1352812597_24488f4e62_m.jpgEven as Bush and his PNAC Platoon allies in and out of the media pretend that Al Qaeda and/or Iran is the biggest threat ever in Iraq (even though 41% of all the jihadis in Iraq are Sunnis from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), and even as they pretend that The Surge Is Working (while simultaneously planning to stay in Iraq forever to prop up the government they installed because it wouldn’t last fifteen minutes without them), they seem to be rather quiet about what Al Qaeda is doing in Afghanistan.

This is because things really aren’t going that well in Afghanistan:

A White House assessment of the war in Afghanistan has concluded that wide-ranging strategic goals that the Bush administration set for 2007 have not been met, even as U.S. and NATO forces have scored significant combat successes against resurgent Taliban fighters, according to U.S. officials.

The evaluation this month by the National Security Council followed an in-depth review in late 2006 that laid out a series of projected improvements for this year, including progress in security, governance and the economy. But the latest assessment concluded that only “the kinetic piece” — individual battles against Taliban fighters — has shown substantial progress, while improvements in the other areas continue to lag, a senior administration official said.

This is actually a fairly mild assessment. If you go to the overseas media, the picture is much bleaker.

From The Guardian (h/t Down With Tyranny!):

Despite tens of thousands of Nato-led troops and billions of dollars in aid poured into the country, the insurgents, driven out by the American invasion in 2001, now control “vast swaths of unchallenged territory, including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries,” the Senlis Council says in a report released yesterday.

On the basis of what it calls exclusive research, it warns that the insurgency is also exercising a “significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime change.”

It says the territory controlled by the Taliban has increased and the frontline is getting closer to Kabul– a warning echoed by the UN which says more and more of the country is becoming a “no go” area for western aid and development workers.

The council goes as far as to state: “It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when… and in what form. The oft-stated aim of reaching the city in 2008 appears more viable than ever and it is incumbent upon the international community to implement a new strategic paradigm before time runs out.”

I remember the last time that Kabul fell to the Taliban after a foreign invader stopped propping up a puppet government. Except then they were part of the “mujahdeen”, and we liked them (and Osama, who was soon to be allied with them) because we were using them to drain the Soviet Union’s treasury and thus hasten its collapse, Grover-Norquist-style. Read this New York Times article from 1989, written during the waning days of the Soviet occupation. Replace the word “Soviet” with “American” and “guerrilas” with “Taliban” and you have the situation as it stands today.

Meanwhile, even as GOP/Media Complex tools like Tom Bevan of Real Clear(ly Republican) Politics tell the Democrats that The Surge Is Working So You Must Bend Over For Bush, Juan Cole reminds us that things aren’t really that rosy in Iraq:

The NYT reports that the Bush administration is giving up on most of its political benchmarks for Iraq. Apparently the most they think they can now hope for is that Iraq will ask the United Nations to authorize an extension of the US mandate in Iraq, that parliament will pass a budget, and that the Iraqi parliament will pass a law allowing mid-level former Baath officials to hold government jobs if they have not been shown to have committed crimes in the Saddam period. Powerful blocs in parliament such as the Sadrists oppose the UN extension of the US mandate in Iraq, and most Shiites and Kurds also oppose changes in the de-Baathification regulations. I wonder if even these scaled-down political expectations are realistic. PM Nuri al-Maliki is a minority prime minister with very little support in his own parliament, and only his Kurdish alliance even allows him to stay in power.

Again, if The Surge Is Working, why does al-Maliki need to have US troops around forever to prop him up?

Meanwhile, the place in Iraq that has had the biggest actual drop in violence and chaos recently is Basra, which had been an ungovernable mess as recently as three months ago. How did this occur? Well, instead of seeing a “surge” (read: escalation) in troop numbers, Basra actually saw the complete pullout of coalition (in this case British) troops, which resulted in a 90% drop in violence. Yes, you read that right: Ninety percent.

So, to sum up: We’ve lost Afghanistan, we never really had Iraq (in fact, our hold on Iraq is so tenuous that Bush plans to keep us there forever in order to prop up al-Maliki and whichever US-picked puppets succeed him), and the places in Iraq that are doing the best right now are the ones from which the Brits have pulled out.

Oh, and Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden (who unlike Iraq’s late Saddam Hussein, really was the guy who attacked us on 9/11) is still free and still not in Iraq.

Any questions?

(Graphic published originally by azrainman under a Creative Commons license.)

Related posts:

  1. Gen. Ray Ordierno: We May Never Win in Iraq
  2. DPC to Continue Drive for Oversight, Accountability for Iraq and Afghanistan Contractors
  3. In Iraq, As in So Many Contexts, Withdrawal is Victory
  4. Conn Hallinan: Why the Afghan Surge Will Fail
  5. An Afghan Circle I Would Like Squared