From this, am I to take that you have abandoned your “Three Conjectures” model?

We came to get bin Laden. We stayed because lily pads at KAF and BAF were good clue bats with which to whomp Islamabad, Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Bishkek, Tashkent and Dushanbe up side the head. Maintaining these two super FOB thumbs in the eye of the regional powers was the mission after Tora Bora. They made great places to run the Special Forces Olympics out of. Beijing and Moscow saw our clue bats and raised us an SCO, outbribing us with Karimov so we lost K2 which put all our logistical eggs in Musharraf’s basket. He actually did an adequate job of keeping the LOC open, but he’s out now, and his successors aren’t earning their bribes.

No evidence. Recent history augurs quite the opposite, I agree, which is unfortunate. I’m about 85 miles from NYC to the NE. The winds will carry the fallout.

Back in the ’70s I read that most of the drug trade in NYC was being run by illegal immigrants from two towns on the North coast of the Dominican Republic. They NYT magazine did a piece on this then unusual phenomena. What struck me was the description of the two things that stood out to a visitor to these towns. First was the unusual presence of the then new technology of satellite dishes on the roofs of what were otherwise typical Latin American village houses. The second feature was the collection of extraordinary monuments that were in the local cemeteries to commemorate the drug traffickers whose remains were shipped home.

To me the obvious response by the US to this invasion should have been to order the destruction of every monument in the cemetery that was paid for by drug money. Second we should have set up an offshore jamming center that would have rendered all of their fancy electronics worthless. Finally if things did not improve we could have targeted for destruction every house with a satellite dish.

A similar approach should be used to deny the allies of the Islamists the benefits of attacking Americans. No family member of an Islamist should be allowed entrance to the US. If Harvard wants to give their kid a scholarship then the CBP officer at the port should tear the admission up and throw them out. No family member of the Islamists should benefit from the financial or communications systems we pay for and defend. If lawyers and the EU try to fight it then they should learn just how seriously we can defend ourselves.

Yes, I know with the Democrats coming in we are going in exactly the wrong direction. Wretchard is correct; we shall have less of the intelligence data needed to defend ourselves in the future.

If we were serious there could never be a large public venting of hatred of the west and the call to jihad by crowds at funerals of leaders we have whacked. We have a ton of assets constantly over the airspace in FATA and I would submit another good use of them would be to target families of suicide bombers. If we were really serious than every suicide bomber attacking us would know we were going to kill his family and a bunch of his best buddies if we catch a lucky break because we do not like suicide bombers and know that a large part of their motivation steams from the esteem in which they are remembered by family and friends.

That is how people in this part of the world understand that you are taking them and their antics seriously. Another cheap addition to a campaign of this nature would be to triple the number of drones flying overhead. The extra drones don’t need weapons or even a sensor package – just the telemetry required to fly them and a few enlisted specialists to pilot and then let them make noise, constantly, every day, all day. The villagers in around here do not like the sounds of drones circling overhead at all; even in areas with no Taliban or fighting the villagers have no real clue about what the drones are looking at and suspect they can see through walls and detect all sorts of things. They are largely illiterate and run the most efficient viral rumor news system in the world…well maybe not the world but you know what I mean. Psyops is a beautiful thing when it is designed to take advantage of an non enemy weakness.

However I do not think that any course of action remotely as aggressive would be considered until after we sustain some type of mass casualty attack on the homeland – only then will we consider actions that would have mitigated the attack if adopted before it was launched. And that is too bad because as Wretchard pointed out it is not easy to envision any type of governmental control being established in FATA with the exception of maybe the Khyber Agency. Who knows what will may come out of that place but an NBC type attack against America is certainly well within the realm of possibility. Then we will get serious.

In the last 8 years the US has made significant advances in selective targeting and intelligence/action fusion. You don’t have to signal as much — shout at the crowd — if you can pick of the troublemakers. But the precision capability is all driven by intelligence, which paradoxically comes from engagement itself. Engaging the enemy gives you intelligence. Disengaging gives you space but you lose information. If Obama pulls back he’s going to lose intelligence. And without intelligence the danger is you go back to sending signals again.

So to recap, if Pakistan goes south it will present a huge hostile furball. Although using a nuke would be normally unthinkable, if a WMD comes out of that opaque furball, and nobody knows exactly where from, then the Clinton tendency will be to send a big, cheap, honking signal in default of precise action may reassert itself.

All this talk about giving terrorist financiers rights, due process, not tapping their comms, not investigating politically correct groups and staying at arms length from everything confers the benefit of seeming nice and clean. But it comes at the cost of losing lots of information which someday we may need to act humanely and instead be forced by ignorance to act barbarously.