Afghan War: No end to Bush happy talk

The Afghanistan portion of From Bush’s Tennessee speech of 07/12/04 really caught my attention.  There's Bush's happy talk...

Three years ago, the nation of Afghanistan was the home base of al Qaeda, a country ruled by the Taliban, one of the most backward and brutal regimes of modern history. Schooling was denied girls. Women were whipped in the streets and executed in a sports stadium. Millions lived in fear. With protection from the Taliban, al Qaeda and its associates trained, indoctrinated, and sent forth thousands of killers to set up terror cells in dozens of countries, including our own.

Today, Afghanistan is a world away from the nightmare of the Taliban. That country has a good and just President. Boys and girls are being educated. Many refugees have returned home to rebuild their country, and a presidential election is scheduled for this fall. The terror camps are closed and the Afghan government is helping us to hunt the Taliban and terrorists in remote regions. Today, because we acted to liberate Afghanistan, a threat has been removed, and the American people are safer. (Applause.)

And then there's reality.  High-risk bid to register Afghans by Gretchen Peters Christian Science Monitor 07/06/04

Peters’ article describes the efforts of a UN team, protected by American troops, to register voters in the provinces of Afghanistan.  Their experience makes the story of civil rights activists trying to register African-American voters in Mississippi in 1964 sound like a summer vacation in Cancun.

The Taliban have vowed to disrupt presidential and parliamentary polls expected to take place in October. [See below on the status of the parliamentary part of the elections.] Three separate bomb attacks in the eastern city of Jalalabad have killed six people, including three women on June 26 working to register female voters. In southern Uruzgan, meanwhile, the Taliban have brutally massacred more than a dozen people after finding them with voter registration cards.

The spike in violence has led to the suspension of election and reconstruction work across much of the country, leading some to argue that elections must be delayed until spring, an eventuality President Hamid Karzai calls unacceptable. …

Critics wonder if it's worth it. Some argue the costs and risks of such an operation in Taliban country hardly outweighs the payback of winning over a few thousand villagers. There's concern that future attacks on the mission might cause loss of life and intense controversy within the UN over working so closely with the US military. …

For the US-led coalition, the mission also yields a wealth of intelligence, identifying which leaders work closely with the Taliban or Al Qaeda forces.

They also come across various clues as to how the enemy operates. "We have an urgent need for weapons like mines and rockets," reads a letter to a Pakistani extremist group found with a Taliban weapons cache. "You need to send them with animals across the border using the secret trails."

In the Afghanistan the president describes as a near-paradise produced by the Bush Doctrine, the most encouraging aspects of this voter drive seem to be that it “yields a wealth of intelligence” on how the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces work.  That would be the Afghanistan that Bush says “is a world away from the nightmare of the Taliban.”  Maybe he exaggerated just a bit.

More news from the Afghan War.  Or Liberated Afghanistan, if you prefer:

Afghans Arrest Three Men Over Herat's Deadly Blast Reuters 07/13/04

NATO's 'Myth' in Afghanistan by Jackson Kiehl Washington Post 07/05/04 Diehl thinks that Afghanistan may become the graveyard of NATO.  Actually, Bush dug the grave in Iraq, but the column has some relevant information on the situation in Afghanistan.

Taliban Raid Afghan Border, Burn US-Built School Reuters 07/10/04

Nato pledge for Afghanistan Guardian (UK) 06/29/04

The extra troops will be deployed to four northern Afghan cities and strengthen military-civilian "provincial reconstruction teams".

However, the Afghan government said that forces were urgently needed in the south and east. On Friday Taliban fighters killed 16 people in a southern province after finding them with voter registration cards. Attacks over the weekend killed two poll workers in Jalalabad and seven police officers in the western province of Farah. …

Afghans to Delay Parliamentary Polls Reuters 07/06/04.  Up until about a week ago, the October elections in Afghanistan were supposed to be elections for a parliament and a president.  The parliamentary elections have been cancelled, because the government doesn’t control it’s own territory outside the capital city of Kabul and the other limited areas where NATO troops are protecting it.  How it’s possible to have meaningful presidential elections but not parliamentary ones is not clear to me.

Bush says on Monday, “Many refugees have returned home to rebuild their country, and a presidential election is scheduled for this fall.”

Sadly, because of the poor job of reporting Afghanistan most media outlets have been doing for the last two and half years, most Americans hearing that won’t realize that less than a week before the US president was saying this, most of theOctober elections had to be cancelled.  I suppose we could praise Bush for looking on the bright side.  But if this is what Bush considers a success story, that makes his policy of wars of liberation look even more questionable.