Why not? They're the sort of friend that seems entirely suitable for people who
(a) had initially befriended the Taliban, and
(b) somehow contrive, in only three weeks, to parlay a secret stateless organisation's murderous attack on a few thousand workers in New York into terrifying all, probably inevitably starving most, and certainly directly killing some, of the population of the world's poorest country.
And with the implied threat that other millions of the world's poor elsewhere might expect same in the foreseeable future, too.
And think of the collateral damage Dubya's ordnance delivery is doing to our value-target-rich language by way of friendly fire!
Until yesterday, 'retaliation', 'surgical precision', 'justice', and 'proportionate' were perfectly serviceable words - words we were free to use without having to accompany them with ironic or apologetic paralinguistic qualifiers ...
But we do have one enrichment to the language. I believe we can add 'parallel humanitarianism', which may be defined as:
a concerted two-pronged strategy, whereby
(a) a poverty-stricken population of millions is denied access to food just as they're about to become snowbound for six months, by way of forcing them off their land and away from their supply routes, by way of large-scale remote bombing campaigns,
while also
(b) dropping enough food parcels to feed 0.5% (37000 divided by 7 million) of said dislocated starving population for one day from extreme altitude such as to spread these few morsels across as much of the world's largest minefield as it is possible for two C17s to cover.
Cheers, Rob.