in Vanity Fair:
"I will venture a prediction: the Taliban/al-Qaeda riffraff, as we know them, will never come back to power. They were able to seize Kabul in the first place only because the country had been reduced to “Year Zero” conditions by civil war, and they are now so much hated, and so heavily outgunned, that they can’t expect to do any better than make life miserable in the more wretched areas of the South. Vicious though their tactics are, they don’t show any sign of having a plan, or a coordinated leadership, or a directing brain. (If Osama bin Laden is still alive, he has a very faint and unconvincing way of demonstrating it. He doesn’t even issue fiery sermons anymore. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, got the job of making the September-anniversary rant this year, and of issuing the false claim that Americans were cowering in their trenches in southern and eastern Afghanistan. And Osama used to be so voluble … )"
Maybe he was smoking some tightly furled bud.
