Placing the blame

It has been seven years since a gang of foreign terrorists launched cowardly, kamikaze attacks on our country. It is a day to remember those who lost their lives, some very heroically. But we are a country that also constantly looks forward, and one thing we have to look forward to is one hell of a mess in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, a day before the 9/11 commemorations, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen told Congress that "we're running out of time" to salvage Afghanistan. "I'm not convinced we're winning it in Afghanistan," said Mullen. And the blame for that lies squarely on one person, President Bush. It was ultimately his decision to virtually abandon the real war against terror to pursue a trumped-up, ruinous war in Iraq, and now we are reaping the deadly harvest from his horrible decisions. Where does Afghanistan stand nearly seven years after our intervention? The Taliban and al-Qaida are regrouping and regaining power. Opium production continues almost unabated, and the illicit drug trade actually helps finance the resurgence of the people behind the 9/11 atrocities. Hamid Karzai's so-called national government can't exert any real authority once you get a short distance from Kabul. And while the situation in Afghanistan worsened, we lost 4,000 lives and spent hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq. And all the while, our few allies in these fights are either refusing to send more troops or pulling their forces out entirely. Would those 4,000 American lives that were sacrificed in Iraq have been lost anyway if we had kept the focus on Afghanistan and the border area with Pakistan? Perhaps. But at least Afghanistan might not be the festering hellhole it is today, a place where we might have to spend thousands more of our soldiers' lives to clean up the mess that our own president must bear the responsiblity for creating.