Radio War Nerd EP #16—LTTE Tamil Tigers & Sri Lanka Civil War

Guys, I generally love your show and agree with your visions, but 'Molenbeek a jihadi Brussels suburb where cops aren't allowed to go in", seriously? What a bunch of alt-right propaganda bullshit! It is one of the most heavily policed (because poorest) parts of the city and the reason why shady Saudi wahhabi preachers are allowed to roam free there (and in other impoverished migrant concentrations in Belgium) are the same as everywhere else, whatever you may think of "Belgium as a barely functioning state" - which is in itself one of these media cliches which have little to do with actual reality. If John/Gary or Mark ever pass by here in Brussels, I will be happy to put you up and give you a tour of the city/country including its "dangerous no-go zones for cops" in "hellhole Brussels" :)

The show is a delight every episode, but I wouldn't be a proper war nerd myself if I didn't have a pedantic quibble from time to time... You list through different variations on suicide bombing and describe their tactical or strategic logic, and I was with you right until the end when you talked about mass civilian casualty strikes. You called them farts, suggesting that it's just a sort kind of acting out that stems from cultural mixing in world cities, without having a clear strategic objective. I can see how these attracts might stem from different groups with hostile values and identities being ground together and forced to share the same urban space, but I do think that there's a sound strategic logic behind them. First off, like the attacks by the PKK in Turkey, they are a kind of red meat you throw to your most bloodthirsty and sadistic followers to make them less inclined to defect to the next jihadi group over, so they serve a kind of retention roll. They also invite overreaction by the security apparatus - you mention that the police are one of the few groups that benefit from these kinds of attacks, since it usually means they get to slip the leash for a while, with new powers to bust heads and round up the usual suspects. I think this actually part of the attackers plan. In the case of jihadis, the attackers come from an identifiable, disliked community which the security apparatus has poor intelligence on. When the police start spying or making arrests, they'll likely pick up some innocent (or innocent-looking) Muslims that then become victim-martyrs whose fate shows how nasty and racist and hypocritical the broader society is, playing directly into the jihadi recruitment pitch. Groups like CAGE in England will stump for anyone rounded up (guilty or innocent doesn't matter, as the case of the "beautiful boy" Mohammed Emwazi demonstrates) allowing you to try to drive a deeper wedge between the minority and the rest of society, and pick up some more recruits and sympathizes. Mass civilian attacks by themselves are almost always counter productive, but if you can provoke a stupid response - like invading Iraq after 9/11 - then you've actually hit the jackpot.

The amazon media player showed like 114 minutes, so when the show ended after 67 minutes it's just dead air.

Another fun episode, although it seems like the file has like an hour of dead silence recorded after you guys close the show out. That might inflate the file size for people who care about that sort of thing. Also, this episode made me remember one of the more memorable bits of assigned reading in UCSD undergraduate Int'l Relations/poli sci. I was really delighted to see mention of the LTTE as the progenitors of modern suicide bombing, as that was one of the points made in Robert Pape's *2003* paper on suicide bombing. He did a universe analysis of every suicide bombing recorded up to that point and identified certain structural factors that make suicide bombing more or less likely (as well as where it can succeed as a tactic and where it can't, as determined by target state structure). This was my first taste of dispassionate, clinical analysis of something the post-9/11 world I came of age in deemed the most monstrous behavior imaginable. I was hooked immediately and invite my comrades to have a taste. <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/stille/Politics%20Fall%202007/readings%20weeks%206-7/Strategic%20Logic%20of%20Suicide%20Missions.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/stille/Politics%20Fall%202007/readings%20weeks%206-7/Strategic%20Logic%20of%20Suicide%20Missions.pdf</a>

Sweden had a battle against poland in the early 1600s that we lost because technology failed. We had a very gunpower heavy force then it rained