As violence in Iraq has decreased significantly over the past several months, President Bush and Sen. John McCain have been quick to attribute the sharp decline in U.S. military and Iraqi civilian casualties to their troop-surge strategy and claim that victory in the desert quagmire is now within reach.
While we welcome the news of diminishing bloodshed and increasing stability in Iraq, we find it difficult to define "success" in the face of a tragically unnecessary and grievously costly foreign policy misadventure. Furthermore, the unsettling developments in the forgotten war being waged in the mountains of Afghanistan have overshadowed the progress in Iraq and further complicated the "success" calculus.
Violence levels in Afghanistan have been steadily increasing since 2002. In May, U.S. and NATO casualties in Afghanistan were higher than those in Iraq for the first time ever. This disturbing trend continued in June. Insurgent attacks are up 40 percent, and Afghan civilian casualties are up 60 percent from just a year ago.
The Taliban, once thought to be severely weakened, if not completely vanquished, has made an alarming resurgence, taking refuge in the uncontrolled tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It is from this region that insurgents assaulted a remote U.S. base on Sunday, killing nine U.S. soldiers in the war's deadliest day since 2005, when an American helicopter was shot down and all 16 passengers died. This disheartening news comes on the heels of a Taliban-orchestrated jailbreak last month that freed 886 insurgents.
These distressing events lend credence to the notion that our leaders took their eyes off the ball when they rushed our nation into a lengthy, costly and pointless war against Iraq before we had finished the job in Afghanistan. The Bush administration and its neoconservative allies, aided by a spineless "opposition" party (the Democrats), recklessly shifted the focus of the War on Terror from a front of legitimate concern to a manufactured threat. What do we have to show for this breathtaking strategic blunder? Have we captured and brought to justice Osama bin Laden? Have we really avenged the victims of Sept. 11?
There are currently 32,000 brave American servicemen and servicewomen fighting in Afghanistan -bin Laden and al-Qaida's base of operations for the Sept. 11 attacks -while there are 145,000 equally brave U.S. soldiers currently serving in Iraq -a country that did not present an imminent threat to our national security and had absolutely nothing to do with Sept. 11, despite the neocon public relations campaign indicating otherwise.
Military commanders estimate that our already overstretched armed forces will need to commit between 7,000 and 10,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in order to quell the ascending Taliban insurgency and ensure the country does not fall back into the hands of those responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans on that dark day in September of 2001.
It is clear that we must redouble our efforts in Afghanistan in order to compensate for the profound miscalculations, incompetence and hubris of our elected leaders who chose imperialism over national security and in the process, have pressed our military to the breaking point.
