He’s just another low level terrorist.

Mid-level probably means he’s more of a facilitator or cell leader rather than just a common foot soldier, but no…he doesn’t appear to be anybody particularly important and I doubt his death will change much of anything. Everyone below the top two is pretty replaceable since it’s not really a hierarchical organization. The only thing that they appear to have on him is that they suspect he “might” have been involved with bombing Bagram Air Base during Cheney’s visit last February…him and a hundred other people I’m guessing. If they knew for certain I’m pretty sure they would have upgraded him.

Actually, every time one of these guys gets taken down I always remember a story a guy I was in Afghanistan with told me. He was in an ambush and he was the turret gunner in his vehicle. Once the initial panic of getting shot at wore off he swung his turret around in the direction of fire, located the probable gunman in a tree and capped him with a .50 caliber burst. He was very certain he got the right guy, but he said that he always had a lingering doubt in the back of his mind (and probably always will) that maybe he just killed some unlucky schmuck who just happened to be up in a tree grabbing some almonds because he was hungry.

Fog of war and all that, I suppose, but we do end up killing the wrong person a lot more than is commonly known…sometimes because of legitimate human error, sometimes because of bad intelligence, sometimes just because of blatant stupidity (I saw that happen a couple of times). Most of the time when I hear about “al-Qaeda’s number three guy” I usually wonder just how relevant of a target he really was and just what we had on him or if we had any evidence at all because our human intel is often so shitty and scattershot, or if the government’s just attributing a false sense of importance to the guy because they’re desperate for anything that looks like a victory.

It’s not a War on Terror, its a war on zombies ;)