Here's a fable to tell our children, by the fire, in a not so-distant post-apocalyptic, dystopian future.

Once upon a time, during George "Dubya" Bush's "war on terra", the Forces of Good in Afghanistan captured - and duly tortured - one evil terrorist, Abu Yahya al-Libi.

Abu Yahya al-Libi was, of course, Libyan. He slaved three years in the bowels of Bagram prison near Kabul, but somehow managed to escape that supposedly impregnable fortress in July 2005.

At the time, the Forces of Good were merrily in bed with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - whose intelligence services, to the delight of the Bush administration, were doing their nastiest to exterminate or at least isolate al-Qaeda-style Salafi-jihadis of the al-Libi kind.

But, then, in 2011, the Forces of Good, under new administration, decided it was time to bury the oh so passe "war on terra" and dance to a new, more popular groove; humanitarian intervention, also characterized as "kinetic military action".