Harbinger of Boom - Austin

Harbinger of Boom - Austin Bay on the Predator unmanned aircraft attack in Yemen that killed six Al-Quaeda operatives, including the planner of the Cole atrocity - and more importantly, the attacks wider ramifications:

Sophisticated technology, like the Predator, is part of a symmetric power's answer to asymmetric warfare. A common fret among the many uninformed critics of America's counter-terror war is that "asymmetric attacks," like those on 9-11, can't be foiled and, moreover, the perpetrators can't be found. The whine is, "The world's too big."

Al Qaeda's terrorists thought they could hide en masse in Afghanistan. They were wrong. We can debate the success of the battle of Tora Bora, but for the first time in 25 years, Kabul has no curfew. Al Qaeda's latest gambit is to lie low in Earth's alleys and dark corners. All politics is local? American counter-terror warfare can be extraordinarily local. The United States is demonstrating even isolated, tribal locales where everyone's a cousin aren't hermetic. Al Qaeda pledged a global battle without borders, and it's getting one. The Predator attack shows that U.S. counter-terror intelligence has improved. Satellites, UAVs and other cutting-edge technologies extend U.S. military presence in ways bin Laden failed to anticipate.

On another related note - much of this technology was stuff the Democrats opposed lustily when it was in development.

Posted by Mitch at November 8, 2002 06:46 AM