I'd suggest reading "Three Cups of Tea" to get a good idea of the kind of people and villages we're impacting. There's a scene in there about an Indian bombing raid on the same area of Pakistan that we're trying to reach and it's impact on two little sisters in a remote village and their terror that will tear your heart out.

We've pushed Pakistan into running tens of thousands of civilians out of their remote villages. And we think nothing of it. We just don't give a damn. How many of these people do we have to terrorize before we've had enough retribution?

So Josh asks the importance of "terrorist capos" who "hide out...in caves in Afghanistan"? Has he been taking lessons from the AntiSemantic Right-Wing, and is now showing off his A Game on the court with dialectic dribbling? He's driving agenda with inapt imagery.

A capo is the head of a criminal syndicate. He's a high-risk venture capitalist, whose business model is to maximise profits through delivering goods and services that are illegal, acquiring monopolistic control over a market through coercion, and marketing fraudulent insurance instruments by creating artificial demand for, as well as owning the complete supply of them. A capo might engage in acts which under post-911 predicates are defined as terrorism, but they avoid high-profile and/or large-scale actions within this category, because they are very bad for business. Capos are also at the top of a well-defined static organisational hierarchy.

True terrorist organisations, and their leadership are not static entities, but are instead amorphous.Often, almost as soon as a terrorist gains enough fame, and (s)he is perceived to be in a hierarchical leadership position, they are relegated to roles of public-facing fronts, and propaganda assets. They no longer retain active operational control. Terrorist organisations are not primarily profit motivated. They are driven by ideological zealotry, and perceive the accumulation of wealth as a means, not an end. Primary traits of their action plans are high-profile and large-scale.

Josh is attempting to grayscale the resident evil of terrorist leaders with this capo designation.

Then he tossed into that mix, an image of these grayscaled persons holing up out of fear for their continued existence in dark, damp and dingy caves, sitting atop guano heaps. The reality is much different, at least in the Afghan/Pakistan frontier. These caves are not small dark holes, they are instead large habitable systems, which have been used throughout human history. These structures have been vastly expanded and improved for effective usage by smugglers, bandits and resistors to invaders. Historically, Afghanistan has been the arpit at the very edge of an empire's expansion, yet at the same time, an important fulcrum point caught between existing powers. These cave structures have served as refuge for Afghans. Even the worst of them are very livable by their standards, and since the 80's the best have been improved with modern technology, funded by foreign covert operations, and international financing for terrorist organisations. Some have received concrete reinforcement, blast doors, self-contained power supplies, and satellite communication links. These are not "caves", but instead modern underground control centers.