I could have taken this question to several other places where folks are all "scum-sucking liberals" like myself, but I wanted to ask this question here, where opinions venture into areas beyond my experience.

I'm VERY interested in this "war", as noted by my continuous posts on the subject. HOWEVER, the U.S. is now in the 8th day of bombing there and [outside of disabling temporarily some things], the end result looks TO ME like we've hit an empty tent and a camel's behind, which Bush specifically said he would NOT do. Somewhere, during all of this bombing, I was informed by the media that Bush said that it could take a year or two to find bin Laden, but that "he was on the run".

Then there's the humanitarian effort, which Stephen Poole claimed would "win hearts". So far, the reports I've read include a young boy plunging the peanut butter packet into the ground thinking it a toy, people feeding the food to their animals, people burning the food packets because they felt it an insult to substitute a few food packets for their blood, and food packets being sold in local markets. Okay...there WERE a few other reports that said that the people just didn't LIKE the food. It was too "Western" for their tastes.

So what has the U.S. accomplished so far? There must be SOME accomplishment, as Flint stated that the NYT and even Cherri agreed with Bush in his actions on this one, but I'm just not seeing WHAT.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), October 15, 2001

Answers

Saudi Arabia doesn't want anything to do with the child developed in their territory.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), October 15, 2001.

A great deal has been accomplished. Remember how long the air phase lasted before the Gulf War with Iraq? Knocking out command and control, air defenses, hard assets, training bases, etc. This is REQUIRED to make the next phase -- sending in ground troops -- less likely to incur casualties.

It won't take as long in this case, because Afghanistan doesn't have the assets that Iraq did, but it still takes SOME time.

Not that the air offensive hasn't rocked the Taliban; they're hurting badly, too. Their ever-more-strident appeals for a "jihad" (which so far, few but Islamic Fundies appear deeply interested in) is one proof of that. Their renewed calls for "negotiation" (which are just the same calls, repeated) are another.

Think about it: if the Taliban was really "shrugging" all of this off, they'd be boasting about it and standing pat. They aren't. We are systematically destroying what military power they have ... and they NEED that hardware to retain control over their own people ... and to resist the Northern Alliance, which has retaken a good piece of northern Afghanistan in the past two weeks.

On that subject: I would also imagine that there's a good discussion between Washington and London about what to do with the Northern Alliance. At first, they seemed like a gift, but there are second thoughts. I think we'll probably end up supporting a coalition government built *around* the Northern Alliance, but that's just a guess (and worth every cent that you paid for it[g]).

-- Stephen M. Poole (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), October 15, 2001.

We have seriously weakened the fascist Taliban without (knock on wood) losing an American military person. We have put terrorism on the defensive here and abroad. We do not know, nor should we know, exactly what has been accomplished. It's a war, not a sporting event, not an election, not a TV show.

The campaign against world terror is far from won. The Taliban has not surrendered, it has not given up BL. When it does collapse, there will be the question of what happens next?

There are those that advocate a neo-colonialism. I don't go that far, but neither do I trust the UN do anything substantive (except wanting to station underarmed US soldiers in wimpy blue helmets as sitting-duck peace keepers). Maybe Tajikistan can take over?

On to Iraq.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 15, 2001.

Anita dear heart,

The face of the world changed forever on 9/11. That face now reveals a kind of creature not understood by many before then. In the Western experience we have always, when necessary, fought with the hope of returing home. These people do not. This is the newly revealed creature. (He's been there a long time, just not widely recognized.) Within his value structure it is not only honorable to die for your cause, as it is in ours, it is to be HOPED FOR and sought after.

While many of us have the highest respect for an individual who holds thier religious beliefs close to heart, and even more respect for someone willing to die for thier bleiefs, we are engaged in nothing less that a struggle for Western Civilization.

The ONLY way you can defeat a enemy who is willing and eager to die for is cause is to KILL him.

Let us observe proper respect, then go kill them.

What we have accomplished so far is the BEGINNING of killing them. We will need to to more, possibly a LOT more killing.

