Ben is probably a lot more sinister than I give him credit for. Part of me wants to feel sorry for him because he appears to have sought Jacob's validation, only to be rebuffed. But maybe Jacob said "What about you?" to him out of disgust!
My hunch is that Ben has not just been going after Widmore and his men as part of their rivalry to control the Others and the island. Rather, in addition to all that, he has been sending Sayid as a hit-man against what I'll call the "Jacob cult," which we encountered last night.
The woman who captured Sayid works for the man whom Sayid shot on the golf course, and she appears to represent the Jacob cult. She called Richard "Ricardus," which struck me as a "secret society" sort of thing. And Richard gave the right answer to her question "What lies in the shadow of the statue?" when he said "he who will protect/save us all" (see here--no, my Latin is not good enough for me to have understood that myself :D). So Ben may not just be part of some petty rivalry with Widmore. He may be attacking Jacob himself, God of the island! I've heard people equate Ben with Satan. Maybe there's something to that!
But there may be other explanations. Maybe the man at the golf course is one of Widmore's men, and the woman who captured Sayid is trying to hinder the Ben/Widmore feud, or save Sayid from being Ben's tool.