COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

...And hits a house apparently full of women and children, but with no Al Qaeda.

The U.S. should diplomatically get out in front of this one, and publicly apologize to the people of Pakistan. It's the right thing to do, and to fail to do so will not serve us well. The support of the people in that particular reason of Pakistan is important to the tactical success of the fight against Al Qaeda locally. If we catch Zawahari or Bin Ladin, it will be because one of those people betray them. I can't imagine that either of them would stay in Afghanistan, where US troops have free reign, when Al Qaeda sympathizers have infested the Pakistani security forces, and AQ has a good shot at getting tipped off if a Pakistani raid is in the offing.

The United States should be cautious here, I think. If I were Al Qaeda, I would start to flood the zone with false reports of Bin Ladin and al Zawahiri, in an effort to provoke US blunders in the region, thus keeping up the political momentum they have going for themselves.

The U.S., I'm confident, is cognizant of the possibility that Al Qaeda will select this course of action, and take action to investigate the background and ties of its informants extra carefully - so that intelligence can be vetted, but also so that every time Al Qaeda does send someone to give a false report, they risk further exposing part of their network.

Publicly turning over one or two people who give false reports to the Pakistani security service as potential Al Qaeda saboteurs may go a long way towards improving the reliability of reports and lending discipline to our own network of informants.

Granted, you do decrease the chances of following up on a truthful report - and you do wind up releasing some of the pressure on the Al Qaeda leadership, which in turn makes it easier for them to coordinate a counterattack. But the US can hardly afford a string of three or four similar incidents like this one, which is Al Qaeda's best hope at severing the U.S. - Pakistan alliance.

I should be careful not to overstate the point, though: I don't think the Musharraf-U.S. alliance is nearly as shaky as it appears in the news. As long as Musharraf remains in power, James Taylor's still on center stage. That is to say, we've got a friend. He knows where his falafel is fried. He has to say some things for public consumption, of course. And so would we.

The US, I hope, is taking some steps to hedge its bets. We have an awful lot of U.S. policy depending on the actuarial chances of one man.

Splash, out

Jason