Wanted: Dead or Alive

Interesting sort-of contrast to the bin Laden raid; Bosnian Serb ex-commander and war criminal Ratko Mladic has been arrested by Serbian police agencies hiding in a relative's home in the little Serbian town of Lazarevo, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northeast of Belgrade.

The guy was obviously well known in town. I love the quote from one of his fans; "They didn't even wake us up," said a resident who identified himself only as Zoran. "I'm furious. They arrested our hero."

You'll note that this didn't require an elite team of Belgian commandos, helicopters, cross-border insertions, or diplomatic furor. A little group of local coppers showed up at his door - undoubtedly with the help of the Serbian national intel agency as well as Euro intel types - handcuffed his ass, and drove him away. He even had a couple of hoglegs on him, but didn't manage to get a double tap through the head for his pains.

Now there's a LOT of dissimilarities between Ratko and Osama, the single biggest being the lack of ideological fervor in the Serbian community. But you'll also note the immense dissimilarity between the countries where they were hiding.

Serbia desperately wants into the EU; it wants a piece of the lovely lolly that comes from being a First World nation and having all that economic development n' stuff. Despite there being a solid core of "fuck-the-Euros" Serbian irredentists, the government and much of the population of Serbia wants shut of the bad old days of Pan-Serbian war and atrocity. Generally speaking, the goals and objectives of most Serbs are fairly close to most other nations and peoples in the EU.

The disparity between the goals and objectives of Pakistan and the United States could hardly be greater. They barely share a common interest. Pakistan is treated as a battleground by the U.S., its government and people seen as objects or targets or, at best, pawns to be manipulated. Is it any surprise that the U.S. government couldn't trust the ISI and the local Abbotabad coppers to knock on Osama's door and whisk him off to an appointment with the ICC?

I'm not going to go back to second-guessing the OBL raid. I'm just observing; given the differences visible between Serbia and Pakistan that makes treating a war criminal like a war criminal possible in one but not the other...is it any wonder we have a scalpel available in Serbia but nothing but a hammer in Pakistan? Or that it looks like the West is likely to get a favorable-ish resolution to the Balkan morass but seem unlikely - barring an imperial-level commitment of troops, time, and money - to get one from southwest Asia?