destroy yourself to inflict massive losses on your enemies, deterrence
wouldn't stop you.

WS: This initially crossed my mind too, but then I think suicide bombing is different. In fact suicide bombing actually REDUCES the loss on the attacking side. In the conventional military attack, the attacker usually sustains much higher loss of life than the defender. However, if you have a suicide mission, you can substantially reduce your loss and reverse the odds vis a vis the defender.

So from the tactical point of view, individual (or small group) suicide missions make perfect sense, much more so than the conventional attack. The only obstacle is psychological - in a suicide mission death is certain, in a conventional mission - highly probable, but not certain. So if you can overcome that psychological obstacle in your troops, you are ahead of your enemy who cannot. You loose fewer people while still inflicting considerable damage.

However, a suicide nuclear attack reverses that logic by placing the loss rates back to those for the conventional warfare. Thus, the suicide aspect looses its advantage of killing more enemies with fewer losses. It thus does not make sense. Jihadists & Co. proved to be rather skilled fighters and tacticians, so I do not think they'd fall for such a trap.

Wojtek



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