While our media attention has been focused on Alberto Gonzales, Iraq and now the Virginia Tech tragedy, the situation in Afghanistan, the “first front” in Mr. Bush’s “War on Terror” (nomenclature the British now no longer employ because it “emboldens the terrorists”) is rapidly spiraling out of control. Yesterday, the third suicide bomber attack in three days killed 9 people in Northern Afghanistan. Another bombing attack on a UN vehicle killed 4 or 5 people (reports vary).

Furthermore, the Taliban has adopted the tactics of Iraqi insurgents, as attacks on civilians have risen markedly over the last year (via Human Rights Watch).

(cont.)

KABUL, Afghanistan — Insurgents in Afghanistan killed nearly 700 civilians last year, the largest number in more than five years of fighting since the toppling of the Taliban regime, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report issued yesterday.

The group blamed NATO-led coalition forces for an additional 230 civilian deaths in 2006, though estimates by some Afghan officials and human rights groups put that number much higher.

In its report, Human Rights Watch said that the attacks on civilians by Taliban militants and other insurgents should be considered war crimes because they “intentionally targeted civilian objects that served no military purpose, including schools, buses or bazaars.”

Nearly 500 of the recorded deaths at insurgents’ hands came in suicide bombings, increasingly the Taliban weapon of choice in the face of vastly superior NATO firepower. Suicide attacks last year more than quadrupled from the previous year.

In short, the country is falling ever deeper into an abyss of chaos, destruction and death, even as the drug trade there flourishes, much of which helps finance both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It’s an unmitigated catastrophe, and one our military, overstretched and bogged down in Iraq, can do very little to stop.

Add to that tumultuous stew, a growing turmoil among various political, ethnic and tribal factions, as many ordinary Afghanis have become fed up with the inability of the Karzai regime to provide security and basic services, and you have the recipe for a failed state, one in which the Taliban and its Jihadist allies are poised to exploit:

In addition to long-lasting problems such as military conflict, narcotics and warlordism, the Afghan government is increasingly facing new dilemmas which emanate from people’s dire social and economic conditions. People demand jobs, shelter and legitimate means to live a decent life. It is the prospect of political turmoil that poses the far greater danger for the stability of the country than military threats by the Taliban.

In fact, the Taliban and their allies have been able to improve their fighting capacity and propaganda capabilities, as well as to considerably extend their territory inside Afghanistan because they were able to improve their organizational structure, train a considerable number of new recruits and receive better supplies of arms and ammunition.

It will enable them to increase their attacks on NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and Afghan forces while terrorizing the civilian population with occasional, but ever more frequent, suicide bombings. This year, they will extend their control over major districts in the south and southwest of the country and improve their capacity to interrupt the main highways connecting Kabul to major cities in the south and west of the country. […]

The US military contingent outside the NATO mission is not sufficient to pursue and engage small and highly mobile groups of insurgents in the rugged and difficult Afghan territory bordering Pakistan. Without of a significant increase in the number of NATO troops, nothing will change until the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police grow in strength and numbers.

It doesn’t help that Afghanistan lacks strong pluralistic political parties, necessary elements for a healthy democracy. In the absence of any coherent political ideology or vision for the future of the country, political regroupings take place based on ethnic affiliations. Tensions over sharing power in the government among the various ethnic groups are growing rapidly, and political and intellectual debates in the Afghan free media focus on differences among them rather than their common interests.

Meanwhile, neighboring countries which are against the presence of NATO forces in Afghanistan are working to incite violent ethnic rifts as a means to undermine NATO’s efforts. The worst scenario would be if ethnic differences become a motive for armed conflict in Afghanistan, as currently in Iraq. The country would sink once again into political chaos and misery.

We haven’t spread freedom and democracy to Afghanistan. We have failed in that effort, assuming that it was really one of our goals in the first place. Nor are we eradicating the Taliban and Al Qaeda, as President Bush has proudly and frequently boasted. We have made the situation worse due to our neglect. Our foolish intervention in Iraq has had negative consequences not only for the Iraqi people, but for the Afghans as well. But any sane individual, one whose judgment is not clouded by either neoconservative visions of Middle Eastern ponies or by a fanatical worship of all things George W. Bush, understood this reality long ago.

The tragedy of Afghanistan is that no one in the Bush administration has ever really cared about the consequences of failure there. Not to the Afghan people, and not to the security interests of the American people. To them the war in Afghanistan has been a sideshow. Merely the first pawn on their geopolitical chessboard, one they have apparently decided to sacrifice on the altar of their megalomaniacal ambition for a New American Empire based on the unfettered use of military might. Regrettably, and most unfairly, it seems that none of them will ever incur any cost for their folly. The Afghanis, the Iraqis, and America’s military families are not so blessed.