Bin Laden associate killed:

A U.S. airstrike near the Pakistan border killed the Taliban’s southern military commander, a U.S. military spokesman said Saturday, calling him the highest-ranking Taliban ever slain by American forces.

Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani’s vehicle was hit by a U.S. airstrike Tuesday as he traveled in a deserted area in the southern province of Helmand, the spokesman said. Two associates also were killed.

We take our military victories wherever we can find them, these days. The good news about killings like this is that it makes terrorism something of a dead end job, no pun intended. The bad news, of course, is that it’s still better than most job opportunities in the region and vacancies rarely seem to last long.

When I read the headline and the dateline, I’d really hoped that we’d gotten Mullah Omar (I believe Bin Laden to have died some time back, though it’s always hard to tell). The upshot is that even to the extent that a lot of these guys are alive, they’re having to keep their head ducked below the crowd, which is better than the case on September 10, 2001.

I generally don’t write about politics here and that’s a policy I will continue (it’s my hope, actually, that none of you even know for sure where I stand politically). But I hope that even in our divided country the war in Afghanistan is one that we can all support, whatever concerns we may have about how effectively it has been performed.