Afghanistan: The Job Bush Left Unfinished

One of the reasons I opposed the war in Iraq was that Afghanistan was far from a finished job. In the winter of 2003, Bush had put Afghanistan on the back burner but it didn't take much digging into news stories in the back pages of various news sites to realize that Afghanistan was not a sure thing. The joke at the time, and not much has changed in the last three years, was that Karzai was not the president of Afghanistan but just the president of Kabul.

Furthermore, Pakistan, having established itself as a nuclear power, had problems we couldn't ignore though we have pretty much patched over some of those problems while the State Department has occassionally put out small wildfires. It's also important to remember that Osama bin Laden found a home in the northwest territory of Pakistan.

Juan Cole of Informed Comment has a post on conditions in Afghanistan:

The Bush administration is in the midst of "imperial overstretch" on a grand scale. Taking on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, convincing Pakistan to change its policies, and reconstructing Afghanistan would have been a tough enough job. It might not have been possible even with the investment of enormous resources and personnel. Afghanistan is large and rugged and desperately poor. Bad characters are still hiding out in the region, who have proved that they can reach into the United States and hit the Pentagon itself.

Instead of doing the job, Bush ran off to Iraq almost immediately. Even as our brave troops were being killed at Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan in spring of 2002, Centcom commander Tommy Franks was telling a visiting Senator Bob Graham that the US "was no longer engaged in a war in Afghanistan" or words to that effect, and that military and intelligence personnel were being deployed to Iraq. The US troops in Afghanistan would have been shocked and disturbed to discover that in the Centcom commander's mind, they were no longer his priority and no longer even at war! As for money, Iraq has hogged the lion's share. What has been spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan is piddling.

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Monday's riots in Kabul, in which altogether 14 died and over 100 were wounded and during which thousands thronged the streets chanting "Death to America", also produced violent attacks and gunfire throughout the city, with hotel windows being sprayed with machine gun fire. The protests were sparked by a traffic accident. But they have other roots.

The US military presence in Afghanistan has quietly been pumped up from 19,000 to 23,000 troops.

A fresh US airstrike in Helmand killed some 50 Afghans on Monday Over 400 Afghans have been killed by US bombing and military actions in only the past two weeks.

(snip)

Despite Bush administration pledges to reconstruct the country, only six percent of Afghans have access to electricity. Less than 20 percent have access to clean water. Although the gross domestic product has grown by 80 percent since the nadir of 2001, and may be $7 billion next year, most of that increase comes from the drug trade or from foreign assistance.

With Bush, it's always too little and too late. We saw proof of that even in his domestic policy. His response on American soil to Hurricane Katrina would have been unacceptable to any president since the end of World War Two. Dealing with Afghanistan on its own merits would have been a tough enough job as it is. One of the ironies, however, is that by going to Iraq Bush has limited his options in many foreign policy situations.

If Bush drags us into war with Iran, three wars may turn out to be more than our economy can handle. And our foreign policy options elsewhere will largely be zero. Such a third war would endanger our national security, not improve it.