Word: williamses
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Are Afghans the worst suicide bombers in the world? That's the conclusion of U.S. academic Brian Glyn Williams, an assistant professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In a fascinating recent essay published on the website of conservative think tank The Jamestown Foundation, Williams analyzes the...
Why the high failure rate? One reason, Williams suggests, is the Pashtun social code of Pashtunwali, which values "acts of martial valor" and revenge. Driven by this code Afghan suicide bombers are more likely to go after hard military targets rather than softer targets such as markets or restaurants as...
Then there's plain ineptitude. Afghan police and military personnel say that the young men the Taliban recruit to be suicide bombers are regularly "deranged, retarded, mentally unstable or on drugs," according to Williams. That's a view shared by Waheed Muzhda, an Afghan political analyst. "The suicide bombers don...
United Nations officials in Kabul also told Williams that some young Afghan men become suicide bombers as a way to make money for their families. There is anecdotal evidence that a few such men deliberately detonate their deadly payloads so as to minimize the number of people they might kill...
Alternatively, I often wonder if the older fans superimpose ghostly images of Ted Williams patrolling left field or imagine Carlton Fisk rounding the bases after his wave-it-fair home run in the World Series. Even without these vivid recollections, one fan could recall exactly where he sat in the...