Punching from our heels

I can think of few -- even those irrational Bush haters we read so much about -- who questioned the wisdom or propriety of invading Afghanistan so soon after the towers fell. Doghouse Riley offers a corrective.

We have no idea whether the dire warnings of an imminent Taliban offensive are accurate. This is, after all, military intelligence, what the noted philosopher Rocket J. Squirrel once referred to as a Contradiction in Terms. But if not this Spring, then the next, or the next. What is plain now is that, had we been able to act like rational people then, we wouldn't be in these straits now. Is there anyone left to argue that the Hell-for-Leather attack on Afghanistan achieved something that wouldn't have been achieved otherwise? Remember, we didn't accuse the Taliban of complicity in 9/11, only of harboring al-Qaeda, and our response was to demand that they cede their sovereignty to us and hand over people we said were guilty, and all Before Sundown, Pardner. We wouldn't have done so ourselves, mutatis mutandis, to the Israelis, let alone the Afghans.

The point of all this, which was conveniently ignored if not actively disputed, was not that one should observe all the niceties of international diplomacy out of some sense of propriety. It was that five seconds after the first-round bell is too soon to start swinging from the heels, regardless of how much you outweigh the other guy. No one can say whether international pressure could have caused the Taliban to turn over bin Laden. All we can say at this point is that the opposite approach sure didn't get the job done. Haste caused us to grant far too much for Musharraf's cooperation, which, not surprisingly, did not seem to extend to committing political suicide in order to serve us up a heaping bowlful of al-Qaeda. We stuck our noses into the most dangerous potential conventional nuclear confrontation on the planet (on China's doorstep, no less), which we had to resolve (if that) by rewarding India for failing to sign the Non-Proliferation treaty.

I guess we should all be thankful that the government of Pakistan is so stable.

Every month's "delay" in 2001-02 would be one more month's rest for what's now left of US ground forces, one less month's worth of junked equipment, one less month's worth of disabled GIs being strongarmed for reporting appalling hospital conditions to the press. (Throw in, if you wish, that after four years of horseshit about the Clinton administration and North Korea we eventually forced ourselves to make essentially the same deal but from a position of weakness.) But we were the aggrieved party, and we were going to show the world who the superpower was.

At the time of the invasion I thought our response was reasonable. That's how self-satisfied an American even this Moonbat lefty felt at the time. We were attacked by al Qaeda, so we had every right to lash out at the regime that harbored its leadership. And I wasn't alone. There weren't too many Noam Chomsky's out there. It didn't help the Taliban's case that they were were crude, treated women like chattel, hated music and other human pleasures, and were rapidly destroying Afghanistan's cultural treasures.

The first sense of unease I felt was when we started marching suspected Taliban off to Guantanamo. Men and boys who'd been picked up on the field of battle in the civil war they were fighting against the Northern Alliance, not us. And all of them products of our proxy war with the Soviet Union.

So when I heard the news today, that yet another "number-three" guy in the Taliban was conveniently served up by Pakistan a few days after Wanderin' Dick Cheney did not beat up on Musharraf, color me as unimpressed. That six foot-plus guy with the dialysis machine remains on the loose, no doubt hiding in plain sight in that region of Pakistan I just heard Bush call "Wilder than the Wild West." If we had reacted to the attacks of September 11, 2001 as brutal, murderous crimes, rather than "AN ACT OF WARRRRR!," maybe he'd be in our custody today.