The Final Collapse of Bush’s Nation-Building: Kunduz Falls to Taliban
This post originally ran on Juan Cole’s website.
On Monday, the Taliban swept into the provincial capital of Kunduz,
taking it in half a day from a large and well-equipped Afghan National
Army force. Tuesday’s riposte had only mixed success, with the ANA
saying it had taken back the (no-empty) prison. An attempt to take back the airport failed,
and when the Taliban captured an ANA tank, the US Air Force had to
intervene to take it out lest it be used to drive an ANA rout.
Those
who want the US to go into Syria in a big way should just consider what
the Kunduz events mean. Fourteen years after the US went into
Afghanistan, it still has not been able to stand up a successful army to
which it could hope to turn the country over. How many orphans do the
hawks want to adopt?
During the Athens summer Olympics of 2004,
the Bush administration ran advertisements boasting that it had
liberated 50 million people. It meant 25 million each in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Most people in the world, according to opinion polls,
thought Bush had occupied 50 million people.
