Rumors of War

The objectives of war are certainly hard to achieve, especially if one side tries to limit the damage done to the other.

A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of Afghans surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to "destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan." It may be difficult to bring many of these stone age communities up to Enlightenment speed; usually bombing and SAW fire drives targets from modern to stone age, not the other way. And, as bizarre as polling the enemy might be, it is the way of our world now, although it does raise some interesting possibilities. Could the enemy manipulate the results of the polls for his advantage? Could every guerrilla band have a PR man?

Our motives will never be clear to everyone; they're not always clear to me. But now that the resistance to us has moved to Pakistan, what are our objectives now? This adventure in the Middle East has all the trappings of a good, abstract idea. But these ideas are experiments, nothing more. Conjecture. And it is hard to justify putting the lives of young people on the line for conjecture.

But it has always been easy for the elite to be courageous with the yeoman's life and happiness.