Remora

Last night, Limited Inc was planning on writing that there is, at last, good news: if the Taliban has suffered a major defeat by the Northern Alliance yesterday, and if the reports today that the defeat is having a broad, knock down effect, then it is good news all the way around. Here's the graf from the AP story, in the LAT:

"Opposition fighters punched through Taliban defenses about noon today after a punishing attack by U.S. B-52 bombers. Taliban positions began to fall one by one along the main road into Kabul.

A senior opposition commander, Bismillah Khan, said his troops had halted their advance at Mir Bacha Kot, about 12 miles north of Kabul, and were awaiting orders."

The bombing has got to stop. We don't believe the guff about the bombers. But now, with a traditional victory at hand, we have another reason to pull the plug on the bomb squad. Now, mind you, we haven't lost our minds here: this good news is not absolutely good. It would even be very bad, sicne the warlord ridden Northern Alliance isn't anybody's dream of a liberating force. What Afghanistan needs, right now, is massive amounts of food and an organization that can manage distributing it. It needs, in the future, secular humanism of a type -- that is, it needs a system that doesn't penalize women, allows basic human rights, and is allergic to rape, looting, and other ills Afghani governments have been heir to. Well, I don't think Afghanistan is going to get that with the peculiar piratical coalition that has been bringing the fight to the Taliban. If this is good news, it is a comparative good: like being told your house is infested with termites, instead of in flames.

Well, this good news turned sour this morning, for us, when we were awakened by a friend who said, another plane is down. Since one of our favorite people, indeed, a friend of the heart, was flying out of NYC today, this was sickening news. Luckily, Miruna, our friend, is alright, and at this moment headed, via train, to New Orleans. But we are still whirling.