Enough sand to cover my head? Not an idiom I am familiar with. I suppose it must mean something.

Anyway I'll expand the point I was making when I said "It doesn't seem too plausible that anyone in Afghanistan could have had anything directly to do with operational planning and carrying out of what happened on September 11."

What seems pretty clear is that the pattern of operations underlying September 11th was one of small cells operating independently, picking out targets, planning independently, and themselves getting hold of the resources they needed. Which in this case consisted of a few knives and some plane tickets, and crucially a bunch of totally committed people.

But the idea that someone stuck in a cave in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, (without even a phone, with the only means of contacting the outside world being it appears to send a courier on a mule) could have had a significant operational control over something like September 11 - well it strikes me as implausible.

The role of Bin Laden in all this would have been to approve, not to direct, except in the most remote way. I don't mean that this mightn't have been a very significant role. It could be that without his blessing the whole thing wouldn't have happened.

But is it really probable that the death of Bin Laden, if and when that occurs, is in itself likely to make that much difference to the possibility of further terrorist outrages? What matters from that point of view isn't so much what happens in the mountains of Afghanistan as what happens in the more comfortable parts of the world.