Guest Anonymous,

Your characterization of my position is very unflattering, but also is fortunately completely fictitious. Viokence is a confession of failure in the worst degree. But when violence comes to your doorstep, leaves your people dead, and threatens to overthrow your state, it is naive not to expect humans to engage. The notion that this is a sop to rage is jejeune.

That said, I am completely in agreement that a big muscle display of bombing is probably not the effective strategy. If you read my often confused and upset posts from September, I have said over and over that the organization that launched these attacks need to be rooted out with ground intelligence and made powerless through surgical PR operations, not bunker busters. Special Ops where necessary on known targets. Using Normandy's tactics to address Al Quesadilla is not going to advance the legitimate purposes of the semicoalition. Partly this is occurring because we have transferred our hostility to the Taliban itself, as an extension of the terrorist network it sheltered.

I agree with both of you that violence tends to beget violence, but I do think it is possible that things can get better. War has an end state. It ends when the enemy's frame of mind has become amenable (Klausewitz).

In this case it would end instantly if the Taliban offered to provide all participants of the Quesadilla up to a court of acceptable jurisprudence and provide any intelligence it could about the extent of the network's associations. I am sure there are a small handfull of senior members who could make a meaningful offer along those lines.

Failing that, it will end (at least insofar as Afghanistan is concerned) when the Taliban can't support itself as the governing body and an Afghan coalition of representatives takes over.

A.