The Obama Administrations new military strategy in Afghanistan may be a sign of desperation - a Hail Mary pass - but it may just work. The President's counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan describes it as giving up the 'hammer' for the 'scalpel.' The military, as we know from classified military documents put on the Internet by WikiLeaks last month, prefers the term 'kinetic strike'. I've heard the Pentagon use the term 'eliminating command nodes'. But I'll go ahead and call it by its everyday name: assassination.
The tactic is familiar in the war on terror, of course, its template being the CIA's unmanned aerial vehicle strikes on al-Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas of Pakistan, another form of assassination. Putting aside questions of the long-term wisdom of firing area weapons into small villages, no one has convincingly disputed the fact that these strikes have badly hurt al-Qaeda, with its remnants either hiding in caves or fleeing to places like Yemen. Not surprisingly, the military has asked, Why can't we do the same in Afghanistan?
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