Any civilized person abhors killing. Any person experienced in these matters know that however horrific, it is sometime the ONLY effective course.

Let us use the respect we have for the these terrorists and help hasten thier trip to thier God. The sooner the better.

Here's hoping Osama get to meet his God soon.

- Greybear

-- Got Beans?

-- Greybear (greybear@hotmail.com), October 15, 2001.

Sorry, for whatever is matters, my addy should have read as on this addendum.

-- Greybear (greybear@worldemail.com), October 15, 2001.

All good questions, but there is just one mistake in your post. The "scum-sucking" ones are the Repugs and Conservos, not the liberals. Don't see how you could make such an obvious mistake, don't let it happen again.

-- (very@foolish.mistake), October 15, 2001.

The New Great Game: Oil Politics In Central Asia By Ted Rall

Alternet Article Dated 10/15/2001

Nursultan Nazarbayev has a terrible problem. He's the president and former Communist Party boss of Kazakhstan, the second-largest republic of the former Soviet Union. A few years ago, the giant country struck oil in the eastern portion of the Caspian Sea. Geologists estimate that sitting beneath the wind-blown steppes of Kazakhstan are 50 billion barrels of oil -- by far the biggest untapped reserves in the world. (Saudi Arabia, currently the world's largest oil producer, is believed to have about 30 billion barrels remaining.)

Kazakhstan's Soviet-subsidized economy collapsed immediately after independence in 1991. When I visited the then capital, Almaty, in 1997, I was struck by the utter absence of elderly people. One after another, people confided that their parents had died of malnutrition during the brutal winters of 1993 and 1994. Middle-class residents of a superpower had been reduced to abject poverty virtually overnight; thirtysomething women who appeared sixtysomething hocked their wedding silver in underpasses next to reps for the Kazakh state art museum trying to move enough socialist realist paintings for a dollar each to keep the lights on. The average Kazakh earned $20 a month; those unwilling or unable to steal died of gangrene adjacent to long- winded tales of woe written on cardboard.

Autocrats tend to die badly during periods of downward mobility. Nazarbayev, therefore, has spent most of the last decade trying to get his land-locked oil out to sea. Once the oil starts flowing, it won't take long before Kazakhstan replaces Kuwait as the land of Benzes and ugly gold jewelry. But the longer the pipeline, the more expensive and vulnerable to sabotage it is. The shortest route runs through Iran, but Kazakhstan is too closely aligned with the U.S. to offend it by cutting a deal with Teheran. Russia has helpfully offered to build a line connecting Kazakh oil rigs to the Black Sea, but neighboring Turkmenistan has experienced trouble with the Russians: they tend to divert the oil for their own uses without paying for it. There's even a plan to run crude out through China, but the proposed 5,300-mile line would be far too long to prove profitable.

The logical alternative, then, is Unocal's plan, which is to extend Turkmenistan's existing system west to the Kazakh field on the Caspian and southeast to the Pakistani port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. That project runs through Afghanistan.

As Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid describes in his 2000 book "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia," the U.S. and Pakistan decided to install a stable regime in Afghanistan around 1994 -- a regime that would end the country's civil war and thus ensure the safety of the Unocal pipeline project. Impressed by the ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the U.S. State Department and Pakistan's ISI intelligence service agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. It has been reported that as recently as 1999, U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official, all in the hopes of returning to the days of dollar-a-gallon gas. Pakistan, naturally, would pick up revenues from a Karachi oil port facility. Harkening to 19th century power politics between Russia and British India, Rashid dubbed the struggle for control of post-Soviet Central Asia "the new Great Game."

Predictably, the Taliban Frankenstein got out of control. The regime's unholy alliance with Osama bin Laden's terror network, their penchant for invading their neighbors and their production of 50 percent of the world's opium made them unlikely partners for the desired oil deal. Then-President Bill Clinton's 1998 cruise missile attack on Afghanistan briefly brought the Taliban back into line; they even eradicated opium poppy cultivation in less than a year, but they nonetheless continued supporting countless militant Islamic groups. When an Egyptian group whose members had trained in Afghanistan hijacked four airplanes and used them to kill more than 6,000 Americans on September 11, Washington's patience with its former client finally expired.

