Top priority would be to get Pakistan's military cooperation, since that would be the idea way to handle this.

But for a number of reasons, overt military action by Pakistan has become difficult for the leadership over there, and a covert search and destroy becomes the second fallback position.

For this, drones and other observation/attack systems, along with intelligence sources on the ground, work quite well. There's plausible deniability by the Pakistan government, and no U.S. troops on site. I would hope this could be continued.

So how would I do it? Just like that.

Lost in the hysterics is the fact that this area is a known hideout for al Qaeda, the Pakistan assertion that Zawahiri and other al Qaeda members had been invited to these homes, and that it would be natural in this culture for such an invitation to include entire families.

It also may turn out that some al Qaeda members were, in fact, killed in the attack.

If nothing else, the flap on this issue is proof positive that if we had never attacked Iraq, the Left would now be just as enthusiastically condemning Bush for pretty much anything else he was doing in the war on terror.

The military was going after a known terrorist, one with a known connection to the 9/11 attackers. You know, "going after the real enemies." And what's the response?