Training New Recruits to Kill.(Brief article)

Byline: Barrett Sheridan

The suicide attack that nearly hit U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney last week may signal worse to come in Afghanistan. The Taliban announced recently that it has recruited hundreds of willing martyrs, who are now training for a spring offensive.

Whether they have the right stuff remains to be seen. The Taliban recruits mainly young, poorly educated, native Afghans, says Reuven Paz, an Israeli expert on radical Islam. But recent research shows that age and education help to make a better bomber. Efraim Benmelech of Harvard and Claude Berrebi of the RAND Corp. recently analyzed 151 Palestinian suicide attacks from 2000 to 2005. They found that a 25-year-old bomber averages five more victims than an 18-year-old, while a college-educated attacker will likely kill six more than a lesser-educated peer. The educated are also 50 percent less likely to get caught prior to detonation. And females are just as deadly as males.

This ...