Finally the Bushies had the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. had wanted all along: invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime in Kabul. Realpolitik no more cares about the 6,000 dead than it concerns itself with oppressed women in Afghanistan; this ersatz war by a phony president is solely about getting the Unocal deal done without interference from annoying local middlemen.

Central Asian politics, however, is a house of cards: every time you remove one element, the whole thing comes crashing down. Muslim extremists in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, for instance, will support additional terror attacks on the U.S. to avenge the elimination of the Taliban. A U.S.-installed Northern Alliance can't hold Kabul without an army of occupation because Afghan legitimacy hinges on capturing the capital on your own. And even if we do this the right way by funding and training the Northern Alliance so that they can seize power themselves, Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun government will never tolerate the replacement of their Pashtun brothers in the Taliban by Northern Alliance Tajiks. Without Pakistani cooperation, there's no getting the oil out and there's no chance for stability in Afghanistan.

As Bush would say, make no mistake: this is about oil. It's always about oil. And to twist a late '90s cliché, it's only boring because it's true.

http://www.tbwt.com/content/article.asp?articleid=2026

-- Salah Al (Din@mecca.com), October 15, 2001.

What follows are my best guesses about the answer to your questions.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I think Bush had this one big hammer - an armed force that was mainly designed to fight the USSR. Bush is using the tools he has against the enemy that best fits his tools.

The Taliban kind of resembles a government with something that kind of resembles an army, so the Pentagon is fighting them the way it would any other government with an army. And it plays well on the home front. A lot of Americans were ready for some big explosions somewhere in enemy territory.

As a practical matter, the Taliban control(led) the territory of Afghanistan. They also allowed bin Laden and al-Qaeda to use that territory as a safe haven in which to train and from which to launch their activities. Safety is a valuable commodity. It was being used as a weapon against us. Our armed forces are in the process of removing some of that safety. A lot, I hope, but no one will tell us the truth about that. Not the Taliban or the Pentagon.

Our armed forces are also in the process of removing part of the Taliban's control over the territory of Afghanistan. This will make it easier to conduct search and destroy operations on the ground. I expect the targets for these operations will be mainly confined to infrastructure: facilities and supplies.

I very much doubt that we will kill any members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The best we are likely to do is to disperse them and force them into less-friendly territory where their operations will become more difficult.

Not coincidentally, we are demonstrating our willingness to destroy a government that did us harm. This may have a good effect in places like Kyrgyzistan and Tajikistan, who might otherwise be tempted to let al-Qaeda linger and set up shop.

If we do put troops on the ground in Afghanistan, the Afghans will very likely see us as invaders. They will feel compelled to resist us and to expel us. Chances are that any alliance we make to lend us legitimacy (for example, supporting the ex-king) is just as likely as not to taint our ally, as it is to legitimize us. I expect our government to understand that and to keep ground operations in the hands of allies as much as possible.

Control of Afghanistan is a very small prize any way you slice it. It is just an opening move and an expected one. Al-Qaeda will use it as a recruitment tool. We are giving them that in exchange for what we want. Their prime audience is made up of young, out-of-work students. Our prime audience is made up of governments around the world. We each gain something out of this. It is the Afghanis who are getting the dirty end all around.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), October 15, 2001.

To see incredible before and after photos of empty tents and camels' behinds, go here.

Maybe somebody can post some of the pictures.

-- They blowed (up@real.good), October 15, 2001.

"Bush is using the tools he has against the enemy that best fits his tools."

Sheeesh! That's scary!

That statement sounds as though it could have come straight from Dubya's mouth! But what the hell does it MEAN???

LMAO!

