Auld Acquaintance - US and Afghan troops are attacking Taliban and al Qaeda forces that have regrouped in Eastern Afghanistan:

Afghan officials say al-Qaida and Taliban fighters are regrouping in the mountains of Paktia and just over the border in Pakistan, urging the faithful to wage holy war against U.S. forces.

U.S. officials and Afghan sources estimate 4,000 to 5,000 foreigners who fought for the Taliban and al-Qaida remain inside Afghanistan.

In particular, U.S. officials have noted a significant regrouping of fighters in Paktia. Air Force Brig. Gen. John W. Rosa Jr. of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Friday the regrouping consists of “hundreds” of fighters.

The good news is that the US government hasn't forgotten the organization that attacked us (al Qaeda) and the organization that sheltered it (the Taliban). Also good news: If they'll just keep regrouping it will be easier to kill them. The bad news is that, at some point, the "Q" word may yet need to be hauled out, however upsetting it is to the imperialist bloggers. Mind you, and speaking of imperialist bloggers, Andrew Sullivan approvingly quotes a reader who says, "We should tell the Afghans we'll leave when we're darned good and ready." Mind you further, Karzai has asked the French to stick around and prop up his government and the French have said yes. Karzai's own pronouncements have been pretty changeable, which you can put down to the fact that he's got a lot of circles to square, and hardly a compass or ruler to do it with. So today he talks nice to Iran, and tomorrow he takes an independent line with the coalition and the next day he asks coalition troops to hang around. Afghanistan is attempting a novel experiment in governance, replacing strongman rule with - weakman rule.

In neighboring Pakistan, authorities sealed off the border along the mountains to block any fleeing al-Qaida from escape.

An editing mistake - should read: "In neighboring Pakistan, authorities sealed off the border along the mountains so that only those fleeing al-Qaida that authorities really want to escape will escape."

They are receiving support from a variety of groups, including Kashmiri separatists, Islamic militants in Pakistan and some former officials of Pakistan’s intelligence service, according to Afghan sources.

For space reasons, the article omitted the following: "and some former officials of Pakistan’s intelligence service, who inevitably have friends and colleagues who are current officials of Pakistan's intelligence service, plus the Saudi intelligence people we never mention, according to Afghan sources."

Sweet Georgia - Unqualified Offerings has a single reason to be glad that Caucasian Georgia is in the news again. In the waning days of the Cold War, it really wanted newspapers to refer to the then-Soviet Foreign Minister as "Ed ' The Shed' Shevardnadze." But back then, UO had not attained this prominence among opinion-leaders, so its campaign went nowhere.

Anyway, Ed the Shed sure has been busy lately, :

"We have been working toward this for eight years. Step by step we have been trying, against the background of great American assistance, to establish factors of time and trust," he told reporters. "We also tried to establish good neighborly relations with Russia. But nothing much came of it."

"Time and trust" = a military alliance with the US and NATO. "Nothing much came of it" = many things; among them, the well-founded conviction of each country that the other was encouraging violent ethnic separatist movements within its borders.

Washington says it is sending the instructors and equipment to help Georgia fight Islamists in the remote Pankisi Gorge near Russia's breakaway Chechnya (news - web sites) region as part of its response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. U.S. officials say its forces will not be involved in combat.

Smart money is against the truth of the last statement. Mind you, if there is a real al-Qaeda presence in the Pankisi Valley, there are things that would irk me more than soldiers attacking them.

But Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov issued a fresh broadside against the proposal in a telephone conversation on Wednesday with Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"Moscow has well-founded concerns that the direct involvement of U.S. military in the fight against terrorism in Georgia could further complicate the situation in the region," the Foreign Ministry said he told Powell.

"Washington must take this into account."

Well, that's not true either. Washington probably should take Moscow's concerns into account. But it almost certainly doesn't have to, in any immediate sense.

Ivlian Khaindrava, an independent political analyst in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, told Reuters the Pankisi Gorge was "not just about the fight against terrorism but about the interests of Russia and the United States in the region."

The United States has interests in the region?

It should be noted that Vladimir ' No Good Rhyme' Putin professed a relative lack of concern, declaring boldly, "Why should they (the U.S. forces) be in Central Asia and not in Georgia?" Reuters may not like getting all interpretive when it comes to declaring someone a terrorist or not, but they were willing to get mildly analytical about Putin's statement:

Putin, who is due to meet President Bush for a Moscow summit in May and has done his best to establish a warm relationship with Russia's old Cold War foe, appeared to be putting a brave face on events he is powerless to stop.

