U.S. falling short in Afghanistan and Pakistan
What about Afghanistan? What about Pakistan? Add this to the sins of the Bush White House: Its foolish misadventure in Iraq has diverted our politics and military away from those places that gave aid and comfort to the jihadists who staged the Sept. 11 attacks.
While Congress debates conflicting reports over progress in Iraq -- and while President Bush soft-pedals his own benchmarks to cover the failures of the Iraqi government -- jihadists in Pakistan and its next-door neighbor, Afghanistan, plot and bomb and kidnap and maim, striking at local populations as well as U.S. and NATO forces.
Afghanistan was the staging ground for the terrorist atrocities that killed nearly 3,000 Americans six years ago. That's where Osama bin Laden set up his training camps, plotted his attack and picked the hijackers. And when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, he fled to the remote mountains of Pakistan, where he is probably still hiding. Last week, German authorities arrested Islamist militants whom they contend were planning a major attack, perhaps an assault on Ramstein, the largest U.S. Air Force base outside North America. The jihadists had traveled to Pakistan, where authorities say they trained in a terrorist camp. Islamists responsible for the London subway attacks, as well as those blamed in a disrupted plot to blow up U.S. airliners, also trained in Pakistan, intelligence officials say.
In July, a National Intelligence Estimate declared that al-Qaida had re-created safe havens in the remote mountains of Pakistan and "has protected or regenerated key elements of its homeland attack capability." Yet Pakistan continues to be treated as if it's our oldest and dearest friend. You'd think Pervez Musharraf was Tony Blair. Pakistan, it turns out, was the place where many of the evil deeds Bush blamed on Iraq were actually being carried out. Its intelligence service has had close ties to Islamic jihadists, including al-Qaida, since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
And while one of Pakistan's highest-ranking government scientists, Abdul Qadeer Khan, shared technology for nuclear weapons with North Korea, Libya and Iran, Saddam had no WMDs to share. Musharraf does occasionally aid U.S. forces in hunting down Islamists. For those desultory efforts, the U.S. gives his military $1 billion a year.
Neighboring Afghanistan, meanwhile, has become the world's largest producer of opium, with proceeds from the cash crop supporting insurgents. Even with NATO backing, the beleaguered government of President Hamid Karzai has never had the military power to take control of the entire country. Because American forces are stretched thin in Afghanistan, they frequently resort to air strikes when they're under attack. Those "surgical" strikes often end up killing civilians -- "collateral damage" that drives the locals into the arms of insurgents.
But with the so-called surge in Iraq straining the capacity of the all-volunteer military to the breaking point, we have no more troops to send to stave off a Taliban resurgence. Most troubling of all, of course, is that six years after the attacks of Sept. 11, Osama is still out there, recruiting more "martyrs" to his insane crusade, with consequences we can only imagine.
© 2007, Washington Post Writers Group