If the goal of our anti-terrorist efforts, including our military response, is to improve our "homeland security," it seems to me the results so far indicate that it has been counter productive.

I don't mean to cast aside concerns about the literally millions of refugees we have helped to create, many of whom will die of starvation, public health threats, or other causes -- including "collateral damage." I acknowledge that these issues can be talked about in humanitarian and religious terms. But such discussions tend to provoke emotionalism and charges of lack of patriotism or worse.

So I'm just approaching it from a "national defense" perspective. That may not eliminate the disagreements, but it at least turns down the volume.

• After two or three days of bombing we said we'd run out of targets. And yet the bombing continued/continues.

• "Collateral damage" was predictable under the best of scenarios; but now we have bombed the same Red Cross warehouse and its humanitarian supplies twice!

• We have not found Ben Ladin.

• The Taliban are located in caves and residential areas and signing up new recruits.

• We are clearly losing the propaganda war -- in football score terms by a score of something like 82-to-6. (We are charged with waging a war on Islam; poisoning the food we're offering; using biological warfare on Afghans -- in papers read by those who have no other sources of information and are inclined to believe it anyway.)

• The Northern Alliance is apparently not even marginally less thug-like than the Taliban.

• Two of their major leaders have been killed (one of whom because we may have not done all we could to save him).

• We don't want them to take Kabul. So now even the Alliance is pissed at us.

• It's not yet at all clear how, even if we were to "win" (whatever that means in a rubble-filled, barren, mountainous, drought-and-poverty-ridden country with little or no usable roads or other infrastructure) how a "government" (in any meaningful sense of that word) is going to emerge from these disparate ethnic groups and war lords.

The problem [from this military/national defense perspective, as distinguished from humanitarian concerns] is that the strategies we are using are raising, rather than lowering, the levels of anger among Muslims who weren't crazy about the United States to begin with. The number who interpret Islam to require -- not just permit, but require -- a defense of their religion that involves an armed attack on the U.S. The number who believe that there are special after-life benefits coming their way if they are killed in the attempt.

On September 12th we had support in Pakistan. During the last 24 hours alone, the number of Pakistanis who have armed themselves and attempted to go into Afghanistan to join the war against us, the Infidels, increased from 60 to 5000.

This change of heart, this increased anger, does not bode well for our efforts to reduce the likelihood that we will come under new, and even more innovative and deadly, terrorist attacks in our homeland from equally increasingly angry potential terrorists newly entering our country or already in our midst.

From my perspective, and that of the world's press I am reading, it seems to me that my "homeland security" is every day somewhat less than it was the day before.