Afghanistan: The Taliban strikes back

You won’t hear this from President Bush, said Newsday in an editorial, but we’ve got big trouble in Afghanistan. The president danced around the subject in his recent State of the Union address, giving a generally upbeat status report and announcing the dispatch of another 3,200 Marines. What he neglected to mention was why we’re sending more troops to a war most Americans think is essentially over. The truth is that the Taliban has staged a “dramatic turnaround,” said Paul Wiseman in USA Today. After a few years of regrouping in the mountains and recruiting disaffected Afghans, the Islamist militants are back with a vengeance. They’ve seized control of many of the country’s rural areas in the south and have begun sending suicide bombers into the heart of Kabul, terrifying Westerners and Afghans alike. The American public, and its politicians, remain fixated on Iraq, but it may be Afghanistan that’s at greater risk of imploding into a “failed state.”

The goal in Afghanistan is “victory, not perfection,” said Investor’s Business Daily, and if you look at the big picture, “the signs show we are winning.” The level of violence against civilians is indeed on the rise, but that’s in large part because the Taliban has learned that in direct combat, its fighters are no match for U.S. military forces. Meanwhile, U.S. and NATO forces have brought electricity, health services, and education to much of the country. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, our goal is not to solve all of the local population’s problems, but to uproot Islamic extremists and to win the war on terror.

But even by that standard, we are falling grievously short, said Lawrence Korb and Caroline Wadhams in The Boston Globe. Security is deteriorating, while the Taliban and al Qaida have established safe havens and training camps in the mountains along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Why, then, does the Bush administration keep six times as many troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan? It’s very perverse, given that al Qaida’s central leadership—the men responsible for the 9/11 attacks—are probably being protected by the resurgent Taliban, and that the international community actually supports this war, with a NATO force of 28,000 troops. The Afghan people, moreover, actually want us there. It is, in short, a war we might actually win if the U.S. stopped waging it as an afterthought and put “more effort and leadership into a major state-building effort.” It’s not yet too late, but, soon, it may be.

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