Descent Into Chaos

You should read Sidney Blumenthal writing in the Guardian today. He quotes Bush's first envoy to Afghanistan:

"I was horrified by the president's last speech [on the war on terror], so much unsaid, so much disingenuous, so many half truths," said James Dobbins, Bush's first envoy to Afghanistan, now director of international programmes at the Rand Corporation. Afghanistan is now the scene of a Taliban revival, chronic Pashtun violence, dominance by US-supported warlords who have become narco-lords, and a human rights black hole.

From the start, he said, the effort in Afghanistan was "grossly underfunded and undermanned". The military doctrine was the first error. "The US focus on force protection and substitution of firepower for manpower creates significant collateral damage." But the faith in firepower sustained the illusion that the mission could be "quicker, cheaper, easier". And that justification fitted with Afghanistan being relegated into a sideshow to Iraq.

Blumenthal also points to Dobbins' observation that "the word 'democracy' was introduced at the insistence of the Iranian delegation" during the Bonn conference establishing international legitimacy for the Kabul government. Like Iraq, where democratic elections had to be forced by Shia politicians on the Bush administration, there was never any original intention to spread freedom and democracy in Afghanistan.

Dobbins describes the situation as one of "barely managed chaos", with the Afghan President, Karzai, being "well meaning and moderate and thoroughly honourable but he's overwhelmed." I would go further. The British have been aware for the last 200 years that what starts in Afghanistan will eventually resonate througout (now nuke-armed) Pakistan and India too. Nowhere is this clearer than in Kashmir, where Pakistani Army-backed Islamic militants carry out continual terror attacks. Still having a parochial interest in the region for old Empire's sake, the Brits are quite obviously becoming more concerned with that region than with their involvement in Bush's Iraqi adventure.

The Taliban and Al Qaida have a huge reserve of armed Islamic extremists just across the Pakistani border, where Pakistan is unable and unwilling to root them out. Money from the drugs trade will eventually mean more and better weaponry for militants and local warlords. Corruption within the police and security forces is already reaching Columbian heights. Violent attacks are rising again and the population outwith the urban zones are just as oppressed as they ever were.

The Independent notes that even in Kabul, Karzai's government is losing ground.

The Taliban have stepped up their attacks in the south of the country, two months away from parliamentary elections.

Many believe that with the help of their former backers, Pakistan's ISI military intelligence, and infiltrated by al-Qa'ida, the Taliban are bent on returning to power through the gun rather than the ballot box.

Over the past year, the attacks in the south-east have become much more targeted and professional, according to senior British officials who express disappointment that even in Mr Karzai's home region of Kandahar the insurgency is on the rise.

Afghanistan still has the ability to do again what it did to British and Russian armies in times past. It also has the needed ingredients to become an even greater center of destabilization and terrorism than it ever was under the Taliban. The descent into chaos is looking ever more likely as the same old rhetoric conceals the same old lack of imaginative solutions.

The fault will lie solely at the doors of Bush and Blair, who deserted the war on terror for what they thought would be a vote-winning, easy war of liberation.