Curly Surmudgeon wrote:
On Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:45:52 -0600, Jeff Mc wrote:

Curly Surmudgeon wrote:
[snip]
I'm of the latter opinion. No troops, one small nuke on Tora Bora the
day Osama took credit. End of problem. Whether or not 9/11 was a
conspiracy, government involvement or solely bin Laden, none matter
when Osama took credit. At that point he signed his own death warrant.

Bush ****ed that up too, squandering world-wide sympathy, involving our
military into a ground war, giving moslems another cause to hate us,
squandering precious national resources and a death-spiral.
That would have been a threshold we would have deeply regretted
crossing,

I disagree, reasons below.

and in the worst possible region of the world in which to
cross it.

The best place to make such a stand.

The Neocons are just itching to begin deploying so-called tactical
nukes, maybe against Iran. I'm rather surprised they haven't yet. But,
in any case, as a technical matter, they would not have gotten the job
done in Tora Bora.

I said "nuke," singular. One medium sized nuke, 20 megaton for example,
would have vaporized the entire mountain and turned the region into a
sheet of glass. Not only would it have nailed bin laden, we knew he was
there at the time, and obliterated his command hq, but sent a signal to
those who only know raw force.

A 20 megaton nuke is larger than anything in our current inventory, and
many times larger than any EPW (Earth Penetrating Weapon) now available
or even planned. An airburst weapon would be useless against hardened
targets like caves and bunkers, unless they were very shallow and the
burst was very large pretty close. It's effectiveness against surface
targets would be somewhat limited by terrain. It would, however, kill
and sicken millions in places like Pakistan and China. The consequences
would be unacceptable, particularly just to try, and fail, to kill one man.

An EPW would require precise targeting data, and if we had such precise
and timely data, we wouldn't have needed a nuke. EPWs are precision
weapons for fixed targets like runways and underground command posts,
not mobile targets hiding in any number of caves or other places. Their
range of effect is quite limited.

"Vaporized" mountains are the stuff of pure fantasy.

Simultaneously we would have removed all our troops and bases from around
the world removing the reason Islam hates us.

Saudi Arabia would be a good start. They don't need us to defend them,
and our bases there don't help us defend their ability to ship oil to
us, either.

Moreover, world opinion would have shifted even more rapidly and
irrevocably against us, and the entire Islamic world, including those
who are kinda, sorta with us, would have risen as one in opposition.

Naah, on 9/12 we had world opinion with us. A few might have made public
statements decrying the use but world opinion would have been, "America
finally grew a set of balls, let's not **** with them!"

All
they had to have done was commit sufficient resources to Afghanistan in
the first place, and then employ them intelligently and in a timely
manner, and they'd most likely have bagged ObL.

"...Most likely have bagged obl..." Close isn't good enough. You don't
know the history of Afghanistan, it beat the entire British Empire and
Soviet Union. With our supply lines a ground war is insane.

You'd think invading two separate countries and overthrowing two
regimes, one of which had nothing to do with 9/11, would be sufficient
to make that point. I do know the history of the region rather well,
and you are conflating a single, limited operation into the larger,
continuing war there.

Instead, American
forces were used to push him towards the Pakistani border, and
unreliable indigenous forces were the only ones positioned to prevent
him from slipping across. Foolish. It struck me at the time that they
must not have really wanted to catch him.

Jeff

Osama outwitted the entire Bush administration. Those who believe a
ground war of attrition will ever win in Afghanistan don't understand
history.

Correct.


The idea is not to kill pawns but to kill the queen. Headless, an enemy
dies.

If you think the problem is limited to ObL and whoever his current
henchmen happen to be, then you need to seriously broaden your perspective.

Jeff