Registan.net

I had to imagine Daniel Kimmage’s tongue was planted firmly in cheek as he wrote this analysis of the latest bin Laden tape. One of the more amusing points?

Osama bin Laden, the man who gained fame as the world’s leading advocate of violent religious fanaticism, turns out to be an old-fashioned, 20th-century aging leftist.

An address that contains less than 2,500 words mentions “large corporations” eight times, and blames all the ills of the world on them and the “capitalist system” they represent. The warmongers killed Kennedy for trying to end Vietnam and they’re keeping America in Iraq, he claims. Capitalists are melting the polar ice caps, miring hard-working Americans in debt, and have even got the Democratic Party in their deep pockets, he suggests. And the only one who’s crying wolf in America is, according to bin Laden, American linguist and left-wing political activist Noam Chomsky.

I for one still won’t read any of Chomsky’s books, in part because I don’t understand why a linguist is especially qualified to disprove capitalism or military policy. I guess that goes for crazed lunatics hiding in caves—at a certain point, you must laugh and shake your head. In case you’re wondering why the U.S. doesn’t go into the Durand badlands to capture Osama, Stratfor (yes, that Stratfor) draws up this dire scenario of just what it would require to travel into Waziristan and grab the man:

The United States and Pakistan have not launched a major military operation to envelop and systematically search the entire region where bin Laden likely is hiding — an operation that would require tens of thousands of troops and likely result in heavy combat with the tribes residing in the area. Moreover, this is not the kind of operation they will take on in the future. The United States, therefore, will continue intelligence and covert special operations forces efforts, but if it is going to catch bin Laden, it will have to wait patiently for one of those operations to produce a lucky break — or for bin Laden to make a fatal operational security blunder.

I dunno; I figure, if another surge is all it would take to eliminate the most important man in global terrorism, why not have just do it and be done with it? The real answer is because a surge into Waziristan would face all the problems the current war in Iraq does, including the tangled morass of tribal loyalties (this time interspersed with actual Al-Qaeda types, and not second-rate copycats) and a severe lack of local knowledge. The lesson one could draw from this tiny, ad hoc thought experiment? Simplistic answers to complex problems—a few thousand troops, for example—is precisely why the same wars we started six years ago still grind on.

Stumble it!