Bin Laden’s role was probably merely symbolic, he’s almost certainly dead, which is what happens when a man yellowed from kidney disease picks indie film-making and spelunking over dialysis, and the guys we can link more certainly than him to the crime are Saudi, and dead.

The idea that I think important to remember here—and one that Andrew Bacevich keeps making—is that it’s simply a mistake of the first order not to distinguish between the Taliban and al Queda. We no longer have a beef with the former it seems to me, and limiting our strikes to the latter—which it seems to me can be done from stand-off/off-shore bases and etc—will eventually demonstrate that it’s one thing to hang around the Taliban, and another to hang around bin Laden’s people and become collateral.

I also think there’s another simply taken-for-granted idea that ought be challenged too that’s even more fundamental. Recently William Lind put up a post here saying we have to turn the present “war of exhaustion” into one of maneuver. (On the “political” and “moral” planes, which doesn’t make a difference to my point.) And indeed this clearly reflects the somehow built-in assumption that we have that the worst thing for us would be a war of attrition.

But why shouldn’t we question this? Why wouldn’t a war of slow steady attrition against al Queda be smart? I realize that our in-built Western lack of patience pushes us to try to just damnit have it out once and for all. And indeed a big central kernal of much of our Western military thinking is to find, fix and destroy our enemies.

But why wouldn’t a low-level war of attrition against al Queda be in our favor really? After all even with our “big war” so far we haven’t been able to find and fix bin Laden and destroy his efforts. But this guy seems to be dying anyway, and his people are living in caves, with difficult access to resources at best, and heavily dependent on new recruits who of course are more drawn to his cause so long as it is seen as involved in some great pitched battle with us.

So why wouldn’t a lower-level, sustained, quieter effort be able to better tax bin Laden right where it hurts? We clear out of Afghanistan and say we have no problem with the Taliban so long as it doesn’t go harboring al Queda anymore. Bin Laden’s fame and repute and attractiveness goes down, we focus more on starving him of resources, both physical and human, publicize to arabs the kind of regime he would want to impose on them, question his version of Islam and indeed ridicule it ….

In essence get inside *his* game-plan, and seek to wear *him* down rather than blow him up.

Cheers,

With regard to creating more al-Qaeda operatives via collateral damage, If we are talking drone attacks the collateral damage is light. The drones fire hellfire anti-tank missiles. I understand the concept of creating more enemies via collateral damage, but if we are stymied by the problem of how to kill al-Qaeda leaders while sparing their dinner guests, then we just lack the will to fight. Inviting Mulla Omar over for dinner and a sit down should be a hazardous undertaking after all. Pushtun’s understand certain basic principles and vengeance is one of them. If they understood our mission against Al-Qaeda in that light from the beginning we might have had less trouble with them.

It seems to me that the Taliban problem is at base an ethnic one, and given that the Pushtun are on both sides of the border, unsolvable beyond exterminating them as a people. Given the reality that Afghanistan does not exist as a nation state we should withdraw in a public way, while working with the Indians to bribe the local factions to keep them busy. Given our eight year stay is it too much to suppose that we would have some stay-behind intel assets? Our real national interest is to hunt down the perpetrators or 9/11. This would actually be easier in the chaotic state of affairs that would result after we withdraw. Beyond that who cares who controls Afghanistan?

You’re right that there’s a great deal of skepticism at TAC about the value of long-range remote weapons — that skepticism is predicated on the belief that these weapons are ineffective at “killing al-Qaeda operatives,” or rather that for however many al-Qaeda operatives they succeed in killing, they create many more potential al-Qaeda operatives because of the collateral damage involved.

You’re confusing a mission with a strategy. The strategy was to keep Saddam moving from place to place, denying him a central command center. The strategy worked. That mission failed. Many do. People resent having property and lives destroyed from the air. That has been understood since 1916 or so.

In this piece and Williams S. Lind’s article in TAC, I detect a certain abhorrence at long range remote weapons, such as the JDAMs and drones. But surely it’s the misguided policy of occupying deeply alien countries, particularly with no clearly defined or obtainable objectives in place, that is the seat of our problem. I fail to see the logical objection to killing al-Qaeda operatives using such means.

You have to learn to use “snark” so that you can denigrate any of the popular conservative icons, and you then pretend to “criticize” libs and other pseudo-conservatives, with snide back-handed compliments.

For example, when the earth slides into it’s ice age,this is the earth “healing itself” from the evils of big manufacturing and our “use and discard” society. But wait, new science indicates a “global warming”, but the part about the earth healing itself is still valid. But wait, indications about the “warming” and the “cooling” are unclear, but we can always scare people with predictions of “change we can believe in”, so the weather changing is the earth healing itself from our evil western materialistic society.

Rumors that, because the tree huggers haven’t let anybody cut their brush in CALLY-FOWN-YA for 50 years, that the wildfires are nature’s way of healing itself from stupid liberalism, these rumors are evil and the sign of an unstable neo-connish mindset. We think, instead, that a law should be passed that all Americans step up to the plate and donate to CALLY-FOWN-YA’s recovery (rates and amounts to be determined by governmental administrators at a later time, upon implementation, with small amounts to be diverted to pet projects of supporting legislators).

“George Will has come a long way in rethinking U.S. policy. But he still has a long way to go.”

To get to what better destination, Mr. McCarthy? You don’t say.

While it would be grading my own paper I think I could do a pretty good job of defending Will’s “get out and go offshore” suggestion re Afghanistan. Of course I wish that things had been done differently so that we weren’t in the present circumstance, but we’re talking about what to do now that the cards have already been dealt, right?

So what would you have us do differently than what Will suggests? Even from the mouths of our own officials (!!) Afghanistan is sounding more tar-babyish every day.

Cheers,

Saying what he said won’t cost him anything. As the author of this piece points out, he’s still taking a moderate stance. Furthermore, he’s taking it at a time when the foreign-policy neocons who earlier might have ripped him are not only irrelevant (that change happened sometime between 2006 and 2008) but also invisible.

Will has principled, smart, courageous things to say on many subjects, but this statement strikes me as a calculated concession to a reality that has already passed him by.