USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011208.0033 (On Screen via long range sensors): The Times of London reports that Mullah Omar may be under the control of a local Pashtun tribal leader who was and maybe still is somewhat sympathetic to the Taliban cause. If this is true, and given that he didn't manage to find a martyr's death for himself, then it raises the interesting issue of whether the new government of Afghanistan would be willing to turn him over to us.

But then the Times comes up with this gem:

Fears were setting in that the anti-Taleban coalition had lost the man without whom, along with Osama bin Laden, the United States cannot claim victory in its war against terrorism.

I am using main force to keep from spouting profanity here. Where did the Times' writer get the idea that Omar and/or bin Laden were the point of this war? Actually, I don't think that's it. What I think we're seeing here is a projected wish that maybe if the US manages to get its hands on Omar that it will be satisfied and won't feel the need to spread the war to other places. That is utter horseshit; this war was never about capturing and punishing anyone. It always was and still is about eliminating forces in the world which were and are intolerably dangerous to the US. We've had one of ours cities pasted; we're going to do our best to make sure it doesn't happen again. Destroying al Qaeda and eliminating the Taliban were always, always, seen as merely being a first step in that process, because al Qaeda was always seen as being only one of several such groups which were dangerous, and it was always expected that no matter how the war in Afghanistant turned out that it would be necessary to take care of other problem-spots in the world. Those places may or may not require actual combat; one would hope that most of them will not. But the capture of Omar will not change them nor remove the necessity of dealing with them.

Capturing Omar won't mean we won this war, and not capturing him won't mean that we lost it. This war was never about Omar. (discuss)

There's a difference between things going badly and things not going perfectly. These writers are seizing on a series of small setbacks and blowing them all out of proportion. Yes, some Taliban fighters escaped from Kandahar; that was to be expected. Yes, they're going to go into the hills and fight a guerrilla action; that, too, was expected. Yes, we still don't know where bin Laden is. What of it? Those are small things by comparison to all that's gone well in this. No military operation every runs ideally; there are always setbacks. The way to judge a military operation is by whether it achieves its goals despite the setbacks, not by whether there are setbacks at all. So far this one has been spectacularly successful at achieving its political goals. However, it's clear from this that these writers don't have a clue as to what the goal of this war actually is; they still think it was revenge or law enforcement or retaliation. It was never about any of those things.