Waterboarding is not ‘torture’ in my mind. Torture should define the inflicting of real injury. Thumbs screws, electrocution through car battery jumper cables, etc. Waterboarding actually taps into the body’s natural reflexive responses to drowning. Yes, it is horribly unnerving, as Christopher Hitchen’s just learned. No one likes to be helpless and controlled by others. […]

Updated! Lots of discussions today on whether we could target Bin Laden with a drone if we discovered his hide out (see here and here). From the second link we read this: Pakistan long ago gave Washington the right to launch an immediate Predator drone strike on Osama bin Laden, without first notifying Islamabad, if […]

The Surge and Awakening that hit Iraq last year (in the face of dour predictions from Democrats that Iraq was a failure, the Surge was a failure, etc) has succeeded, victory is at hand. The Surge had many goals, nearly all of which have been met, according to a US State Department Government Report on […]

I have been hoping for months now that the pressure we have been seeing put on the Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants inside the tribal areas of Pakistan might bear some fruit. Back in January of this year there were reports that a new Taliban leader, Baitullah Meshud, was charting a new and dangerous course by […]

The International Herald Tribune (IHT) ran a reasonable article (for them) recently on the al-Qaeda and Taliban forces who retreated from Afghanistan into the Pakistan area and efforts over the years to deal with them. I want to take some key information from that article to lay out the case that we are seeing the […]