Afghanistan

If you run it backwards, we’re doing great!

Forget Iraq for a minute, and just give Afghanistan standing alone the “Bill Clinton Test”.

Here is where we were six years ago…From the January 29, 2002 State of the Union Address…

…
In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan's terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.

The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay. And terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own.

America and Afghanistan are now allies against terror. We'll be partners in rebuilding that country. And this evening we welcome the distinguished interim leader of a liberated Afghanistan: Chairman Hamid Karzai.

The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government. And we welcome the new Minister of Women's Affairs, Doctor Sima Samar.

Our progress is a tribute to the spirit of the Afghan people, to the resolve of our coalition, and to the might of the United States military. When I called our troops into action, I did so with complete confidence in their courage and skill. And tonight, thanks to them, we are winning the war on terror. The man and women of our Armed Forces have delivered a message now clear to every enemy of the United States: Even 7,000 miles away, across oceans and continents, on mountaintops and in caves -- you will not escape the justice of this nation.
…

We had won. Got that?

Won.

Afghanistan was all but fading into the Great Conservative Rose-colored Rear View Mirror, we were so very much winning the shit out of it.

Terrorist camps stomped flat. The country liberated. Bad guys dead, in prison or on the run. Our flag flying over our embassy. Afghani women free to do great things.

We had won. Period.

And then, about a year later…

Karzai to urge Bush not to forget Afghanistan

Thursday, February 27, 2003 Posted: 8:11 AM EST (1311 GMT)

Karzai testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai is urging President Bush to keep an eye on Afghanistan despite the prospect of war with Iraq.

Even though Bush has promised U.S. commitments to Afghanistan will not lag behind other foreign policy matters, Karzai said he expects further assurances from Bush when they meet Thursday at the White House.

Afghan officials have said for nearly a year that they fear their country would slip from view if the United States took on the task of disarming Iraq -- a country Karzai described Wednesday as "a friend" that supported Afghanistan during its occupation by the former Soviet Union.

"We know the Iraqi people very well. They are Muslim, we are Muslim," Karzai said Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We would wish for them what we wish for ourselves. To be free, to be liberated, to have access to a better life."

However, Karzai said, Afghans don't want the United States to withdraw as it did when the Soviets left Kabul. In the aftermath, the Taliban rose to power and Afghanistan became a haven for terrorists.

"Don't forget us if Iraq happens," Karzai said. "If you reduce the attention because of Iraq ... and if you leave the whole thing to us to fight again, it will be repeating the mistake the Unite

...

"The fight against terrorism is not completed," Karzai said. "You have to see them totally defeated and gone before we can presume that Afghanistan is now out of the woods."

Ruh Roh.

But hey, not to worry.

Afghanistan was over. Yesterday’s news.

Already being spoken of by The Commander Guy in the past tense.

...

"We will deny the terrorists the sanctuary and bases they need to plan and strike, as we have done in the battle of Afghanistan," Bush said. "We will not permit terrorist organizations or states to blackmail the world with weapons of mass destruction, as we have shown in the battle of Iraq."

Have done.

Have done.

Have done.

Of course this was just around the time that House Halliburton finally lied and terrified the United States into juicy, oil-rich Iraq -- the cool, ass-kicking, Super Christian, Xbox War for the History Books Dubya wanted for Christmas -- instead of smelly, poor Afghanistan, the socks-and-underpants war he actually got.

At which point it became necessary to start to blur the distinctions between them.

And so "Iraqandafghanistan" started becoming one word, because WTF, they’re all just a bunch of scary, ululating brown people over there, right?

$87-billion more

The president puts a price tag on the current phase of the war on terror and calls for more international help.

By Associated Press
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 8, 2003


WASHINGTON - Four days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush said Sunday night that he will seek $87-billion to fight terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan and "engage the enemy where he lives."

In an 18-minute address, Bush said, "We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities."

Bush appealed for troops and money for security and reconstruction from other countries, even those who opposed the U.S.-led war.

...

And of course to make it all work you have to use the Majyk Incantation Word -- "alqaida" -- to scare the bejesus out of everyone.

