I can remember George W Bush, in the midst of virtually the lowest polling numbers ever, saying that history will be the judge of his Presidency. And, once he was out of office, one of the first things he did was start attempting to rewrite history. However, I believe as more and more information becomes public, he will go down in history as one of the worst – and most incompetent – Presidents in our history. To go along with this, President Bush was POORLY SERVED by both Dick Cheney and his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Both Bush and Cheney have received a lot of deserved criticism for their poor decision making, but Rumsfeld has managed to slip into virtual obscurity since being fired right after the 2006 Democratic victories in the midterm elections. Rumsfeld was a convenient and appropriate scapegoat for Bush (he couldn’t really “fire” Dick Cheney) but, by this time in the Bush/Cheney administration, the damage had been done.

Bush tried to salvage as much as he could with the so-called “surge” which, despite attempts to proclaim it a success, has only put off the inevitable in Iraq. And, while we’re waiting for our Iraq nightmare to end, the reality of Afganistan/Pakistan is looming as the real challenge facing the Obama administration. Many Americans (including me) would like to see all of our troops come home, ASAP. I believe President Obama is needlessly dragging his feet in Iraq – remember, he “promised” to have the troops home in 16 months. He’s been in office almost 10 months and the troop levels are still at pre-surge numbers, and I’ve seen little indication that our soldiers are coming home. There is no way, at this point, for them to get home even close to the 16 month “deadline,” and I believe President Obama is planning to leave an unacceptable level of what he calls “non-combat” troops on the ground in Iraq as long as the Iraqi’s will put up with them. To complicate matters, the Generals who devised the surge in Iraq (Patreaus, Odierno, McCrystal) want to repeat the “strategy” in Afganistan which would require at least an additional 40,000 American troops there.

Here’s the “rub” for President Obama. I believe a strong case can be made that our troops are still needed in Afganistan. I’m presently reading “Descent into Chaos” by Ahmed Rashid (a Pakistani author with “inside” connections to the Afhans and Pakistani’s) and the consequences of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld incompetence in Afganistan are alarming. Not only did the Bush/Cheney administration “blow it” on 9/11 by ignoring one warning after another and by pitting one agency against another in there first few months in office so that they “DIDN’T KEEP US SAFE,” but their prosecution of the invasion of Afganistan was incredibly poorly thought out. THEY HAD NO CLUE WHAT THEY WERE DOING, or who they were dealing with. The result of their actions in Afganistan was almost like pouring fuel onto a fire, in regard to eliminating the threat to the United States which is Al Qaeda.

What most of us Americans don’t know is that the US tried to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda with as few troops as possible. In fact, they essentially sent in the CIA and a few hundred Army Special forces (along with a small number of NATO forces and superior air power) who worked with some of the Afgan militias to push the Taliban out of power and Al Qaeda out of Afganistan. They had an opportunity to essentially wipe out Al Qaeda and get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, but General Tommy Franks refused to send in American troops to “finish the job.” THIS WAS UNBELIEVABLE in it’s own right. But they screwed up another opportunity as well when the Taliban and Al Qaeda were surrounded in Kunduz and ready to quit, according to Rashid, “Gen. Tommy Franks could easily have put the US troops waiting in Uzbekistan on the ground in Kunduz to accept an orderly Taliban surrender. The absence of US troops ……. led to the deaths of thousands of Taliban prisoners by the hands of the Northern Alliance and to the escape of the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders.” But, worse than this, while they had thousands of Taliban soldiers and Al Qaeda leaders boxed in at Kunduz – along with members of Pakistan’s ISI – the Bush administration did a “favor” for Pakistan’s leader Pervez Musharraf by allowing a huge airlift removing the ISI and maybe a thousand Taliban and Al Qaeda from Kunduz – probably including Osama bin Laden.

Of the thousnds of Taliban who perished “at the hands of the Northern Alliance,” they were put in box cars – jammed in so that there wasn’t enough oxygen – and carted to another site in Afganistan with huge numbers of them suffocating en transit. These dead Taliban were buried in mass graves in an attempt to cover up the travesty. This was a direct result of President Bush doing Pervez Musharraf a “favor.” Not only did bin Laden “get away,” but these mass murders of Taliban undermined our credibility with the Afgan population. President Bush’s support of Musharraf showed his lack of understanding regarding his enemy. Musharraf was supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda who were training the insurgents fighting in Kashmir – Pakistan’s number one priority. Bush pretty much got “played” by both the Pakistani’s and the Afgan warlords who the American CIA tried to “buy” in order to gain control in Afganistan. What they didn’t seem to understand was that their very actions always produced the opposite result from what was intended. Yes, they pushed the Taliban out of Afganistan into Pakistan, but, in the process, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld made decisions that might have given them short term “gain,” but are now problems which are far more serious than when we originally “went in.”

