USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011217.1001 (On Screen via long range sensors): I remember when I was young and began to discover girls. Women are nice to watch; and frankly doing so is involuntary. I couldn't stop even if I wanted to. At first I was embarrassed by it, but I got over that. Of course, while the low level mechanisms co-opt the eyeballs and steer them at attractive targets, it's inevitable that higher brain functions should operate on the images being captured, and inevitably there was scoring: OK; how good looking is she? So what you do is to start with some standard of perfection (say, Sophia Loren) and then to tally up all the ways that the particular woman within view failed to live up to this high standard. This led to me concentrating on a woman's bad points, and also led to a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Then I got a grip: the right way to do this is not to compare agains Miss Loren, but agains Selma Thump of Oshkosh, the most ugly woman in the world (an imaginary creation which fused the worst characteristics imaginable; she's the one who rolled snakeeyes a hundred times and crapped out). Then the idea was to look for all the ways that this particular lady was better than that, and to concentrate on her good parts. So if her face was perhaps a big plain, then maybe she has a nice ass -- and that's what to look at. And suddenly I realized that world was full of beautiful women, and I became a much happier man.

But that other attitude, of painting an image of the best possible outcome and then complaining when reality doesn't match up, is unfortunately common -- not just in girl watching but in all things. We're seeing a lot of it now from anti-war writers who are trying to find some way of justifying the fact that they weren't really wrong to have opposed the war in Afghanistan, since the result turned out to be so lousy. That's what Ted Rall did a couple of days ago, and that is also what Adrian D'Hage does here. Both are trying to prove that since the situation in Afghanistan hasn't achieved instant perfection then the effort there must have been a total failure. There isn't any room in their elucidation for the idea of a partial success, or a limited objective. Thus they place the goal so far away that reality could not possibly match up, and thus "that girl is ugly" even if she's a knockout.

The unexpected speed of the Taliban's defeat is welcome news. But before we drink too much champagne, let's be wary of the challenges we're likely to face in the war against terrorism. It is still not a stretch to argue that the present strategy is a potential quagmire. It does have echoes of Vietnam.

First, there's the difficult task of apprehending or killing bin Laden and up to 1000 of his hardened fighters. Even as the fight against al-Qa'ida in Tora Bora intensified over the weekend, local Afghan leaders cautioned that the campaign for bin Laden and his top al-Qa'ida lieutenants could drag out.

So he beings with a grudging admission that she's really pretty darned good looking, But... Always the inevitable "But". And then the rest is a litany of all the ways she doesn't really measure up to what she really should have been in an ideal world.

There is the obligatory claim of quagmiredom and the invocation of the demon of Viet Nam. (Hey, anyone notice that the US is normalizing relations with Viet Nam, and that they are eager for trade with us?)

Yes, it's true that some of al Qaeda will get away. That's never been in doubt. But the organization has been badly hurt, and in any case the process of pursuing them was never expected to end in Afghanistan. al Qaeda may well still have the ability to launch operations against us but they are less able to do so. There will be fewer missions and they will be less well organized and likely will be much less lethal. And that is a victory.

Then there's the looming instability and chaos in war-ravaged Afghanistan. Having conducted the campaign against the Taliban mainly from the air, there is a danger that precisely the same lawlessness that allowed the Taliban to ascend to power in 1994 will prevail.

Ultimately, war always requires troops on the ground to dictate victory. Lacking that commitment, we have surrendered the opportunity to dictate the peace. Hopefully, Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai will be able to hold the warlords together and a several thousand-strong UN stabilisation force will be allowed in.

On the contrary: there's every reason to believe that any attempt to dictate peace to the Afghan people through foreign occupation is doomed to failure. It is indeed true that the current government may fail; the idea, then, is to work to make sure that doesn't happen. But if we'd attempted to actually occupy the nation and create a government in our own image, we'd have been replicating the mistake the USSR made there which lead to nine years of war. Part of why this war has been so successful is precisely that the commitment of ground forces was careful and small. And by the same token, there's every reason to believe that this maximizes the chance of this new government succeeding.

But history says otherwise. Already, ma