The real secret weapons against terrorism??

[dieseltaylor]

But winning a war - surely that is a matter of framing your war aims to be realistic. Frame them stupidly and you are stuffed.

The trouble with the US I think was not sticking to smack Al-Quaedi and force a regime change if necessary. If boots on the ground were required it should have been for as short as time as possible.

The garbage about building a new society bladiblah was a fatal mistake as it tied US prestige to something essentially unwinnable in the short term , the medium term, and possibly unwinnable in the longer ten year term.

Thei blog here has some very interesting articles, it is new to me but I am very impressed.

http://www.fpif.org/blog?type=Blog&start=10

anyway here is a flavour if the story

The Americans claim Davis was carrying out surveillance on radical insurgent groups, and was simply defending himself from two armed robbers. But Davis’s story has problems. It does appear that the two men on the motorbike were armed, but neither fired their weapon and, according to the police report, one did not even have a shell in his pistol’s firing chamber. Davis apparently fired through the window of his armored SUV, then stepped out of the car and shot the two men in the back, one while attempting to flee. He then calmly took photos, called for backup, climbed into his car, and drove off. He was arrested shortly afterwards at an intersection.

The Pakistanis have a different view of the incident. According to Pakistani press reports, the two men were working for the ISI and were trailing Davis because the intelligence agency suspected that the CIA agent was in contact with the Tehrik-e-Taliban, a Pakistani group based in North Waziristan that is currently warring with Islamabad. As an illustration of how bizarre things are these days in Pakistan, one widespread rumor is that the U.S. is behind the Tehtik-e-Taliban bombings as part of a strategy to destabilize Pakistan and lay the groundwork for an American seizure of Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal.