As IF Times

link Taliban imposter: Senior Taliban leader was a fake, officials say – latimes.com.

Well duh! What was the first clue?  The guy was holding peace talks! Some may recall that the mission statement of the Taliban was to wipe out the Great Satan, kill all non believers etc etc.  The only logical reason to negotiate with the sworn enemy is either you’re out of bullets, out of suicide volunteers or in this case, if you were an impostor. It’s actually amazing no one else has gamed the system up to now, excluding Hamid Karzai of course.

If you are living in Afghanistan,  you likely spend your days watching the landscape transistion from one shade of khaki to another and nothing ever changes.  Why not pretend to represent the locals and get feted and fawned over by all the elite mucky mucks of the West?  It’s a fair bet the food is better and the beds they provide softer than the straw mat in a dusty corner of a cave that you’re accustomed to.  You get to shower and glad hand all the top officials sent to meet you.  It’s not as if it’s easy, even if you had a program, discerning the good guys from the bad over there; I mean come on, all bearded men look the same.  It could have been Cat Stevens for all anyone knew.   But you would think some cursory checks were made to verify that this guy was who he said he was. 

This has been a fairly dependable tactic on dealing with the West, supported by decades of precedence.  The root of this begins from early childhood.  As most public school teachers surely know, average decent and unassuming students don’t cause them any grief.  The really rotten kids, the misbehaving, class disrupting social misfits take up way more of the teacher’s time and attention than the well behaved kids.  It’s not lost on the little darlings that the more they misbehave, the more attention they get.

As they grow older and see that this tactic always brings about the desired response, they become even better at employing it.  In the West, they go on to Hollywood and become actors and entertainers, or they become lawyers, or they go into politics and become Democrats.  Recently there has been a new vocational direction for these folk, the area of environmental activism.  Whatever their chosen vocation, the common denominator is that the public is usually held ransom by their utterances and they themselves believe in the importance of their lives.  But I digress.

On a global scale, this tack is employed again and again by rogue nations looking for some kind of concession by the community at large, principally of course the West.  Think North Korea, think Iran, think Venezuela.  So in this particular case, the Akhtar Mohammad Mansourh impostor figures, why not dance with NATO a bit?  It’s likely that NATO was so keen on getting some discussions going, they didn’t even bother with the usual TSA style security groping.  The tip-off should have been that the impostor was sipping on a 12 year old Glenfiddich and watching Dancing With The Stars in his hotel room. This fiasco is a big red flag that the tactics being employed by our top people there mirrors the competence of  the idiotic TSA regime back here. But you cannot really blame the impostor for taking advantage of the red carpet being deployed for every nut who rattles sabres and wants attention.  The West calls it diplomacy.  The other side calls them Suckers.

link Bin Laden threatens Americans with execution | Reuters.

What to do, what to do.  If everyone just goes about minding their own business, the Taliban will attack them, flying planes into buildings etc..  If the terrorists are pursued on their home turf, the Taliban will attack them.  If we capture an antagonist, have him admit his guilt and then threaten to execute him, the Taliban will attack.  Their folk are just downright hard to please.  On the other hand, if our hero Bin Laden is still alive and issuing threats, which I doubt, how seriously do you take them considering he’s hiding out in some subterranean cave with no air, cable or indoor plumbing?

I’m not sure what news value there is to broadcast the latest threat to the world from public enemy number one.  I can see the value for the terrorists since they delude others to believe that OBL is actually alive and con other recruits to catch American bombs barehanded.  It’s been almost 9 years since that infamous day in September when the Americans were blindsided by the co-ordinated attacks by hijacked airliners.  Innumerate fighters on both sides have been killed during the subsequent military campaign to find or kill the iconic terrorist.  Because of lack of hard evidence to prove his demise, the world is treated to the occasional “still here!” missive from OBL’s camp and the fighting continues.

It may occur to someone one day that the people shooting back at the American led forces may just be people who hate Americans, even without the figurehead OBL issuing the orders.  There certainly is no shortage of those people in the world, even in America it seems.  Someone has be continuing to supply the other side with bullets, guns and RPG’s.  When you consider the billions of dollars it costs the Americans every year to fight, imagine the drain on the people backing OBL’s team.  It makes a lot more sense to have people on our side digging around tracking money flows and arms suppliers.  I’m sure this is happening now and most likely,  the tracks lead not to caves but to banks, industrial companies and certainly nation states.  The best soldiers we have may turn out to be accountants.  We’re all waiting for the day when the money spigot finally gets turned off and the Taliban are out of money.  I’d love to be there in that cave in the near future when an underling comes in to inform the Smelly One, “um, bad news your Shiekness, we’re out of bullets and food.  I’m going home to mom.  Can you get your own ride back?”