A couple of thoughts:

If the US is in Georgia because of concern about al-Qaeda-related activity, then it's a trend: bin Laden keeps picking - interesting places to make trouble. First there were the incidents that heated up Kashmir right when the US least needed trouble between India and Pakistan. Around then there were also the rumors that bin Laden was in Pakistan. Around the holidays, UO suggested that bin Laden himself might be behind those incidents and rumors, hoping to goad the US into taking actions that would be seen as "betraying" Pakistan after all General Musharraf's support. Now Georgia, where, no matter what Putin says, Russia can not be happy to see US troops. So there's the hope of an open US-Russia split and down the line maybe a Russian nod and a couple of winks in al Qaeda's direction. Or, another way of looking at it: US public diplomacy has made much of American support for "beleaguered muslim communities" in Southeast Europe and - Chechnya. So bin-Laden may be happy to arrange for the US to become the enemy of one of those beleaguered muslim communities.

Here's the other thought: Way back last fall, everyone kept saying that the war against terrorism was going to be a new kind of war, with battleifelds unknown and deeds unsung and all that. Subthought A: Who has more to offer the US in such a conflict - Russia, which, while it has a crummy army, apparently still has a pretty good intelligence service with a global presence, or Georgia, which, while it has a crummy army, apparently still has - Ed 'The Shed' Shevardnadze.

Subthought B: All that "new kind of war talk" last fall, all the "How many divisions has the EU?" in the New Year. That is, we don't need the Europeans because their armies suck anyway, so who cares what they think? But again, in many cases their police forces and intelligence departments don't suck. There is surely a point of annoyance beyond which police and intelligence cooperation with the US war on al Qaeda quietly dries up. These things being what they are, we won't even necessarily know a given country isn't cooperating any more - beforehand. Are our fine new friends in Uzbekistan going to keep us apprised of the doings of Hamburg terror cells, and round their members up when we want? That would be a no.

I dislike the EU as an institution intensely and hold no affection for any of its member governments. I think we're doomed to some difficult times with the EU's obnoxious regional-socialism. But while there is a large, well-financed and ill-tempered NGO out there that wants to kill as many Americans as possible, we need their help, and not just theirs either.

Hush My Mouth - A reader, whom Unqualified Offerings will call "Mike," because his name is "Mike" wrote with what seemed on the face of it an outrageous claim: that Hockeyland was talking about adopting the US dollar as their official currency. I couldn't believe it - it seems to go against the most basic tenet of Canadian nationalism, which is, "Don't be the United States." Challenged, "Mike" responded with this link to a WAMU radio discussion on February 18. Next: The CFL considers attempting to gain yardage by running the football.

Don't Bogart That Link - Unqualified Offerings got this one from Ginger Stampley, who got it from Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Oh the Irony Dept. The Office of Strategic Influence "was" supposed to plant bogus stories disguised as legit ones. This SatireWire piece may be the reverse.

I Knew Him, Horatio - On the other hand, the Donk seems to be...well, an Oxfordian. At the very least, determinedly anti-Stratford. But there's good and bad in everyone.

Speaking of Adventures in Paranoid Thinking - Let's say you were the Government, which meant that you were inclined to lie, shade and generally make stuff up if you thought it would enhance your status and interests, and that you were as inclined to do this overseas as domestically. And you recently put out a bunch of planted news stories because you'd been in a small war and had a bigger one in mind. How could you enhance their credibility? How about by loudly announcing that you were thinking about creating a department to plant news stories in the future, then, when the outcry came, saying that you had no idea what came over you, and thank heavens that was done with. You weren't going to make up news stories after all. Honest.

(See eerily-similar musing by Ginger Stampley.)

Wilderness of Stephanies - Unqualified Offerings has not gotten caught up in the Stephanie Dupont craze. But (he's everywhere!) the Illuminated Donkey has - and how. If you read only one blog post this year, it must be - one of mine. Let's not get carried away. However, check out this "interesting adventure in paranoid thinking," and googling, complete with ironically appropriate Ayn Rand allusion in the title.

Some of us are old enough to remember the days when you just assumed that any "woman" you met on the net was really a guy.

