No, we were not loved in that region, thanks to our foreign policy blunder after the Soviet pull-out, but not everyone hated us either.

It's probable that some indeterminate portion of the Afghan people, possibly a majority, despise the Taliban, but see no alternative save a return to the bloody infighting which finally drove the masses to accept the repressive regime in the first place. Their draconian control restored some semblence of law and order (?) in their battered land.

If we are to get bin Laden, the effective choices are few.

We might have lain in wait, like a deer hunter, for him to emerge finally when he thinks the coast is clear. In waiting, we also might have accrued a lot of brownie points with the masses of Islam. American forbearance would have gone a long way toward defusing the wide-spread Islamic image of the United States as a bomb-happy world cop. This option is all but dead.

Other than a lucky direct hit on bin Laden's lair, the only way we're going to get the man is with our forces on the ground to root him out. We would/will probably suffer casualties in this effort, and setbacks, but a man-to-man fight would not generate further hatred for America, and we might even win some respect among Muslims in the process. Obviously, this option would accomodate a wide range of tactics, but all we really need is one good tip.

Such priceless intelligence is much more likely to emerge if we don't completely alienate the masses.

At any rate, bin Laden is as much a symbol as anything. Even with him dead, there are certainly many capable replacements ready to fill his shoes, albeit without his wealth.

But stop and think what was really required to execute the 9/11 attacks. It didn't take a lot of wealth or organization, despite what the press was reporting, rather just mostly dumb luck in the face of our own incredible stupidity when the warnings of this kind of attack were written in large, bold 72 pt. type.

I mean, a guy in Minnesota just wants to learn how to turn a plane, and the flying school gets suspicious and boots him out. How much effort would it have taken to run a routine check of all flying schools to see if there are any other student pilots out there with this preference in flight training? Any two-bit analyst should have known to do this, but apparently this routine check was not accomplished until after the fact.

The computer files recovered in the Phillipines from, I believe, Ramzi Yousef's PC detail a plan to fly a hijacked jet into CIA headquarters, another to blow up a dozen skyjacked airliners at one stroke. Subsequently, several cockpit incursions occur, in one case the skyjacker is beaten to death by passengers, in others disaster is narrowly averted.

Meanwhile, bin Laden and other militant Islamics are issueing Fatwahs and calls for a holy war against the U.S. and its citizens.

Our intelligence agencies were monumentally incompetent in the face of these kinds of warnings. And there is more.

The point I'm trying to make is that bombing is unlikely to get bin Laden, it is likely to increase anti-American sentiment when the inevitable mistakes occur, and the only tangible result is the destruction of a bunch of rusty Taliban assets which were a joke in the first place.

I was encouraged in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by a quote, perhaps apocryphal, which I heard attributed to President Bush: “It doesn't make a lot of sense to shoot a 2-million-dollar missile into a thirty dollar tent to hit a twenty-dollar camel in the ass.”

Indeed.

sp