Celebrate!
Major-General Joseph Osterman, the deputy operations chief of Afghanistan's NATO-led force, said small numbers of al Qaeda fighters remained entrenched in the rugged eastern mountain province of Nuristan, where the forested terrain and plunging valleys provided natural havens.
"They are less than 100, I would say, and they are in fact just trying to survive at this point," Osterman told Reuters in an interview late on Thursday. "I think what you find is that it's not necessarily that they have got a springboard in there."
That's comforting.
Except for the fact that when we left Iraq in 2011, we'd broken the back of al Qaeda in Iraq and counted on the Iraqis alone to complete their defeat.
How's that working out? Oh. Not so well, as it turns out.
And if you don't want to pay attention to Iraq, remember that the Taliban themselves defeated the non-jihadis in Afghanistan in the late 1990s to control the Afghanistan central government. But the remnants holed up in northeast Afghanistan under the banner of the Northern Alliance. They were just trying to survive at that point and were in no position to use their territory as a springboard to take over the country.
Until 9/11 when we intervened and used that small non-Taliban force to smash the Taliban.
We really do have to kill them all. It's too dangerous to let any jihadis live anywhere under any circumstances.
