PLAYING "WHACK-A-MOLE" IS GOING TO DO US IN

I found it amusing when the US government announced the death of Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani--after a recent air strike--was a major "victory" in the war on terror, and that his death would have profound implications on the war in Afghanistan in the long-term.

Funny, Bush said the same thing when Al-Zarqawi was killed in June 2006. ("A major blow to Al-Qaeda in Iraq."--in his words.)

Of course, it was said of the same when Saddam himself was captured, and when his sons were killed at the beginning of the Iraq War.

In fact, I recall many such "trumpeting" declarations by the US government every time some [[major]] domo/terrorist figure was killed by a US air strike.

But the government is failing to catch onto 2 important things:

1) Terrorism won't go away. It'll always be there--no matter how much military force is applied.

2) Believing that this is some kind of "whack-a-mole" game where the bad guys will lose and the good guys always win, is so...twentieth-century. In this day and age, terrorism has taken on a whole new dimension. And while most groups are now de-centralized and broken up into cells, killing a major figure like Osmani, or even Osama bin Laden, won't end the threat of terrorism.

It'll just mean that the cell Osmani was in gets a trained replacement and the war goes on. Nothing changes.

But being entrenched in Cold War tactics isn't winning any points for our side. In fact...has anyone noticed lately that we are eerily following the same pattern the Soviet Union took with Afghanistan in the 1980s?

And look at what happened to them.

Schuyler Thorpe

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