USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011212.2305 (On Screen): I just love the passive voice. It covers up a multitude of sins.

As U.S. warplanes continue to pound cave complexes containing al Qaeda fighters in eastern Afghanistan, the onslaught is raising questions about whether the ultimate American aim should be defeating the terrorist forces – or annihilating them.

Actions don't raise questions, people do. The proper way to phrase this would have been: The onslaught is causing XXXX to raise questions about... only then the reporter would have to identify just who XXXX is who is doing the raising -- and we might find that it's someone that we really don't care about, such as the reporter himself.

If the United States does in the last phase of the Afghan war wage a campaign of extermination against the network's leaders – for example, by refusing to accept surrenders so it can continue bombing the Tora Bora caves where some al Qaeda members are holed up – it may lose international support by appearing overly vengeful and, some legal experts say, could even find itself accused of war crimes.

Let's see if I can't express my view about international supporters as briefly as possible: Fuck 'em. International support is not an end but a means, and when it prevents us from doing what we need to do, then it is no longer an asset and will be dispensed with. The comment about refusing surrenders refers to this article which reports that the last remaining pocket of al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan tried to surrender on their own terms, terms which were not acceptable to the US.

Several Afghan leaders said today that Americans in the area had adamantly resisted terms of the deal, which would have allowed bin Laden's mainly Arab and other foreign fighters to hand themselves over to the United Nations and diplomatic representatives of their own countries.

"The Americans won't accept their surrender," Hazrat Ali, regional security chief for eastern Afghanistan, said after emerging from hours of negotiations with U.S. officials. "They want to kill them."

Well, it's true that we wouldn't mind at all if they all ended up dead, but the primary point is to make sure that they don't get away. They can surrender to us or they can die. "Going home" isn't one of the choices; there's too much chance that they'll get free and be able to start operating against us again. It's not that we refused surrender as that we refused an unreasonable surrender. They're the ones who are surrounded and getting bombed, so they don't get to set the terms of the surrender. And that is completely legal; it is not a war crime. International law has never granted surrounded soldiers the right of free passage to whereever they want to go. Their "surrender" offer wasn't really a surrender offer, and that means they are still resisting and still a legitimate military target.

One of the results we need out of this war is to make an example out of both the Taliban and al Qaeda. For both organizations, the result must be total annihilation, and death or imprisonment for substantially all of their leaders. That is necessary to support the next phase in the war, where we're going to try to use diplomacy instead of further warfare to eliminate terrorist threats from other places. If we go to Somalia next and say "We hear you've got some al Qaeda training bases, and if you don't get rid of them we'll do it for you and get rid of you, too" then they're going to listen and believe and really do something about it -- because they won't want to end up the way the Taliban did. And the next terrorist group somewhere else who is contemplating an attack on the US will see what happened to al Qaeda, and think three times about it. (discuss)