Afghanistan on the brink

While the House and Senate continue to debate the merits of the U.S. military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan continues to drift steadily toward the brink of disaster. 58 coalition troops were killed in 2004 but that number jumped to 129 in 2005 and is already at 69 so far this year. In the words of Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid, author of the best-selling book Taliban,

Since 2003 when the Taliban first began to regroup, they have gradually matured and developed with the help of al-Qaeda, which has reorganized and retrained them to use more sophisticated tactics in their military operations. As recently as a year ago, the main Taliban groups were composed of a few dozen fighters; now each group includes hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with motorbikes, cars, and horses. They burn down schools and administrative buildings and kill any Afghan who is even indirectly associated with the government. In the south, they operate with impunity just outside the provincial capitals, which have become like Green Zones. Approximately 1,500 Afghan security guards and civilians were killed by the Taliban last year and some three hundred already this year. There have been forty suicide bombings during the past nine months, compared to five in the preceding five years. Some 295 US soldiers and four CIA officials have been killed in Afghanistan since September 11, 2001 —140 by hostile action.

Even right wingers like Michael Yon are starting to admit that things are taking a turn for the worse.

One of the most powerful arguments for staying out of Iraq back in 2003 was that launching an invasion there would draw attention away from the threat posed by al-Qaeda and compromise our ability to attend to our unfinished business in Afghanistan. As it stands, it looks like those fears are coming to fruition:

It is now five years since George W. Bush declared victory in Afghanistan and said that the terrorists were smashed. Since the Bonn meeting, in late 2001, a smorgasbord of international military and development forces has been increasing in size. How is it, then, that Afghanistan is near collapse once again? To put it briefly, what has gone wrong has been the invasion of Iraq