Where Are They Now Dept. The Illuminated Donkey has the last word we citizens are likely to get on the momentarily-famous "Egyptian Radio" case. Millenium Hotel security guard Ronald Ferry pled guilty to lying to the FBI about finding the radio in the safe in Egyptian diplomat offspring Abdallah Higazy's room safe after the attack on the World Trade Center towers. (The Hotel was so close to the WTC that it is still closed.) Ferry's lawyer "told reporters his client 'thought he was being a good citizen' by trying to help the FBI build a case against Higazy," perhaps in hopes of scaring some sense into military tribunal enthusiasts. (One more time: The problem with saying hostile terrorists don't deserve the protections of the legal system is that the whole point of a trial is to determine whether someone is a hostile terrorist in the first place.)

The plea and the conviction prove conclusively that Ferry lied about finding the radio in the safe but that it somehow, as Ferry says, was in Higazy's room, or that Ferry planted the radio himself and isn't admitting to it, or that he was in league with someone who planted it, or that Ferry lied about that too and is only partially owning up to his actions in his plea, or that the diplomacy angels settled on Ferry as a way to rescue a well-connected Egyptian fellow from a heap of trouble or, well, almost anything. As the Donk says, "I still don’t expect to ever really find out what happened here."

This might be a good time to mention the Unqualified Offerings motto: Never confuse politics with current events.

That's More Like It - The Great Texas Blog Outage is over. Both Virginia Postrel and Ginger Stampley are back on the job after their respective bouts with actual productive work and the flu. Rejoice, World, and get thee thither, if you ain't yet gotten.

Side note: While neither Virginia nor Ginger would fit the title, wouldn't a great Austin Lounge Lizard-inspired blog name be "Another Stupid Texas Blog?"

Tasteless Football and Terrorism Comparison - Remember reading that the lesson that the bin Ladenites among the mujahidin took from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan was that superpowers were vulnerable, so therefore the US was vulnerable too? Unqualified Offerings found itself thinking of that and this recent offering about conference Super Bowl streaks at the same time today:

But if you start with a working assumption that the best team in the league wins the Super Bowl, and that to be the best you have to beat the best, implications arise. NFC Team A beats AFC Team X this year's Super Bowl, so it's the best team in the league. Who will represent the NFC in next year's Super Bowl? Either Team A or a team that can beat Team A. Who will represent the AFC? Either Team X (best in conference) or a team that can beat Team X. But our simplifying assumption was that Team A is better than Team X, because it won. So being able to claw your way past Team X does not imply that you are necessarily up to the challenge of Team A-level football.

Gentle readers, the Soviet Union was Team X. We are Team A.

The Jordan Roles - So Michael Jordan may be done for the season and, let's face it, may be done for his third basketball career. The (radio) talk in DC is whether he returns to the Wizards' front office or lights out for the territory.

It's a truism in basketball journalism and punditry that if Jordan doesn't return to his President of Basketball Operations job that that's okay, because he stunk at it. I disagree. Jordan ran personnel for the Wizards for about 14 months. He did not sign any big deals for marquee players and the team did poorly. But the Wizards were in an impossible cap situation. What's more, they were sitting on some of the highest-priced driftwood in the league. They had Juwan Howard, who will never be better than very good, making $18 million a year, Mitch Richmond, one of the great pure shooters in the days when he had legs, making, I believe, ten million a year, and worst of all, Rod Strickland, whose picture appears next to "problem child" in the latest American Heritage Dictionary, making another oversized pile of money.

This being the NBA, every one of these aging or simply overpriced boat anchors had a guaranteed contract with at least another year to run. I saw something close to the same team the year before, with tickets I got free, and I felt cheated. No effort, no pride, no nothing.

Jordan moved them all in a single spring. He found the perfect mark for the Juwan Howard con in Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Until the day that deal happened, almost no one in basketball believed the Wizards had any hope of getting Howard off their payroll. Dallas just traded Howard away last week, which has to raise the "coup factor" of Jordan's original deal. He played chicken with Rod Strickland just long enough to get Strickland to agree to a contract buyout worth 50 cents on the dollar.

To evaluate Jordan's front office work, you have to know just how bad the team's situation was - the franchise had spent several years trading large, relatively-affordable young men for smaller, more expensive old guys. That's not quite a recipe for success. Jordan undid the financial damage the team had done to itself in a lot less time than fans and media here thought possible.

He drafted a high school player number one. The fact is, almost any team picking in that spot was going to draft a high school player, and probably the same one Jordan picked. The bargain acquisitions he's made have given the team at least an interim upgrade in size, talent, energy and, you know, interest in actually playing basketball. This year's team is very mediocre without Michael Jordan, which is way better than stupendously bad, which was what the Wizards were before Jordan put on his management suit.