Except while Dick Cheney and George Bush had argued that there were absolutely pre-existing links between "alqaida" and Iraq sufficient to launch a war that would eventually run on longer that WWII and cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American Lives, Colin Powell apparently did not get that memo and let slip this little gem of truth-blurt:

(From the same article)

...
Powell said the Bush administration is concerned that members of al-Qaida or other terrorist groups may be heading toward Iraq. "I'm not sure how large these numbers are, how significant the threat is, but we will deal with it in Iraq," Powell said on NBC's Meet the Press.

So having declaimed into existence an entirely new country called “Iraqandafghanistan” and conflated al-Qaida with every-other-suspect-group-of brown-people-from-Hamas-to-Menudo, the Lyin’est Fucking Administration in American History would then spend the next four-and-one-half years (and counting) repeating the same bald-faced lies over and over and over and over and over and over again.

And it worked.

I remember very vividly around a year later -- right around the time that Afghanistan was showing clear and dangerous signs of neglect and Taliban resurgence -- getting into it in a bar “conversation” with a Conservative colleague who waved off any suggestion that Afghanistan was now anything other than a fully pacified, bucolic Montana-with-turbans as Liberal America-hating waving-the-white-flag-of-surrender-talk.

We had already won in Afghanistan! It was done! Over! Another glorious Conservative Victory that was in absolutely no way threatened by any drain on money or manpower from that other unqualified Conservative Success Story; Iraq.

And BTW, all of this talk about there being an “insurgency” in Iraq that would suck us into a bloody stalemate year after year was also clearly just more moonbat traitor-speak.

Period. End of discussion.

Remember how it was?

Remember?

These were the simple, declarative, dismissive, super-patriotic constituent elements of the Wingtard World View of my Conservative colleague.

There were millions like him.

And they haven’t evolved one iota in the last five years, so rather that taking to the streets to apologize en masse to each and every one of us for being such irredeemably ignorant blood-drunk fucknozzles, instead this Fall they will all be storming the polls to vote for Saint John McCain and against the candidate of dirty fucking hippy American-haters like me.

And now, seven years after we “won” in Afghanistan?

Bush Urges Patience in Afghanistan
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

BUCHAREST, Romania — President Bush opened a meeting of NATO leaders here on Wednesday by urging the alliance to “maintain its resolve and finish the fight” in Afghanistan and to strengthen its military forces to combat Al Qaeda and other threats around the world.

With the war in Afghanistan in its seventh year, Mr. Bush used a speech and a news conference to urge NATO nations to deploy still more troops than the 47,000 there now, even as he acknowledged it was politically and militarily difficult for some of the alliance’s 26 nations to do so.

“We expect our NATO allies to shoulder the burden necessary to succeed,” he said, appearing with Romania’s president, Traian Basescu, at a retreat beside the Black Sea.

With officials and commanders warning that NATO risked failure in Afghanistan, Mr. Bush sought to reinvigorate the alliance’s commitment to what earlier in the day he called the “most daring and ambitious” mission in its history. Some nations, including France, have publicly indicated they intend to send more troops, but a full accounting of any additional forces will not be clear until Thursday, when the summit officially convenes.

...

Afghanistan was always the pesky book report that Dubya never wanted to do in the first place, because it was full of big words and poor people and bringdown stuff. No, Dubya always wanted to throw the winning touchdown in a rigged game and get carried off the field in glory, and no fucking book report on one of those fucking backward, pest-hole "stan" countries was going to get that done.

So Dubya never bothered to read it.

Instead he watched "North Dallas Forty"

500 times while swearing that his report -- "Afghanistan: Land of Strange People and Music and Stuff that is a LOT like North Dallas Forty" -- was almost finished.

And after seven years he has never paid any price for his failure and incompetence in his other, “stepchild” war.

But if it were President Bill Clinton?

If, seven years after dropping the full weight of the most powerful military in the history of the world on the neck of poverty-stricken, Third World country from which the worst terrorist attack in our history had been launched, the following were true:

1. The United States was now seriously in danger of letting it all slip away.
2. The man who launched the attack was still at large
3. And all President Bill Clinton had to offer was a lecture on maintaining our “resolve”

How long do you think it would be befor every Republican in America was up on his hind legs shrieking for the Clinton’s impeachment 24/7/365 until the got it? And how much would you like to wager that the entire GOP play-book for the 2008 elections would be to ride this single issue into the White House?

Big ones or small ones, Dubya has fucked up every war he ever touched.

Except, of course, his War on the Middle Class: at that, he and his Party continue to do a spectacular job.