B y night, we drop bombs; by day, we drop peanut butter and jelly. Our daytime rounds, at least at the outset of the campaign, seem more symbolic than our nightly ones; the amount of food we're delivering from the sky does not make up for the amount of food that no longer can be delivered on the ground now that our counterattack has begun. Still, the operational side of the U.S. offensive in Afghanistan looks, in its first few days, about right. The facts on the ground there--the relative absence of the kind of infrastructure to which our air force could lay waste--have precluded a Curtis LeMay, bomb-'em-back-to-the-Stone-Age offensive. The need to build an anti-Taliban coalition, and to keep the Middle East from a further turn toward militant Islamic fundamentalism, has impelled us to target our strikes carefully--though any claims to surgical precision are ludicrous. For the same political reasons, we are scattering our happy meals from on high. Plainly, we need to do a lot more...
