re: #396 lawhawk

I think you may be misunderstanding. There are more ways of changing the opponents mind than negotiations. Destroy his abilities to recruit, disrupt his cash-flow, disturb his supply lines.

The problem is actually that regular warfare has the added risk of increasing the recruitment base for something like AQ. The cash-flow is hard to disrupt unless you really put the thumb screws on some of the best friends of the US in the region and the supply lines… well… in much the same way that certain countries were interested in supporting afghan rebels in their war against the USSR I have a strong feeling that there are players (not necessarily nation states but who knows) who support AQ for opportunistic reasons. Hell, if I was someone with an interest in making sure that the focus of the US was kept elsewhere then I would certainly think very hard about how I could make their life miserable as long as the risk was reasonable.