Well no one is more surprised than I to see the dread Afghan in full flight. The Gurkhas must be practically eating their kukris to see their chance at the World Cup of War go down the drain. Full kudos to the... to the... Air... Force (as a guy who got dropped in the trees more than once that is so hard to say) and to the special operations troops on the ground showing them where to put the busy.

But the reality is that it's the Pashtun zones that had always been the real problem, and now we're there. The near future is going to get interesting in a very real and Chinese sense.

That being said, we're not in a "quagmire." Many of the Pashtun tribes have decided that either they don't like the Taliban nearly as much as it had appeared or they know on which side the kumiss is buttered. So more and more area is becoming "Alliance" territory, territory in which Osama and Mullah Omar cannot move.

This is a good thing. As the areas that they can move in get narrowed down, it becomes more and more likely that some kind soul will cash in the $25 mil on Osama. And, given the noted Pashtun sense of humor, he's liable to arrive COD at the White House, packed in a teak. Or at least enough of him to identify. "George W. Bush? Could I see some ID? Thank you. Sign here. That will be $25 million dollars, plus postage. I'll take a US government check."

But the news could be even better than that. It appears that Mullah Omar has, like the captain of a sinking ship, decided to live or die in Kandahar. Is this a trick question? No? Okay, I think we can accommodate you there. The US Marines have been spending all their doctoral dissertation time lately on Urban Warfare coloring books for the bright and sophisticated. If we don't get you with a Predator drone you might want to consider if that humming sound is a micro-UAV. It won't take much for some bright Marine private to strap a grenade and detonator to one. You see, we Americans don't have mujaheddin (although the Marines are close.) Being by and large of the Patton frame of mind ("I don't want you to die for your country! It's your job to make sure the other poor b------d dies for his country!") we send in our fearless robots. And they are swift, silent and deadly.

Then there's the fact that it was the Marine Corps that reintroduced the sniper school to the US military. Being a Marine Sniper is the highest aspiration of every young man in the Corps. The mujaheddin seem bound and determined to die for Allah. Trust me on this, every single Marine is going to be doing their level best to get them there as soon as humanly possible. The Pashtun was considered nearly invisible to the British Indian Army. As the Pashtun are discovering, the United States has reinvented the concept of military invisibility. Especially at night when between night vision goggles and ghillie suits the Marines might as well be evil ghosts. One of them is eventually going to get lucky and take the head off of the Taliban. Unlike the Gurkhas they probably won't bring just the head back. But don't be surprised if the good mullah's glass eye is missing. It will, after all, make someone a really interesting pendant. (Wouldn't that be a tasteless bauble for Jenna Bush to wear to the next inauguration.)

In the case of Osama Bin Laden, he might or might not have bellied down in a high-tech fortress that is "virtually impregnable", or so says a, pardon me if I give a huge chuckle, leftist British journalist. I read the article about it, from the hydro-electric power to the thousands of tunnels to the heavily reinforced (wooden) door and had to restrain a belly-laugh.

I'm trying to think of all the military quotations that came to mind. Patton: "Fixed fortifications are a tribute to man's stupidity" probably is at the top. The "impregnable fortress", in fact, sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing the Japanese built in WWII. The worst one we faced was probably on Iwo Jima. And of those 15,000 casualties that the Marines suffered, almost all of them were outside of the actual fortress.

In modern times the big problem will be taking the surface. The Taliban won't just sit in the fortress, waiting for us to mess with them. And the area is almost guaranteed to be thick with mines. Just getting to it will, therefore, be a challenge. Taking it will be tough. But, make no mistake, we'll do it. And probably with far lower casualties than anyone is throwing around. I have to say that the A... the Ai... the Air Force will, once again, come in handy in getting control of the Tora Bora area of operations.

Once you have the surface, you have so many choices it will probably take round-table committees to winnow them down. You can pump gasoline in all the air vents. You can do the same with acetylene (heavier than air, pools in low places.) You can bring in some wild-catters from Texas and drill at will. You can use standard "SWAT" tactics to fight your way through, probably taking a fraction of the Taliban losses. If you get really upset you can cut off the electricity (and thus the pumps that keep any such facility dry) and flood them out.

Or you can just seal all the entrances and come back in ten years. If they start the cannibalism early enough, there probably will be sufficient air. For five or ten of them.

Oh, I know the best quote. "Revenge is a dish best served cold."