The election was two days away, and pollsters were calling it a deadlock between two candidates clearly representing the nation’s left and right wings. Security concerns topped the voters’ priorities. Then that night, 36 hours before the dawn of election day, assailants threw several firebombs into a packed passenger bus traveling on a regular route from city to city, killing a mother and her three young children. Terrible pictures and condemnatory commentary filled the media for the next 24 hours, carrying the anger forward to election morning — just as the attackers had planned.

And when the votes were counted, the right-wing parties were ascendant. That was in Israel 21 years ago, Yitzhak Shamir of the Likud Party vs. Shimon Peres of Labor. That was my first encounter with tactical terrorism.

Shamir formed a government with other right-wing parties, propelled into office by a Palestinian terrorist who abhorred the idea of swapping land for peace, as Peres proposed.

In those days, most Palestinians still wanted nothing less than all of the land that Israel “occupied.” In the decades since, of course, the sort of attacks Israel suffered have been emulated in many other places, most of them in the Middle East. And now, unfortunately, they are commonplace in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But even now, most people looking at the attacks consider them largely strategic. In other words, simply part of a general, long-term strategy to wear the enemy down. One reason for that is their anonymous nature. Almost never does a bomber step up and explain why he exploded his device at that time and that place or what he hoped to accomplish. So we forget that individual malefactors meticulously plan them, choosing the target, the date and time and location with great care — always with the intention of influencing the public debate.

In Israel 20 years ago, we journalists, wallowing in the dark humor our profession encourages, talked up our plans to cover the bombings that were certain to occur anytime Secretary of State George Shultz announced he was coming for a visit. We seldom planned in vain.

So what happened last week, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Islamabad, Pakistan? The Taliban exploded one of the deadliest bombs it had ever detonated, in Peshawar, killing 101 people, just three hours after she arrived. Was the timing coincidental? Certainly not. The bombers’ message: Do you, the United States, really think you can take us on here in Pakistan? Forget it. Just look at this. Look at what we can do to you.

Across the Western border in Afghanistan, the Taliban attacks in recent days have been as ferocious and deadly as they have ever been. Guerrillas dressed in police uniforms stole into a guest house, tossed a few grenades and killed at least eight people — right in the center of Kabul. That same day, President Obama flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to meet the coffins of 15 soldiers who died in Afghanistan during October.

For the United States, that was the deadliest month since the Afghan war began eight years ago. What were those hotel bombers thinking? The entire world knows that Obama is deliberating his military’s request to send up to 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Obviously Taliban leaders don’t like that idea. What can they do to persuade Obama not to send more troops? They can show him how deadly they can be. They are saying: Look at what will happen to your men. You aren’t safe even in Kabul!

Obama is listening. The visit to Dover, he said, “was a sobering reminder of the extraordinary sacrifices that our young men and women in uniform are engaging in every single day, and “obviously the burden that both our troops and our families bear in any wartime situation is going to bear on how I see these conflicts.”

That’s just what the Taliban attackers wanted to hear.

Former President George W. Bush never visited Dover. He also forbade photographs and other news coverage of the returning dead. He claimed this was to protect the families’ privacy, but I suspect he had a larger motivation. He did not want to give the enemy the ability to play on his emotions — and, more important, the American peoples’. Obama rescinded Bush’s policy. He has a different view. And now, as his spokesman, Robert Gibbs said, “I can’t imagine anybody would make a decision about sending troops into harm’s way without thinking about this.”

Almost certainly, the Taliban’s tactical terrorists are smiling.