September 9, 2006
IT WILL BE five years in December since the United States, in conjunction with ethnic militias in Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, routed the Taliban from power and promised Afghans an advent of peace, democracy, and the reconstruction of their war-shattered country. Today in large areas of Afghanistan there is renewed warfare, corrupt or ineffectual governance, and hope-destroying poverty untouched by misspent foreign aid.
Many have contributed to Afghanistan's agony. Notwithstanding a promise Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made Wednesday during a visit to Kabul to ``fight Talibanization," Pakistan continues to harbor fighters from the Taliban movement that Pakistan's military intelligence originally midwifed. Corrupt warlords bear responsibility for increased poppy production. And Taliban fanatics who are killing teachers in girls' schools and beheading foreign aid workers remain the scourge of the Afghan populace.
President Bush and his policy makers nevertheless deserve a large part of the blame for what they failed to do -- or did wrong -- after toppling the Taliban. The most salient reason for their failure to rehabilitate Afghanistan has been a doctrinal blindness to Afghan realities coupled with an ideological fixation on the superiority of the private sector.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected proposals from former Secretary of State Colin Powell for a hefty force of armed US and European peacekeepers that, in 2002 and early 2003, might have provided Afghans the security they needed -- and deserved.
more:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/09/09/failing_afghanistan/
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