It didn't take a genius to figure out that this administration didn't have any intention of genuinely following through in Afghanistan. I remember the early days of this blog when even suggesting that things weren't going swimmingly there brought howls of anguish from the Righties, who stopped caring as soon as they were given their shiny new toy -- Iraq.
It's sad really. I like, you know, just about everyone else in the country supported the Afghanistan conflict with little reservation at first, though my skepticism grew rather quickly. The truth is, as with Iraq, too much "liberal cover" was given to that war as with the one in Iraq. Toppling women hating theocrats? Sounds good to this liberal! Let's send a dollar to the Iraqi schoolchildren! Hooray!
It wasn't that demolishing the Taliban and going after terrorists there was a bad idea, but because the "rightness" of the mission was so obvious, and anyone who questioned any aspect of it was quickly necklaced, tough questions about just what the hell we were doing there were never asked.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq there were two missions -- remove terrorist threats and rebuild nations too long under the boot of authoritarian regimes. While the "Taliban" are gone in Afghanistan, most of the country is run by warlords (drug lords). And, large numbers of terrorists were allowed to escape at Tora Bora.
In Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, it seemed at least that we'd committed the funds to rebuild the country. Much "liberal cover" was provided from the Friedman wing by people who couldn't believe the Bush administration, which had screwed up everything else so horribly, would screw up their pet project. The terrorist threat was nonexistent, as were the WMDs, so removing an authoritarian regime and replacing it with something better is the only metric by which success can be judged.
When the history of the Bush administration is written, a key theme will be the fact that the "War President" managed to lose two wars. Not the military - they did their jobs. The president.