-- (monkey see @ monkey. do), October 15, 2001.

anita one thing is for certain my dear they did not teach you anything hark i hear college calling you

-- (anita@is.anass), October 15, 2001.

Stephen: Remember? You know my memory better than to ask. However, I DID read an article comparing THIS effort to that of the Gulf War. It seems that there's hardly anything to hit in this one, and fewer resources are being utilized. Thinking back [my memory DOES seem to work for a few days], I seem to remember the press reporting that the U.S. had basically run out of things to hit, yet the bombing continues.

Comparing the Gulf War to the Afghanistan effort

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), October 15, 2001.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20011015/ts/attack_military_dc_25.ht ml

Monday October 15 8:32 PM ET

U.S. Launches Heaviest Bomb Raids Yet

By Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. warplanes on Monday launched their heaviest daylight strikes yet on Afghanistan, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Taliban troops dug in north of Kabul that more bombs were on the way.

Rumsfeld told a news conference U.S. intelligence information had improved both from the air and on the ground as daylight strikes increased sharply on Sunday and Monday in an intense campaign across Afghanistan that began on Oct. 7.

Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff, added that both U.S. and British warships resumed firing cruise missiles at targets over the weekend ranging from airfields to guerrilla training bases.

``There have been troop concentrations that have been attacked every day in the last three or four,'' Rumsfeld said. He told Taliban troops dug in north of Kabul, ``In the period ahead, that's not going to be a very safe place to be.''

Forces of the Northern Alliance opposed to Afghanistan's ruling Taliban have been pressing the United States to attack more than 5,000 Taliban troops entrenched north of the capital. The opposition forces, fighting a civil war since before the U.S. strikes began, control swathes of northern Afghanistan.

On Monday, the U.S. military used one of its most devastating attack planes, the AC-130, to target the Taliban stronghold city of Kandahar, a senior defense official said.

It was the first time in the nine-day air campaign that the four-engine turbo-prop aircraft -- equipped with a 150mm cannon and two rapid-fire machine guns capable of firing 2,500 bullets a minute -- has been used, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The use of this relatively slow plane in Kandahar is a sign that Taliban air defenses have been degraded, especially around populated areas.

The AC-130, which is operated by Air Force Special Forces troops, moves low and slow over ground targets, and the sound of its droning engines might be mistaken for a helicopter. CNN reported earlier that those on the ground in Kandahar had heard unusual air activity, possibly a helicopter.

The United States and Britain have struck hard at the Taliban, accused by Washington of protecting Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on America that killed nearly 5,400 people.

Myers said U.S. warplanes and American and British cruise missiles hit about 25 targets on Saturday and Sunday including ''terrorist camps, military training facilities, airfields, air defenses and command and control facilities.''

Monday's strikes included intense raids around Kabul, Jalalabad and the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, according to reports from Afghanistan.

``It was a pretty robust day,'' a U.S. defense official said later, requesting anonymity. The targets included Taliban military deployment and staging areas, weapons storage, and marshaling points used to organize troops.

A small number of cruise missile strikes had been planned for Monday, but the official said he did not know whether the missiles had been used.

BETTER INTELLIGENCE AND TARGETS

Rumsfeld and Myers said that as Taliban air defenses were degraded and intelligence improved, the United States had become aware of more targets. Last week, U.S. defense officials had said the number of fixed targets such as Taliban warplanes, command centers and guerrilla training bases of bin Laden's al Qaeda network were decreasing as attacks mounted.

``The target set that existed at the outset has been significantly enhanced by additional information from the ground and by additional attention from the air,'' the secretary said as he and Myers showed more before-and-after photographs and films of target destruction on the ground.

``And as a result, the number of targets that are available have continued to be roughly the number that they were the day before, notwithstanding the kinds of film you have just seen where we have had success,'' he added.

Rumsfeld and Myers conceded Afghan civilians apparently died when a U.S. 2,000-pound bomb went astray over the Kabul airport and landed in a residential neighborhood on Saturday. Also there might have been casualties in a village near where an al Qaeda cave was struck by bombs and exploded last week.

