Bushed!

Osama bin Laden is still at large and Afghanistan is a mess -- so why is the president in a hurry to take his anti-terror campaign elsewhere?

By David Talbot

Feb 26, 2002 | The Bush cheering squad that is still applauding his prosecution of the war in Afghanistan should hold off on the victory parades. Recent news reports are now confirming that Osama bin Laden (remember him, the demonic mastermind behind Sept. 11 whom the president once labeled his No. 1 target?) and most of his top lieutenants are alive and well, as is the Taliban's one-eyed despot, Mullah Omar, and his top deputy. While the president searches for evildoers in other far-flung corners of the globe, the man responsible for more American deaths than anyone in Baghdad, Tehran or Pyongyang is merrily sending out e-mails to friends and supporters, including heartfelt condolences to the family of a deceased Afghan cleric. As the administration was forced to acknowledge last week, only one senior al-Qaida official has been killed or captured -- Muhammad Atef, the terror network's top military strategist. And the FBI has not even removed his name from its list of most wanted terrorists because his death remains unconfirmed.

Apparently frustrated by its inability to track down the terrorist leaders, the Bush team has begun to downplay their significance. The president once told the world that he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." But nowadays he never even mentions the holy warrior with a lust for American blood -- and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has begun telling the press that bin Laden and his loathsome circle are not that important in the overall scheme of America's anti-terror war. Try selling that one to New York City firefighters -- or the rest of the American public, for that matter.

At least Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of the Afghanistan campaign, had the decency to concede his mission remains glaringly incomplete. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, Franks nodded in agreement when Sen. Jim Bunning bluntly told him, "I'm not pleased, and I don't think any Americans are pleased that we haven't done a better job on al-Qaida." The Pentagon strategy of relying on Afghan warlords and heavy American bombing to secure the Tora Bora region where al-Qaida leaders were holed up, now seems an undeniable blunder. It might have minimized American casualties -- more journalists than GIs have died as a result of enemy fire -- but it failed to stop bin Laden and his band from melting away, probably across the poorly guarded Pakistan border. One military analyst quoted in last week's Boston Globe called the bombing-centered strategy "shooting a hornet's nest with a shotgun."

Without the head of bin Laden (and of key deputies like the doctor of death, Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri), the Bush war in Afghanistan is looking more and more like Gulf War II, a replay of his father's half-victory against Saddam Hussein, which left the dangerous dictator in power. The analogy is not exact: Bin Laden does not rule a country, and his terror network may have received a far more damaging blow than Saddam received. And, of course, luck may fall our way one of these days -- the $25 million bounty on bin Laden's turbaned head might finally prompt a local fortune hunter to ambush the world's most wanted terrorist. But the Bush administration's apparent haste to move on to other quarry, like North Korea's hermit tyrant or the obscure band of thugs marauding on a distant Philippines island, is not reassuring.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan -- the country we were aiming to rescue by eliminating the Taliban and its terrorist backers -- is a mess. According to a classified CIA report made public last week, the country is not exactly on the brink of civil war, but it's close. Warlords and other assorted thugs control the entire country outside the capital city of Kabul -- and even there the popular British peacekeepers have been fired upon and civil order is still shaky. Reports in the press -- including those from Salon's war correspondent Phillip Robertson -- paint a picture of a country whose valiant efforts toward peace and justice are widely frustrated by what its decent but beleaguered interim leader Hamid Karzai calls "the culture of the knife and the gun." Crime is rampant, even in Kabul and its surrounding villages, which are patrolled by 4,000 soldiers from Britain and other countries. Even relief workers have been kidnapped and killed. Last week, Dallas Morning News correspondent Gregg Jones filed a discouraging report about life in the Kabul area, where Northern Alliance "liberators" have reverted to form and are terrorizing the local populace, killing and robbing and preying on young women. "Many of the same Northern Alliance soldiers who were here before the Taliban are here again, and they took many girls away before," a young medical student named Nasima Makhail told Jones, explaining why she still covered herself in public. "Under the burqa we feel safer." (Those warlords who prefer boys are also back to their pederastic ways, according to another story in last week's New York Times.)

And outside Kabul, law and order is practically nonexistent, as Salon's Robertson documented when he took his life in his hands by traveling by car from Kabul to Kandahar, a route preyed on by heavily armed teenagers and highwaymen on motorcycles. When not worrying about bandits and warlords, the people who live in the Afghan countryside must contend with malnutrition and disease. And the drug business is back in full force, with farmers once again planting fields of opium poppies, even though Karzai has demanded it stop.

Next Page: Why is the liberal press so ga-ga over Rumsfeld?

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