{"id":181548,"date":"2016-05-24T17:32:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T22:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/05\/24\/and-yet-i-find-just-the-opposite-to-be-true-the-replacement-is-even-more-extreme\/"},"modified":"2016-05-24T17:32:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-24T22:32:00","slug":"and-yet-i-find-just-the-opposite-to-be-true-the-replacement-is-even-more-extreme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/05\/24\/and-yet-i-find-just-the-opposite-to-be-true-the-replacement-is-even-more-extreme\/","title":{"rendered":"And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What a surprise.&nbsp; The US policy of assassination <a href=\"http:\/\/mobile.abc.net.au\/news\/2016-05-23\/strike-on-taliban-leader-mansour-counter-productive\/7438062\">makes extremest groups more extreme and more dangerous<\/a>:<br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">The <a href=\"http:\/\/mobile.abc.net.au\/news\/2016-05-22\/afghan-spy-agency-declares-taliban-leader-dead\/7435802\">elimination of Taliban leader Mansour<\/a> will only increase the danger to Afghan civilians, a US terrorism analyst, whose research focuses on the impact of targeted killings, predicts.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">Dr Max Abrahms, from Northeastern University in Boston, said the US Government does not look carefully enough at the strategic implications of its strikes on extremist leaders.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">He said he had done a number of studies on leadership decapitation of a militant group and he had not found a statistically significant reduction in the amount of violence perpetrated by the group after a leader was removed.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;In fact these decapitation strikes can actually be counter-productive, because one of the assumptions of the targeted killing campaigns is that the replacement of the leader that you killed will be more moderate,&#8221; Dr Abrahms said.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;So for that reason, in the immediate aftermath of a successful targeted killing, like over this weekend, the group&#8217;s violence tends to become even more extreme, in the sense that it&#8217;s even more likely to attack civilian targets.&#8221;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;What I&#8217;ve seen is that the younger people to emerge in the Taliban are actually even crazier, if you will, than the old guard.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And then Abrams says that, &#8220;He did not think the US Government very carefully studied the strategic implications of taking out Mansour.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Gee, you think?<\/p>\n<p>The problem here is that there are way too many people out there who think that our &#8220;Freedumb Bomz&#8221; will make the world a better place because they are our weapons.<\/p>\n<p>Like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.<\/p>\n<p>H\/t <a href=\"https:\/\/www.emptywheel.net\/2016\/05\/23\/mullah-mansour-drone-strike-important-milestone-or-radicalizing-event\/\">Empty Wheel<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What a surprise.&nbsp; The US policy of assassination makes extremest groups more extreme and more dangerous: The elimination of Taliban leader Mansour will only increase the danger to Afghan civilians, a US terrorism analyst, whose research focuses on the impact of targeted killings, predicts.Dr Max Abrahms, from Northeastern University in Boston, said the US Government &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153,1133,1151,982,1076,1152,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-assassination","category-south-asia","category-stupid","category-terrorism","category-uav","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}