By Joe Conason
Cheney, Rumsfeld and President Bush himself were distracted from the vital necessity of victory in Afghanistan - which meant not only driving out the Taliban but installing a real government in their place - by their obsession with Iraq.
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The resulting neglect of Afghanistan - with all the corruption, disillusionment and anger that has ensued - had reached a critical stage when the Bush administration finally departed. Their own commanders were left behind to warn the new president that after eight years of war, the enemy had gained the upper hand.
No further recrimination is necessary - history will render sterner judgments than any that can be written now. But after eight years of incompetence and arrogance, how can the United States salvage what has become of the "good war"?
Escalation appears to be a self-defeating strategy. If the secretary of defense worried in 2001 that a few thousand Americans in Tora Bora would enrage the Afghan population, how will that population react to the presence of nearly 200,000 foreign troops next year? The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan further inflames suspicions of American domination not only in that country but across the Muslim world - as the war in Iraq also did - and especially in strategically vulnerable Pakistan.
As investigative reporter Aram Roston recently revealed in a cover story for The Nation, the Afghan countryside is already so deeply permeated by the Taliban that contractors shipping logistical supplies to our troops routinely bribe the enemy to allow safe passage. Military sources estimated that the payoffs amounted to as much as 10 percent of the cash value of those shipments. So if we spend another $30 billion a year to send in additional troops, roughly $3 billion will end up in the coffers of the Taliban, far more than they need to buy the ammunition and explosives that kill our soldiers.