Great news...

Quote:The leader of ISIS in Afghanistan was killed in an airstrike on Saturday along with 10 other fighters, officials said.

U.S. forces conducted a counter-terrorism strike in Nangarhar province targeting a senior leader of a terrorist group, said a spokesperson for Operation Resolute Support, a NATO-led mission which trains and advises Afghan forces.

Spokesman Lt. Colonel Martin L. O’Donnell referred NBC News to a statement from Afghan leader Ashraf Ghani’s deputy spokesperson which confirmed that Abu Sayeed Orakzai, Islamic State’s leader in Afghanistan, had been killed.

The provincial governor of Nangarhar said Orakzai was the fourth ISIS leader in Afghanistan to be killed since July 2017.

The group has developed a stronghold in the province, on Afghanistan’s porous eastern border with Pakistan, and become one of the country’s most dangerous militant groups.

The local affiliate of ISIS, sometimes known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) after an old name for the region that includes Afghanistan, has been active since 2015, fighting the Taliban as well as Afghan and U.S. forces.

Keep reading here..

So long sukka!

Good news to see a leader get killed, but I can't help but feel that this still ends up being an ultimate win for those opposed to the U.S. We are spending vast sums of money to kill what - thousands of bad guys at best? Closer to hundreds perhaps? This is a classic case of the law of diminishing returns - where the costs go up exponentially for each additional bad guy we want to kill in the war on terror.

Maybe our best approach is to use the low tech ordinance and widen the area of operation. Or maybe we should do what we've done in the past and find the most reliable warlord we can and let him fight the war on his terms with the payoff being the dictator of Afghanistan. It's not the most palatable thing given our values, but it's effective and has been used before.