Bush has created a debacle for the ages in Iraq, but he can always point to his success in Afghanistan, right? After all, as the president has explained, he put the Taliban “out of business forever.” Afghanistan, we’re told, was the “first victory in the war on terror.”
Too bad none of this is true.
The LA Times had a good editorial today that reminds us that the first war in the war on terror — you know, when we invaded the right country instead of the wrong one — is still struggling terribly.
[D]uring the Republican convention this week, Bush supporters are playing up Afghanistan to draw attention away from the mess in Iraq. But last weekend’s bombing in Kabul, the Afghan capital, provided the latest reminder that the victory is nowhere near complete.
[…]
The Taliban is far from destroyed, and its leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, is still at large. So is Osama bin Laden, and Al Qaeda remnants still fight U.S. troops.
Security has deteriorated to the point that aid workers are fleeing.
Foreigners and international organizations have been special targets in the last year. Two United Nations workers registering voters in southeast Afghanistan were among six killed in a bomb blast in July. That month, the Nobel Prize-winning group Doctors Without Borders announced it was withdrawing from the country. Officials with the nonprofit group said the security situation was so bad, and the investigation of the June killing of five of its staffers so poor, that it could no longer put its members at risk. At least two dozen additional Afghan and foreign workers for international aid groups have been killed this year.
And the semblance of government that does exist — and which Bush largely ignores — is hardly in control.
Karzai has had trouble extending his writ much beyond Kabul. Too much of the country remains the fiefdom of warlords. Some of these men helped U.S. forces in the months after the invasion, but they must be disarmed now before the country can collect taxes, build more schools or stamp out the opium poppy crop — which is estimated to have increased 36-fold since the days of Taliban rule.
The country that al Queda and the Taliban called home was responsible for the attacks of 9/11, and yet Bush decided Afghanistan’s significance paled in comparison to a country with no WMD, no connection to 9/11, and which posed no immediate threat to the U.S.
Washington shortchanged Afghanistan to launch the Iraq war and seems to remember the early battleground of the war on terror only when political advantage accrues. If the U.S. clears the cobwebs and remembers Kabul again, it will have to stay focused to produce long-term progress.
True, but the cobwebs remain very much in place, at least for the next 62 days.