> Dennis Perrin wrote:
>
> >But what would be an "appropriate international police response"? I mean,
if
> >it meant going in and ridding the Afghans of the Taliban, would that
upset
> >you? I've seen plenty of people say they'd support a "police action" but
> >they never say how it would differ from what the US did.
>
> This is just the point that got me in trouble when Rick Perlstein
> quoted me in the NY Observer saying that it would take considerable
> force to capture these motherfuckers. You can't just parachute in and
> arrest thousands of heavily armed, resourceful people who will fight
> to the death. The crime/police action contingent were never very
> clear on this.
This takes the administration's version of events far too much at face value.
The unspoken implication is that if we hadn't dispatched the Taliban, thousands of terrorists plotters would still be walking free around Afghanistan instead of occupying cells in Guantanomo Bay, as our leader told Congress in January.
But the penitents in Guantanomo aren't the terrorists plotters. As a senior administration official told the NY Times recently, the "vast majority were cannon fodder" - volunteer foot-soldiers whose job was to shoot at the Northern Alliance. 99.9% of the time, a newspaper article referring to "Al-Qaeda personnel" killed or captured is talking about these cannon-fodder types. They're not the guys who plot to blow up buildings in the Midwest.
The number of actual "terrorists" in Afghanistan - people who are in on attacks against civilians in Western cities - probably number in the low dozens, I'm guessing. And virtually none of these people have been captured or killed. Not Bin Laden, Al Zawahiri, or anyone else. (They claim Mohammed Ataf was killed in a bombing raid, but they're not sure.) Of the FBI list of the "22 Most Wanted Terrorists" released on Day 1 of the bombing, none has been captured or killed. So on the Bush administration's own terms, the war has been a failure.
The biggest success against Al Qaeda so far was the capture of Abu Zubayda. But the irony is poignant: he was captured in a police raid in Pakistan, where he had lived the last two years. He was never based in Afghanistan. So the biggest success so far was the result of exactly the type of crime/police action methods that the left advocated during the war.
Seth