Bush lost Afghanistan because he is simple-minded

When al Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. on Sept 11, 2001 everyone knew where they came from. Afghanistan. Bin Laden had been working with the Taliban to control that country and use it as a base so that al Qaeda could use it to train and send out terrorists to disrupt the moderate Islamic and secular governments he wanted to replace. Since they were remaining in power largely by support from the U.S., al Qaeda also went after the U.S.

Pakistani scholar Ahmed Rashid, who has spent thirty years studying the connections between the Pakistani military and religious extremist groups points out in Newsweek that the Afghans hate the Taliban.

The mountains and valleys surrounding Afghanistan are among the least understood parts of the globe, he says. And he believes his findings help policymakers understand and alleviate tensions in the volatile region. He's shared his research with the world and has had high hopes, particularly for successive U.S. administrations. In recent years that hope has been dashed.

Until Bush came into office, Ahmed thought his words mattered to America. In the 1980s, he discussed Taliban resistance with ambassadors over tea. In the 1990s, he collaborated with policymakers to raise Afghanistan's profile in the Clinton White House. But during the Bush administration, he feels his risky research has been for naught.

The administration has "actively rejected expertise and embraced ignorance," Ahmed told me inside his fortress. Soon after the Taliban fled Kabul in late 2001, Ahmed visited Washington DC's policy elite as “the flavor of the month.” His bestseller Taliban had come out just the year before. The State Department, USAID, the National Security Council and the White House all asked him to present lectures on how to stabilize post-war Afghanistan.

Ahmed traversed the city’s bureaucracies and think tanks repeating “one common sense line”: In Afghanistan you have a “population on its knees, with nothing there, absolutely livid with the Taliban and the Arabs of Al Qaeda . . . willing to take anything.” The U.S. could "rebuild Afghanistan very quickly, very cheaply and make it a showcase in the Muslim world that says ‘Look U.S. intervention is not all about killing and bombing; it’s also about rebuilding and reconstruction…about American goodness and largesse.”

What did Bush and Cheney do? Same thing they did to New Orleans. They took their eyes off the ball and tried to solve a minor problem in Iraq by using military force. Bush and Cheney attack people. They don't do nation-building or city-building.

The only tool the Bush administration recognizes is military power. Instead of using aid to rebuild Afghanistan they are trying to dominate it militarily.

America has done the same thing to Pakistan, says Ahmed. After 9/11, the current administration embraced Musharraf’s military regime unquestioningly because it waved a big stick and assured Bush it would smash terrorists with it. America took Musharraf at his word. Meanwhile the dictator "pursued a dual strategy," hoarding U.S. funds while letting pockets of extremism grow.

For years Ahmed has been accusing Musharraf of deceit and calling for America to pressure him to democratize. Now, Ahmed says, America’s vocal, singular focus on terrorism makes it "virtually impossible to convince average Pakistanis that the war against extremism is not just America’s war, it is theirs too.” This lack of local buy-in exacerbates the threat of transnational terror.

Bush never understood foreign policy. He failed to prepare for a terrorist attack on America because he could not conceive of it, and Cheney did not think that terrorism was possible unless it was state-supported. They both thought the Clinton administration people were ignorant and deluded when they briefed the incoming Bush administration that the greatest threat to America during the early 21st Century was going to be terrorism organized by non-state organizations.

That's why they considered the two most important foreign policy issues to be military containment of China and the anti-ballistic missile system. Because the guys at the top did not consider terrorism to be important, the managers of the agencies that had information on terrorists and terrorism (FBI and CIA that we know of) did not consider it important to investigate foreign Muslim aviation students who only wanted to know how to fly a jet but did not consider it important to learn to land or take off. Not did the FBI consider it important to follow up when the CIA informed them that known al Qaeda terrorists had traveled from Thailand to California.

September 11 was a real wake up call to the Bush administration, but one they were not ready for. Their reaction was to increase their secrecy so that no one would realize just how badly they had screwed up and to develop a public relations response to al Qaeda. The PR response was (and still is) encapsulated in the slogan "the Global War on Terror."

War, of course, means troops and bombs, not civilian foreign aid or diplomacy. The Bush administration does not DO civilian foreign aid or diplomacy. They do war and they do pubic relations.

War still means troops. Cheney and the NeoCons do not trust anything short of killing their enemies or holding a gun on them until they are imprisoned. They don't trust any enemy to hold to an agreement, especially in the Middle East. On the PR side they are aware that the word "democracy" is something that a lot of people profess to believe in, and democracy means voting. So they offer people the option between war and elections, and assuming that elections means democracy, they will hold off bombing those people. They believe in bribery or war.

They have been horribly shocked that instead of taking bribes those ungrateful Muslims will fight an insurgency. I am sure that the Bush reaction is that you just can't trust people like that.

The people in the Middle East have a very realistic view of the Bush administration. The Bushies will demand obedience or they will attack your town and kill everyone who moves. Those troops don't care what the townspeople want or need. They just demand obedience or the troops and bombs will be sent in. Then the troops and bombs arrive, the killing will be indiscriminate, since the American soldiers don't speak the language or respect the culture.

Bush and the Bushies consider the terrorists to have a single purpose - to destroy America. They know this and don't care why it is true. Without any knowledge of the causes of the terrorism, they don't trust the terrorists.

Since the Bushies think in sound bytes, the only reason they can imagine for such a hatred of America is that the terrorists are Muslims. Without being able to make a clear distinction between "terrorist" and "Muslim" they assume that all Muslims are terrorists. [This same inability to distinguish between two groups without a clear boundary between them leads to the fallacy many conservatives make when they assume that a human being is human from the moment of conception, and thus assume that abortion is murder. It is a symptom of minds which cannot deal with logical and linguistic complexities and demand that leaders provide certainties.]

Since the Bushies cannot understand the terrorists, they do not trust them. The only way to deal with someone you cannot trust who might threaten you is to use force.

The experts offer complex explanations for why the terrorists are behaving the way they do, but the Bushies cannot understand or trust the complex explanations, so they don't trust the experts, either.

So instead of going into Afghanistan after September 11 and removing the Taliban and al Qaeda, then working to create a nation that would reject such extremism, the Bushies bought into the NeoCon sound byte that they needed to create an Iraqi showcase and let the magic of the free market cause all the Middle Eastern nations to emulate the new Iraq.

Rebuilding Afghanistan would be a complex program. The NeoCons and Ahmed Chalabi offered a simplistic solution that depended on the magic of the free market rather than trust in all those fancy experts.

Simple-minded people act on simple slogans rather than on complex and difficult to understand analysis. Rebuilding Afghanistan was going to be a complex proposition. Attacking Iraq was a lot easier.

So now we are bogged down in an Iraq too complex to understand, Afghanistan is being taken over again by the Taliban and has become the number one producer of Heroin in the world, and the unqualified American support of Pakistan's President Musharraf and his military is threatening to turn Pakistan (a nuclear power) over to the fundamentalist extremists.

In the meantime, Bush remains simple-minded, operating as though sound bytes intended for political public relations campaigns were actually governing policies and Darth Cheney continues to distrust everyone and depend on military force as the solution to all problems foreign and domestic. The only trust that exists is between Bush and Cheney. Cheney trusts that Bush will remain simple-minded and under his control, and Bush trusts Cheney to fix the messes that are too complex for Bush to begin to understand.

The rest of us get to watch the rapid decline of our once-great nation on all fronts as these fools keep trying to solve complex problems with nothing but simplistic slogans-for-policies or military power.