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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Constant Reader who wrote (27848)	9/17/2001 1:48:26 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

Let's not be dense here. When governments that are legally prohibited from disposing of people really want to dispose of someone, they arrange for the disposal to be done by someone with no visible connection to the government. Let's not pretend that the bin Laden organization is composed of one maniac hiding out in Afghanistan and a bunch of suicide bombers. It's not. There are people in between. People who are able to travel freely, move money, move people, find flight schools that don't ask too many questions. People who speak fluent English, and other languages, people who can blend in and set up complicated logistic systems without arousing suspicions. These people are not in Afghanistan, and they are not running around in headscarves shouting "Allahu Akhbar". These are the people we need to eliminate. I suspect that our caricatured tough-guy response will run into all manner of trouble. There are so many possible complications. For example: we say to the Taleban "you folks got 3 days to turn over Osama, udderwise we gonna come in dere and git 'im". Fine. What happens if they agree, then come back in a day saying "sorry, he bolted". Well, maybe they are lying, and he's still shacked up in Afghanistan. Maybe they aren't lying. Our responses would surely have been anticipated; they are utterly predictable. Bin Laden surely knew, long before the strike, that whether it succeeded or not, we'd be coming after him. Do you really think he has no plan, that he is huddled weeping in some camp waiting for us to come and get him? How hard would it be to smuggle him into Pakistan, across one of the world's most porous borders? The Pakistani government may be cooperating, but many of their bureaucrats are fundamentalist sympathizers, and many others can be bribed. By the time our ultimatum expires, he could be living quietly, with a full set of false identity papers, in a rural village in Pakistan. He could be in Iran, or practically any other country with a sympathetic fundamentalist network. We could be sending troops after someone who isn't even there. Even if we did get him, do we really want to stage the trial of Osama with his whole functional network still out there? How many deaths would there be before that show was over? Our goal is to eliminate the capacity of terrorist networks to strike at us. That means eliminating the working terrorists, the ones based outside of the hideaways. I would like to believe that the war on terrorism is a simple matter that can be resolved by leading an armed charge into Afghanistan, but I can't do that. I would like to believe that the monster will die if its head is removed, but I don't believe that either. I will watch with interest. I suspect that things will become quite complicated, and that the cowboy approach will prove to be less than effective.