Afghan War: Did Bush "liberate" Afghanistan?

Juan Cole has some worthwhile speculations about the role Tony Blair may have played in persuading the Bush Administration to focus on Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks. If Blair agreed to support a later Iraq invasion as part of a deal by which the Bush Administration would first strike against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, that would be at least a partial explanation of why he threw himself so recklessly into the Iraq War, at such cost to his own standing as a leader.

He also has some timely observations in references to Bush's Iraq War anniversary speech, on how "liberated" Afghanistan is at this point:

It is true that the Bush administration overthrew two harsh regimes, the Taliban and that of Saddam in Iraq. But in Afghanistan they only overthrew the Taliban because the latter stood in the way of getting at al-Qaeda. They accomplished the task by allying with the Jami`at-i Islami, or "Northern Alliance," the anti-Taliban Islamist movement among Tajiks, with which the pro-Iranian Hizb-i Vahdat of the Hazara Shiites was allied. Two years later, Afghanistan does not have an elected government (the so-called Loya Jirga or tribal council doesn't count for lots of reasons). Elections are scheduled for summer of 2004, but President Karzai is talking of postponing them. Afghans won't be "liberated" until they have an elected government and a sovereign parliament. At the moment, Karzai is the mayor of Kabul. Warlords like Ismail Khan rule provinces like Herat harshly, with Taliban-like restrictions on girls and personal liberties. The Taliban are resurgent in some Pushtun provinces in the south. 2/5s of gross domestic product is generated by drug production, raising fears of narco-terrorism. ...

It is disturbing that the Afghan and Iraqi elections may both be postponed past the US presidential elections. The likelihood is that both parliaments will be dominated by Islamists, which would be a public relations problem for Bush in the campaign. By cleverly postpoining the elections, he ensures that no embarrassing poll results emerge from his two "liberated" projects.