But Rumsfeld said Taliban claims of more than 300 civilian dead so far were ``ridiculous.''

``We know of certain knowledge that the Taliban leadership and al Qaeda are accomplished liars, that they go on television and they say things that we know are absolutely not true,'' he said.

As part of a U.S. propaganda push, military planes dropped nearly a half-million leaflets over Afghanistan with a message in the local languages of Pashtu and Dari that the United States is not the enemy.

One leaflet showed a photo of an Afghan man shaking hands with a Western soldier, with the message: ``The partnership of nations is here to help.''

Another leaflet had a picture of a radio tower and radios, listing the times and channels for U.S. radio broadcasts that say the offensive is against terrorism, not Muslims or the people of Afghanistan, a Pentagon spokesman said.

FOURTH AIRCRAFT CARRIER APPROACHES

The latest Pentagon comments on military action in the new U.S. war on terrorism came as a fourth U.S. aircraft carrier moved near striking range of Afghanistan.

One defense official, who asked not to be identified, said the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt had headed south through the Red Sea toward the northern Indian Ocean after passing through the Suez Canal on Saturday.

The carriers Carl Vinson, Enterprise and Kitty Hawk are already in the Gulf and Indian Ocean region near Afghanistan.

The official said it was not clear whether the Roosevelt would replace the Enterprise, which is overdue on an earlier schedule to return to the United States, or if the Enterprise would be kept on station for the immediate future.

The Roosevelt, Enterprise and Carl Vinson each carries about 75 attack and support aircraft. The Kitty Hawk sailed from Japan last month without its aircraft wing and officials have confirmed it could be used as a base for raids by elite American Special Operations troops from the Indian Ocean south of Afghanistan.

-- Spoon (feeding@the.blind), October 15, 2001.

Taliban Foreign Minister Defects

The rats begin to leave the stinking ship.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 16, 2001.

Anita, the reason your salmon dries out is because you cook it too long. It only takes about fifteen minutes to cook. When done sprinkle with parmesan.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), October 16, 2001.

Is that the way Afghanis cook their salmon? We are cooking their goose.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 16, 2001.

If this campaign has accomplished one thing, it has convinced the Taliban that the USA is not the same as the USSR. I think we are taking a bit of the starch out of them. Let's not let it go to our heads.

-- Miserable SOB (misery@misery.com), October 16, 2001.

A Fight Over the Next Front

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), October 16, 2001.

"If this campaign has accomplished one thing, it has convinced the Taliban that the USA is not the same as the USSR."

Yes, it has convinced the Taliban that Dubya does not have the balls to send in ground troops like Russia did.

-- (Bush@Coward.In.Chief), October 16, 2001.

To the Bush hater, aka Bill Mahr, military strategy has nothing to do with balls. It has to do with winning, to exploit your enemy's weakness and not succumbing to his strengths. Geez, even little nipper knows this.

Anita, your article stated, "The modern record of "special operations" is at best checkered: when veterans think of operating helicopters in the sort of dust storms common to Afghanistan, they recall Desert One, the failed 1980 Iranian hostage-rescue mission. And the possibility of escalation-of regular ground troops invading Afghanistan-evokes mutterings from old warriors about another Vietnam." However it fails to note the main reason for these checkered events, the news media giving away our secrets. The media will, if given the opportunity, broadcast the whereabouts of our troops. They did this in Vietnam under the cloak of freedom of the press while the enemy knew our moves even before our troops did. The media fail to realize that this freedom of the press also gives our enemy an advantage. I applaud the tight lips our government has right now. Further on in the article, not even fazed by the possibility of harming our troops, the author surmises the whereabouts: ". . . these shadow warriors, sources say teams are already stationed at remote bases along the Afghan border in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as well as aboard the carrier Kitty Hawk, which has finally arrived in the Arabian Sea." I'd go even further by allowing the Pentagon to give misinformation to the press. The media doesn't check 'sources' anyway.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), October 16, 2001.