Bizarro Car Trip - Tonight I was riding with my friend Frederick Pollack, one of the country's best poets and a lifelong Marxist.

"Fred," I told him, "I find myself using the word 'imperialist' unironically lately."

"Are you well?"

Then on the ride home, we were discussing the history of European Jewry, about which Fred knows rather a lot. That required an adversion to the medieval Church's theory and system of "the just price," which, Fred noted, was declared to be the cost of production plus the cost of distribution, with no profit and interest forbidden.

"The only problem," Fred said, "was that you can't have a functioning economy without interest."

"Or fixed prices," I offered.

"Exactly."

And not a bearded Spock in sight.

Wither Canada (sic) - It occurs to me we could do something useful with this benevolent hegemony I keep hearing about. If we intrigue on behalf of Quebec independence, the breakup of the Canadian federation would divide the talent pool just enough to give the US the talent edge it needs in Olympic hockey. Getting rid of the Soviet Union worked wonders - now the Belorussians play on a different team from the slightly-less-belo Russians, who play on a different team from the Ukrainians. Put Martin Brodeur and Mario Lemieux on the Quebec team with maybe one solid line, and leave Anglo-Canada with no frenchies. We will not have to hear carping from "Europe" either - self-interest will put the Czechs and the Swedes on our side, at the very least. Crikey, the Czechs already did the national breakup thing and they were golden just four years ago.

We simply define Quebecois sovereignty as a human rights issue. Bonus: Canadian nationalists have insisted for decades that the US has secret plans to annex their country. We can torture them by refusing to do so. Best of all, our action will have been wise and just, because it will have been our action.

Preemptive Google - Everybody does it, though they say it lowers your resistance to colds and if you do it too much, you go blind. When I sign some disagreeable petition and you want dirt, here are the Jim Henleys I am and am not:

I am

The roleplaying game geek Jim Henley
The poet Jim Henley
The computer-game Front Page Sports Football Pro Jim Henley
The Jim Henley who posted an Elvis Costello concert review in the early 90s
The Jim Henley in the archives of the Gene Wolfe mailing list

I am not

The zoologist Jim Henley
The Sacramento Bee Historian
The President of the Mainland Building and Construction Trades Council in Nova Scotia
The fellow who explained the origin of "an eye for an eye"
The fellow who appears in fishing tournament results, even though I keep claiming that fishing material will appear here

Most especially I am not

Susan McDougall's brother

We Make Do Other sites not only get useful referrer information, but they get actual search strings from major engines that found them. All Unqualified Offerings gets is a list of unconnected keywords. In many cases, not only can it not figure out how those words found this domain, it can't even figure out why someone would type most of them into a search engine in the first place:

unqualified
insupportable
precariousness
progresses
distinct
initiation
dabbler
recollections
equivalence

I get the first and the last one. The word "dabbler" may lead someone to one of my gaming sites. No doubt some of my readers do find this site noteworthy for the distinct precariousness of its insupportable positions, though.

Cleared for Takeoff - I know I've had occasion to mention Airstrip One items before, and mostly favorably, but I want to stress what a valuable site it has become. Chiefly, Airstrip One has become the best source for links on the situation in Afghanistan. By an amazing coincidence, as soon as the Administration shifted its rhetorical focus to Iran, Iraq and North Korea, most warbloggers did too. But as a minor matter it's worth noting that: The US and Britain still have troops in Afghanistan; there is still fighting in Afghanistan; bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still on the loose; and the West (including the US and Britain) have taken on a nation-building project whose prospects for success are, at best, ambiguous.

Hawkish readers will hate Airstrip One on principle, equating "anti-anglosphere" with "anti-american." That's a crock, but a familiar one these days. No doubt they would consider this Emmanuel Goldstein puncturing of imperial mascot Mark Steyn somehow anti-american, too. But sound advice is what you get from a friend:

A wonderfully barking article from Mark Steyn. Some little gems:

The ‘axis of evil’ is actually a pretty sophisticated construct.

That's not really the problem is it? The problem is that in response to one problem - an international terrorist network - you produce a different enemy. One (Iraq) has less connection with Al Qaeda than, ooh, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia; another (North Korea) is an atheist state with no tradition of Islam; and the third (Iran) had been on the opposite side of a proxy war with Al Qaeda within Afghanistan since before George Bush had learned the name of the president of Pakistan.

The problem with the axis of evil is that it is too sophisticated. Overly simplistic suggestions like "get Bin Laden and get out" would actually be a bit more popular.

Note the nice irony of a European urging the Bushies to be less sophisticated.