Over at Firedoglake, Scarecrow has an excellent post about how the planned escalation of the war in Iraq will make the situation in Afghanistan--remember Afghanistan?--worse:
Not only are the US and NATO forces already stretched for enough troops to deal with a resurgent Taliban, but some of the US troops already there are scheduled to be part of the "surge" into Iraq.
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A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.
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US commanders understand that the Afghan war is an "economy of force" operation, a military term for a mission that is given minimal resources because it is a secondary priority, in this case behind Iraq.
So Bush thinks that at a time when Mullah Omar is casually giving interviews to the Pakistani press (but somehow can't be found by U.S. forces) and the Taliban plans to ratchet up the war in Afghanistan, it is appropriate to draw down American forces there in order to intervene in the civil war in Iraq?
Bush must believe his own 9/11 propaganda. Why else would we be slacking off on our efforts to defeat the Taliban, who were intimately tied to and gave shelter to al-Qaeda terrorists, while expanding our efforts in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11?
As I've noted before, "our folly in Iraq is linked to our failure in Afghanistan. Like so much else that the Bush administration has wrecked, it will take decades to fix."
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