The measure of victory

From The Washington Post:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, May 13 -- Mullah Dadullah was the face of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan as it used suicide bombings, videotaped beheadings and targeted assassinations to escalate its insurgent campaign over the past two years.

Dadullah periodically turned up on television to taunt the Afghan government and U.S.-led international forces with threats of ever more ambitious attacks.

On Sunday, his face was on display again, resting on a pink sheet, bloody and lifeless. A bullet hole was visible in the back of his head, with two more piercings in his stomach.

Dadullah, the Taliban's top operational commander, was killed Saturday after U.S.-led troops and Afghan forces tracked him down and surrounded him in southern Afghanistan, according to Afghan and international security officials.

His death was hailed by those officials as a critical victory in the fight against the Taliban at a time when the extremist Islamic movement has destabilized large portions of the country through Dadullah's uncompromising approach to warfare.

This is good news and it is the kind of news that the American People need to hear more and more of. I don't just mean when important leaders are killed either. Every day the American public hears reports (in which it often seems that the reporters can scarcely contain their glee) of Americans killed in action and the numbers of innocent Iraqis killed by terrorist attacks. But we never seem to hear about enemy combatants killed unless they are in the top tier of leadership.

The American public is being given the impression that casualties in this war are vastly one sided in favor of the enemy. I know that this is untrue. I have spoken with friends who have been deployed in Iraq two and now three times and they are getting far more of them than they are getting of us. We Americans need to hear this from some official source.

I just googled "Iraq body count" and over 1 and a half million hits came back and all the ones of the first few pages concerned the number of civilians supposedly killed by US military action and the number of US forces killed fighting and the numbers of civilian contractors killed.

Where are the numbers of the enemy dead?

This is important because the total number of "insurgents" in Iraq never was as many as 30,000 and is decreasing. Decreasing because we are killing them and decreasing because a good number of them thought we would have already given up by now if we really were a "paper tiger" and so they have gone home.

Of course the actions of the Democrats in congress have given them new hope and their numbers are probably trending upward again because of that, but if we can get funding for the troops without a timetable, which seems likely, that growth will once again turn to decline.

If the American people thought we were winning they would support the war through to a successful conclusion. If the American people showed the world that they were committed to remaining in Iraq for as long as it took the insurgency would melt away because an insurgency can only win by outlasting an irresolute opponent. Meet them with competence and resolution and they will break.

The American people still support the greater war against terrorism. They do not insist that we sit down and negotiate with Osama bin Laden because the knowledge that over two thirds of the people in al Qaeda before 9/11 are either dead or in jail today.

I urge the DOD and the White House to tell the American people how well we are doing in Iraq not by telling us how many streets can be walked down safely on any given day, but by telling us how many of the bastards we are sending to hell on a given day.