By adapting a policy of buying off the various warlords in Afganistan the Bush administration virtually cut off the “legs” of the Karzai government that they put into power. Hamad Karzai was a patriot in the battle to get the Taliban out of Afganistan, but the lack of American support once he was in “power” combined with the billions distributed to the warlords in different remote parts of the country led to a dysfunctional government and ever increasing corruption and graft. As I’m reading Rashid’s book, it becomes very clear that we in America have no clue what life is like in Central Asia. But, the people there, at the time, were open to “nation building” by the United States – they’ve been at war forever. Getting sidetracked in Iraq not only has been a total disaster for the US foreign policy since then, but abandoning Afganistan has allowed a much more dangerous situation to emerge today – and like the economy President Bush left in ruins for Obama, Afganistan/Pakistan is a BIG PROBLEM.

In America after 9/11, we were as united as I can remember, when President Bush said we were going in and we were going to get Osama bin Laden. He said, any country who “harbors terrorists” does so at their own peril. However, we’ve known since 2002 that bin Laden is in Pakistan along with the Taliban leaders who retreated to Pakistan (it was the Pakistan ISI which was funding them in the first place), and we are painfully aware that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal which bin Laden would love to get his hands on. Yet, President Bush not only ignored this (I’m sure you’ve heard Bush’s famous answer to a question regarding bin Laden after the Iraq invasion, “I don’t know where he is, I don’t spend that much time on him”), but he gave Pervez Musharraf over 10 billion dollars in aid after 9/11. At the end of the Clinton Presidency Pakistan was sanctioned by the US and its allies for “harboring terrorists.” They were funding the Taliban who, in conjunction with Al Qaeda, (as mentioned above) were training Pakistani rebels fighting India in Kashmir – another seemingly unending conflict – and, another very DANGEROUS “hot spot” in the region. Musharraf played Bush for a complete sucker not only to get the sanctions removed, but to get the billions in aid, using the funds he received from the US to support the very enemy we were supposedly fighting (shouldn’t Bush have known about Pakistan’s support of the Taliban? Did they ignore everything the Clinton administration told them?). While Bush/Cheney/Rumsfelf (and the rest of us in America) were focused on Iraq, the Taliban and Al Qaeda reconstituted themselves to be an even bigger threat today than they were on 9/11 – all of this in Pakistan, and with money from us. I even remember Bush being asked at a news conference about Al Qaeda being in Pakistan and why weren’t we going in after them – he said, “Pakistan is a sovereign nation, we don’t invade sovereign nations!” (this, after us invading Iraq – a sovereign nation – FOR NO GOOD REASON – did he forget that it was Al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11?)

So, now President Obama faces a very tough decision. Afganistan is noted as the graveyard of invading troops. Do we stay and increase our presence? Or, do we pull our troops out? Obviously, what we’ve been doing and what we are doing is NOT WORKING. General McCrystal’s assessment, where he calls for more troops (kind of like the surge in Iraq) acknowleges the reality that we can’t win the way we’re going (I’m still not sure what “winning” would look like). President Obama has already put over 20,000 troops in Afganistan above the amount there when he took office. His next move is going to be met with opposition, NO MATTER WHAT HE DECIDES! Bush has left President Obama in almost a no-win situation (although we all – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike – need him to make the “right” decision, whatever he does) When history looks back at the policy there of the Bush/Cheney and especially Rumsfeld administration, people are going to be incredulous. It’s almost like we were in cahoots with the enemy. The refusal to defeat Al Qaeda at Tora Bora, allowing the airlift out of Kunduz, refusing to go into Pakistan after Osama bin Laden, pulling resources out of Afganistan so that we could invade Iraq, undermining the very “government” we “installed” in Afganistan by funding various “warlords” around the country who formed their own militias, all these “gaffs” have made Afganistan/Pakistan the most difficult problem that President Obama faces. While everyone knows that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld committed war crimes, history will show their policy in Afganistan was a criminal failure of a huge magintude for the rest of the world. George W Bush will never be able to rewrite history to hide his failures in prosecuting the war against Al Qaeda! (I will never understand why President Obama has allowed Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld to avoid investigation over all of this)