Word: binning
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...Bonn," where the main factions meet this week to thrash out a power-sharing arrangement. Washington will do business with the warlords, however thuggish or politically grasping they might be. That's partly by necessity but also because the Pentagon wants people in power with enough authority to locate bin Laden and assist in killing...
...Administration's biggest worry is bin Laden's slipping away. "It's reasonable to assume he has a Plan B as to his own safety," says the intelligence official. The Pentagon is watching the mountain passes along the south and west of Afghanistan's long, porous border with Pakistan, and pushing the Islamabad government to mount stringent patrols. The search concentrated last week on the ridges of Tora Bora, just southwest of Jalalabad, where a thousand or so Arab fighters were holed up. Last month Afghans passing through reported spotting bin Laden near the Tora Bora bunker built by mujahedin...
Still, it must be comforting to have so single-minded a purpose. But there is more to Phase I of the war on terror than the demise of bin Laden or even the defeat of the Taliban. The collateral damage from those objectives has reduced Afghanistan to a nation where warlordism, betrayal and defection are again the order of the day. After 22 years of perpetual war, Afghans no longer trust any army on their territory. What they long for is security...
...most of us, martyrdom lies beyond understanding; we recoil from it. Of all the pronouncements of Osama bin Laden, none baffles Westerners, shaped (as they suppose) by rationality and the Enlightenment, as much as his celebration of the martyr's sacrifice. We puzzle over bin Laden's apparent conviction, in a 1996 fatwa, that at the moment of death, a martyr will feel no more pain than if he were being pinched. We giggle nervously at the rewards bin Laden says a martyr will receive in paradise--marriage to 72 virgins, divine intercession on behalf of 70 relatives...
...should try harder. Martyrs win by losing, and we don't want the world's most famous martyr-in-waiting to win. Given the success so far of the military campaign in Afghanistan, it seems highly likely that bin Laden will soon be dead. He may be killed by U.S. forces who find his lair, or he may meet his death in the rubble of a bomb blast. Perhaps his end will come at the hands of those closest to him; bin Laden's bodyguards are said to have sworn to kill their leader rather than let him be captured...