His JAG didn't like it

Mark Steyn writes,

I wouldn't want the week to end without noting the death of the once-famous Mullah Omar. The one-eyed mullah actually died two years ago, but the Taliban managed to keep it quiet until a few days ago. He was an evil man who helped facilitate the murder not only of those trapped within his prison state but of 3,000 people on the other side of the planet. And he should have died 14 years ago. As I wrote in the November 3rd 2001 issue of The Spectator:

With hindsight, the turning point was the first night of the bombing raids, when (according to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh) an unmanned CIA Predator reconnaissance aircraft identified Mullah Omar's car fleeing Kabul. Lacking the authority to 'push the button', the agency relayed the news back to central command in Florida, where General Tommy R. Franks, the head man, replied, 'My JAG doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire.' A JAG is a Judge Advocate-General — i.e., a military lawyer — and the only reason I know that is because there's a show on CBS called JAG. It says something about our times that the only military adventure series on American network TV is about an army lawyer. So, rather than offing the mad mullah and worrying about ass-covering later, the asscovering took precedence and the mullah got away.

No wonder Don Rumsfeld is reported, on hearing the news, to have kicked in a couple of doors. Had Mullah Omar been killed on the first night of bombing, what a message that would have sent! Wanna play host to guys who massacre US civilians? Fine, but you're in the last month of your life, pal; don't start any long books. It would have been an important psychological victory, leading to political upheaval and defections and disintegration, in the light of which much of the indeterminate bombing of subsequent weeks would have been unnecessary.

Not to mention the indeterminate 14-year pseudo-occupation. A war led by JAGs is unlikely to end in anything so old-fashioned as "victory".

Mullah Omar banned music in Afghanistan. Yet, when US troops seized his abandoned compound in Kandahar, they found in his private quarters a bunch of Rod Stewart cassettes - not the easy-listening Rod Slays The Great American Songbook stuff, but the full-strength "If you want my body and you think I'm sexy" big-hair'n'codpiece classics. So the one-eyed mullah was forced into exile, and twelve additional years of life he should never have enjoyed ...but without his double-cassette of Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits. I suppose we should be grateful for such modest victories as that.

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