The Panty Bomber and Yemen are all over the news. Stopping terrorism is such a a difficult job because their is no measure of success. You have to accept that there are people out there that want to do us harm and we have to stop them. But reading all these reports got me to think about my trip to Yemen.
Yemen is a harsh country with very little control outside of the capitol of Sanaa. It is a place where everyone had a weapon, a rifle mainly an AK-47 and the Yemen knife a Jambiya, a curved hook blade. I barely saw any women and three Belgian tourists had been blown up the morning we got into town.
Most of the Yemeni people I meet with and talked with were very nice and helpful but they had a fierceness behind their eyes. Fierce isnt the right word, they all had an intensity I couldnt describe. Maybe everyone was intense because they had staffers in a country that was under serious stress. I remember seeing SUV's with tire covers that had images depicting 9-11 and I mean the planes flying into the towers. Seeing that image so casually embossed ontot a tire cover for an SUV when I am use to seeing a damn Landrover cover with a giraffee on it is unsettling. Seeing men give death dagger looks at women in our group made me defensive and concerned.
I never felt scared but thats because we had a battalion of security in all shapes and sizes. Yemen is a troubling area and has so many problems that it is going to be a while before we can fix it.
Thinking back at U.S history the United States fought a guerilla war when the Philipines wanted their independence. The U.S. won by isolating the guerillas moving civilian populations so that the guerrillas couldnt mix in with the geenral population and just extreme brutality. How do we defeat terrorism without committing the time and reosurces the answer is we can't.
1 comment:
You should take self defense classes. Then you can be the Filipino Bourne.
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