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say we may have killed Mohammed Atef, a top bin Laden lieutenant.
This is one
of those moments when history seems to come together, when two warring
sides achieve a strange confluence of interests across all that
separates them. To wit: bin Laden and his associates, on the one
hand, constantly say how they are willing to be killed for their
cause, and we, on the other, are willing to kill them for their
cause.
Isn't that
kind of nice? It's a real "We Are the World" kind of moment.
There should
be, if we take their words seriously, great rejoicing in the bin
Laden camp at the excellent martyrdom of Atef. We don't know what
kind of bomb he was dispatched with, but we do know that he did
a spectacular job of being dispatched. Congratulations, Mr. Atef,
and may your splendid example be followed by your colleagues very
soon!
It would be
easier to take seriously the bin Ladenites' call to martyrdom, of
course, if they would just stand still and let themselves be martyred,
instead of running into the hills like nothing is so important to
them as avoiding a few 1,000-pounds dropped from a B-52. But why
should such a corrupt excrescence of Western culture, such a banal
and "cowardly" weapon, faze these fearsome warriors?
The debate
over the bravery or cowardice of the suicide hijackers always seemed
a no-brainer: It is not a courageous act to sneak onto an airliner
full of unsuspecting people, and slit the throats of women. (See
Jonah's excellent
column on this point.) But anyone who had illusions about the
courage of bin Laden and co. should look at what they do when confronted
with a real military: They run and hide, and run some more.
The success
of the Afghanistan campaign over the last week is testament to the
efficacy of killing your enemies. It was something we had been awfully
chary about during most of the 1990s. Even the early part of this
campaign seemed to have been stifled by a "gentle war"
restraint.
But over the
last two weeks or so Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seemed to get
steadily more blunt about our aim: to kill the Taliban. He would
actually use the word "kill." This was refreshing stuff,
since we had almost none of it from the previous administration.
A Nexis search
of all of 1999 — when we fought a war in Kosovo — doesn't
turn up one instance of Bill Cohen using the word "kill"
to refer to what we were doing to the Serbs. That apparently would
have been much too impolite.
The few times
the word does show up is in statements like this: "We are attacking
the military infrastructure that President Milosevic and his forces
are using to repress and kill innocent people."
Well, you can't
kill military infrastructure, as we learned during the first few
weeks of the Afghan war when we tried to impress the Taliban by
blowing up their buildings. What gets their attention — what
prompts defections, betrayals, and groveling surrender — is
the sort of thing that was happened to Mohammed Atef, now apparently
good and martyred.
Dowd
Footnote
Maureen
Dowd wrote the other day about how "embarrassed" the
U.S. should be by the "savage force" of the Northern Alliance.
Before she apologizes for America, however, Dowd should at least
read her own newspaper. This is from the New York Times yesterday:
Alberto Cairo,
who has worked for the International Red Cross in Afghanistan
for 12 years, said the shift in power was the most peaceful he
had seen in a country ruined by 22 years of almost continual fighting
and fast-shifting alliances among rival clans and warlords.
He said his
organization had collected the bodies of 10 Afghan and Pakistani
fighters in the capital, but could not say whether they had died
in fighting or in reprisals as the Northern Alliance forces entered
Kabul on Tuesday.
He praised
the general lack of violence and looting in the city and the work
so far of the roughly 2,000 alliance policemen and soldiers securing
it.
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