New York Times Article on How War in Afghanistan Went Bad

The New York Times, in its Sunday edition for August 12, 2007, takes a look at the war in Afghanistan and how it went bad. As usual a deadly combination of American hubris, Bush incompetence, and blind focus on Iraq offers an explanation. This is a quote from the article:

President Bush’s critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America’s effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.

Statements from the White House, including from the president, in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan’s myriad problems, according to dozens of interviews in the United States, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

One of the amazing things about Democratic statements before the Iraqi war vote in 2002 is why prominent Democrats didn't use the theme that Bush wanted to start a second war before he had won the first one. Such a theme would have made sense to the American people and would have been instinctively understood. How many of us heard our parents tell us when we were growing up not to start a new project until the old one was finished? Yet, although it is hard to remember all that was said about Iraq back in the fall of 2002, Democrats using that theme doesn't stick out.

Granted, given the lock-step approach that the Republicans who controlled Congress took when it came to backing Bush back in 2002, it wouldn't have made much of a difference in policy terms. It could have, however, made a difference in political terms. Such a theme would have given Democrats a way to distinguish themselves from Bush on national security and might have limited Democratic losses in the 2002 mid-term elections. It also would have set up Democrats for the 2004 presidential campaign which Bush and Rove planned to make about national security.