5 Years and Counting... (The Hidden Krugman)

Five years ago... I'd just moved into a new apartment in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle the weekend of the 8th. My cat, Spoon (who's no longer with us), was still a little freaked out about the move and the new digs and woke me up about 5. I'm a pretty light sleeper and I was also a bit of a workaholic at the time, so I thought I might as well head into work at Amazon and start feeding the beast. Since it was so early, I decided to drive in and pay for parking, and I just put the parking break on when Carl Kassell noted, with his voice showing a trace of confusion, that a small plane had just hit the World Trade Center in NYC. I shut off the car, thinking that odd indeed, and told myself to check the news sites as soon as I got into my office.

After chatting with the friendly folks down at Starbucks (they knew me and my espresso habit well), I headed up and fiddled around with some emails before remembering that I was going to check the news. But a funny thing was happening. I couldn't get to the NYTimes home page or really any of the major US news sites. So then I went to the BBC and saw that all hell had indeed broken loose, then turned NPR back on. I quickly made the rounds of the office, but no one was in yet. I'd never felt so alone, and I started to worry about my friends in Manhattan.

As the days dragged on, I grudgingly gave our President the benefit of the doubt, and as it was becoming obvious that Afghanistan, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden needed to be dealt with in a very serious manner, I backed our government but hoped that the response would not be so overwhelming that it would turn world opinion against America. But once the Afghanistan operation commenced and we weren't carpet bombing the place and it looked like we were very serious about bringing bin Laden to justice and creating a hospitable homeland and government for the Afghani people, I started to find a modicum of trust for the Bush Administration.

My, how five years can seem like a lifetime, and it's interesting that many of the worries I had about the actions that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld nexus of neo-con would play out in just that way. Oh, and bin Laden is still hopping around the mountainous terrain of Pakistan or Afghanistan without meeting the justice that he deserves. Paul Krugman in his Monday colum reminds us of the Promises Not Kept by the BushCo Admin LLC:

Five years ago, the nation rallied around a president who promised vengeance against those responsible for the atrocity of 9/11. Yet Osama bin Laden is still alive and at large. His trail, The Washington Post reports, has gone “stone cold.” Osama and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are evidently secure enough in their hideaway that they can taunt us with professional-quality videos.

They certainly don’t lack for places to stay. Pakistan’s government has signed a truce with Islamic militants in North Waziristan, the province where bin Laden is presumed to be hiding. Although the Pakistanis say that this doesn’t mean that bin Laden is immune from arrest, their claims aren’t very credible.

Meanwhile, much of Afghanistan has fallen back under the control of drug-dealing warlords and of the Taliban, which sheltered Al Qaeda before it was driven from Kabul. NATO’s top commander has appealed for more troops; the top British commander in Afghanistan has said that fighting there is fiercer than in Iraq. And the numbers bear him out: since the beginning of 2006, the NATO force in Afghanistan has had a higher rate of fatalities than that suffered by coalition troops in Iraq.

The path to this strategic defeat began with the failure to capture or kill bin Laden. Never mind the anti-Clinton hit piece, produced for ABC by a friend of Rush Limbaugh; there never was a clear shot at Osama before 9/11, let alone one rejected by Clinton officials. But there was a clear shot in December 2001, when Al Qaeda’s leader was trapped in the caves of Tora Bora. He made his escape because the Pentagon refused to use American ground troops to cut him off.

No matter, declared President Bush: “I truly am not that concerned about him,” he said about bin Laden in March 2002, and more or less stopped mentioning Osama for the next four years. By the time he made his what-me-worry remarks — just six months after 9/11 — the pursuit of Al Qaeda had already been relegated to second-class status. A long report in yesterday’s Washington Post adds detail to what has long been an open secret: early in 2002, the administration began pulling key resources, such as special forces units and unmanned aircraft, off the hunt for Al Qaeda’s leaders, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq.

At the same time, the administration balked at giving the new regime in Kabul the support it needed. As he often does, Mr. Bush said the right things: the history of conflict in Afghanistan, he declared in April 2002, has been “one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We’re not going to repeat that mistake.”

But he proceeded to do just that, neglecting Afghanistan in ways that foreshadowed the future calamity in Iraq. During the first 18 months after the Taliban were driven from power, the U.S.-led coalition provided no peacekeeping troops outside the capital city. Economic aid, in a destitute nation shattered by war, was minimal in the crucial first year, when the new government was trying to build legitimacy. And the result was the floundering and failure we see today.

How did it all go so wrong? The diversion of resources into a gratuitous war in Iraq is certainly a large part of the story. Although administration officials continue to insist that the invasion of Iraq somehow made sense as part of a broadly defined war on terror, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has just released a report confirming that Saddam Hussein regarded Al Qaeda as a threat, not an ally; he even made attempts to capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But Iraq doesn’t explain it all. Even though the Bush administration was secretly planning another war in early 2002, it could still have spared some troops to provide security and allocated more money to help the Karzai government. As in the case of planning for postwar Iraq, however, Bush officials apparently refused even to consider the possibility that things wouldn’t go exactly the way they hoped.

These days most agonizing about the state of America’s foreign policy is focused, understandably, on the new enemies we’ve made in Iraq. But let’s not forget that the perpetrators of 9/11 are still at large, five years later, and that they have re-established a large safe haven.

Here's a bit more on the resurgent Taliban from the WaPo's Peter Bergen:

When I traveled in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, the Taliban threat had receded into little more than a nuisance. But now the movement has regrouped and rearmed. Bolstered by a compliant Pakistani government, hefty cash inflow from the drug trade and a population disillusioned by battered infrastructure and lackluster reconstruction efforts, the Taliban is back -- as is Afghanistan's once forgotten war.

In the past three months alone, coalition forces have killed more than 1,000 Taliban fighters, according to Col. Tom Collins, a U.S. military spokesman, while the religious militia has killed dozens of coalition troops and hundreds of Afghan civilians, spreading a climate of fear throughout the country. And suicide attacks in Afghanistan have risen from single digits two years ago to more than 40 already this year. Most of the victims are civilians -- including more than a dozen bystanders who were killed here Friday when a bomb-laden car struck a convoy of armored U.S. vehicles just 200 yards from the U.S. Embassy; the attack also killed two U.S. soldiers and wounded a third. Half an hour after the blast, I watched as firefighters hosed down the streets, which were littered with shards of blackened metal and singed body parts.

I recently traveled to Afghanistan for three weeks, meeting with government officials, embedding with U.S. soldiers from the 2-4 Infantry and interviewing senior American military officers. I found that while the Taliban may not constitute a major strategic threat to President Hamid Karzai's government, they have become a serious tactical challenge for U.S. and NATO troops, as the war here intensifies. And their threat is only amplified by their ubiquity and invisibility.

The key to defeating bin Laden and the "Islamo-fascism" that BushCo keeps trumpeting was always going to be creating an Afghanistan that was a shining city on the hill (as it were) to show the Islamic world that we were serious about curbing extremism while improving the lives of ordinary people with a good government that provided safety and economic opportunity. But then the wandering eye of the neo-con nexus spied the hunky charms of Saddam Hussein, and it was all over.