The UN and Doctors Without Borders said they were now faced with "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world."

No TV footage, no story.

South Africa keeps 75,000 under arms. Forty percent of the force is HIV positive. And only 3,000 men are deployable.

West Africa is a graveyard of failed nation-states.

The DRC, formerly Zaire, is the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. DRC is only a country on a map. Nineteenth-century tribalism has displaced the Western notion of a nation state.

Al-Qaida cells operate autonomously with sleeper agents among Muslim communities in most western, eastern and African countries. Bin Laden's capture -- dead or alive -- won't change the correlation of forces between terrorists and counter-terrorists.