It’s a poor idea to set strategy based on one specific example, but. Special Forces troops appear to have pulled off a raid in Somalia that killed the asshole who tried to down that Israeli passenger jet in 2002 and now serves (well, until yesterday) as a link between al-Shabab and al-Qaeda in the Pakistani tribal areas. The attack occurred by helicopter and was based from a "small Naval vessel," according to the Post‘s Karen DeYoung. Now that is how you do offshore-based counterterrorism. Steve Hynd argues that, with sufficient adjustments, this could be a model for counterterrorism in the tribal areas. (Obviously, for instance, we’re talking about a landlocked area, etc.)  And: maybe. Let’s let the smoke clear and then examine the exportable and the specific aspects of the attack.

And as long as we’re operating on the one-example-and-wonder model, a Reaper drone apparently achieved self-awareness and decided to stop fighting the Afghanistan war today, forcing the Air Force to execute the drone for desertion. Dare we turn over the Afghanistan war and the al-Qaeda hunt to SkyNet? More seriously, we really do need to know more about the efficacy of the drone strikes in Pakistan before considering whether it makes sense to devote more emphasis in the combined Afghanistan-n-Pakistan theaters to the drones as an alternative to ground troops. (Steve, for the record, derides the drone program in his post.) No one’s looking for a perfect solution, but drones are problematic; air strikes are problematic; more troops are problematic; and fewer troops are problematic.  (What happens when the Taliban overruns the areas of the country where those fewer troops aren’t?) Everything’s problematic.