Eerie Prescience No Longer “Pre”
Via the redesigned and better-looking Airstrip One, this Daily Telegraph story about infighting among America’s local “allies” in Khost:
For the Americans, the intricacies of tribal allegiances and enmities are apparently baffling.Unable to separate truth from lies, they have put all the commanders on the payroll, subscribing to the theory that, if they hand out dollars to everybody, perhaps someone will help them to find Osama bin Laden and his associates.
But the policy has only made the belligerents more angry. Two weeks ago, gun-battles broke out in town after Kamal Khan said assassins tried to kill him. Five died.
Unqualified Offerings, November 16, 2001:
the Northern Alliance (soon to change their name to The Northern Opponents)
Other noteworthy claim in the Telegraph article:
“There are 7,000 al-Qa’eda and their Afghan allies in the mountains around here,” said Kamal Khan Zadran, Khost’s military commander.“They all came here after the fall of Tora Bora and Operation Anaconda. Now they are fighting a guerrilla war and it is very difficult to defeat them.”
Two weeks ago suspected al-Qa’eda fighters launched a midnight attack against the American special forces base near Khost. In a battle that lasted several hours, one American was wounded and two of their Afghan allies killed.
Let’s assume Khan’s numbers, like everyone else’s numbers in the Afghan war, are about an order of magnitude high. That’s 700 guerillas and terrorists loose in the mountains. In one spot we know about. Good thing we’ve wrapped up the war against our attackers and have time to fix the rest of the middle east now.
