Amen, Byron.

It’s entirely understandable that we don’t want to make life more difficult for Musharraf and Karzai — if the former falls, we can stop fretting so much about Iran’s bomb because the jihadists will already have one, and the latter is struggling to remake an unruly country under circumstances where NATO’s commitment and recent performance have been disheartening, to say the least. But c’mon. You don’t get to try to kill the Vice President of the United States without consequences.

We belittled President Clinton’s response to the attempt on President Bush 41 for years because it wasn’t sufficiently serious — missiles at an Iraqi intelligence facility intentionally fired late at night so no one would get killed except the janitors. Now, we’re at war with these guys. They are making a point of showing they are still strong and consider us to be flagging. Zawahiri is campaigning for the jihadist movement to circle the wagons around Mullah Omar. The Taliban is resurgent, while its backbone, al Qaeda, is telling everyone (including, especially, its recruits) that we are about to skulk away with our tails between our legs — just as bin Laden always said we would.

There has to be a swift and substantial response to this. And if the Democrats were smart, after all their bleating about how they all support the “real” war on terror in Afghanistan, they should be the first people screaming for it.