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Few doubt that Afghanistan was the right war at the right time. Al Qaeda, those who direct attacked the U.S. on 9/11, had the run of the country and the cooperation of the hyper-religious Taliban. We learned from abandoned Al Qaeda documents and computers that Afghanistan had become even more of a dangerous haven for international terrorism than we had thought.In late March of 2002 the Bush administration started diverting attention away from Afghanistan to ramp up its plans to invade Iraq. Deputy CIA Director John E. McLaughlin brought an unexpected message to the White House Situation Room, according to two people with firsthand knowledge, telling senior members of the president's national security team that the CIA was scaling back operations in Afghanistan.
That announcement marked a yearlong drawdown of specialized military and intelligence resources from the geographic center of combat with Osama bin Laden. The CIA closed forward bases in the cities of Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Kandahar and cut off an $80 million plan to train and equip a friendly intelligence service for the new U.S.-installed Afghan government.
Task Force 5 -- a covert commando team hunting for bin Laden and his lieutenants in the border region permanently lost more than two-thirds of its fighting strength. The commandos, their high-tech surveillance equipment and other assets would instead surge toward Iraq through 2002 and early 2003, as President Bush prepared for war with Iraq.
President Bush scoffed at any contention that the Iraq invasion was an unwise diversion in confronting terrorism, but as usual, President Bush was wrong again. Afghans are becoming disenchanted with the performance of the country's pro-American president, Hamid Karzai because he has not brought security, economic revival or effective governance to most of the country. Karzai has been hobbled, to a great extent, because he has not receive the full measure of aid and attention President bush promised when Karzai took office. Those failures have left the country vulnerable to warlords and drug lords, and escalating military pressure from a revived and reinvigorated Taliban.
Nearly five years after America and its coalition partners toppled the Taliban government and routed the training camps of Osama bin Laden, the war for Afghanistan rages on. The Afghan people in parts of Afghanistan are again under the thumb of the Taliban and al Qaeda due to the Bush administration's reckless haste to divert attention and treasure to Iraq. Daily battles now rage across five southern Afghan provinces as civilian and military casualties sharply mount.
Americans are coming to see the war in Iraq as something apart from the war against 9/11-style terrorism - and a distraction from it. The war in Afghanistan has always been an essential part of that larger struggle. Democrats running for office this November must do more to explain to the American people that as we "stay the course" in the middle of an Iraqi civil war, the real "war on terror" against those who direct attacked the U.S. on 9/11 rages on in Afghanistan and we seem to be losing that war too!.
