FIVE YEARS LATER, DRUGS AND TALIBAN AGAIN RUN AFGHANISTAN

On Sept. 20, 2001, President Bush delivered the speech of a lifetime,
reassuring a stunned nation and promising swift and certain
retribution. "Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring
justice to our enemies, justice will be done," he declared in one of
his more memorable turns of phrase.

I believed him. When he later announced the campaign to stamp out the
Taliban, I applauded. Like most Americans, I desperately wanted to see
a strong and competent president who would ferret out the terrorists,
shut down their recruitment pipeline and restore our sense of
security. I didn't think any of that would be easy, but I thought Bush
meant what he said.

He didn't.

The incursion into Afghanistan - which started out well enough - was
just the first of a series of half-hearted feints at doing the right
thing, just the beginning of a long and disastrous season of public
relations gimmicks designed to rally Americans around the flag and lay
the groundwork for an imperial presidency. Bush had no intention of
putting enough troops on the ground to rout the Taliban and catch
Osama bin Laden; he didn't plan to spend the money or make the
commitment to rebuild Afghanistan; he didn't have the vision or the
patience required to resurrect a failed state.

So it comes as no great surprise that, five years after 9/11,
Afghanistan has reverted to a cauldron of violence and corruption, a
haven for jihadists and narco-terrorists, a miserable backwater
teeming with contempt for central government authority. Currently,
coalition soldiers are dying in Afghanistan at nearly the same rate as
in Iraq as they tangle with a resurgent Taliban and a motley
assortment of warlords.

As in Iraq, reconstruction efforts have faltered because of security
issues. As a report in the London-based Financial Times put it, "With
this growing lawlessness, the very conditions that brought the Islamic
student militia of the Taliban to power in 1996 are being
re-created."

Jihadists fund their insurgence with drugs; this year, Afghanistan's
opium harvest will be "a staggering 92 percent of total world supply,"
according to Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N.
Office on Drugs and Crime. In 2001, under Taliban rule, the battered
country had about 29 square miles of opium poppies under cultivation;
this year, an estimated 637 square miles are under
cultivation.

The worst news of all is the recent capitulation to pro-Taliban
militants by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who signed an
accord in which he promised to stop trying to root out Taliban
terrorists who hide in the rugged western mountains of Pakistan.
Musharraf, of course, is a strong U.S. ally who has just given quarter
to our enemies. (The Pakistani leader extracted a pledge from tribal
leaders that they would stop allowing cross-border raids by
pro-Taliban forces into Afghanistan, but Western allies can hardly
depend on that promise.)

Still, it's hard to blame Musharraf for our failure to capture bin
Laden. The Pentagon and the White House are responsible for allowing
bin Laden to slip the noose in December 2001, when key intelligence
sources placed him somewhere in the caves of Tora Bora, on the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The Pentagon didn't have enough troops on the ground to cut off
possible escape routes, partly because top military officials had
already begun to change their focus to an invasion of Iraq. Gen. Tommy
Franks left bin Laden's capture up to tribal leaders and other
surrogates, and bin Laden and several of his lieutenants escaped.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld never had much enthusiasm for
striking Afghanistan, complaining that there "weren't any good
targets" there, according to Richard Clarke, a former national
terrorism expert. Never mind that Afghanistan was the training ground
for al-Qaida, the group responsible for the atrocities of 9/11.
(Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies," was an early contribution to
the growing canon exposing the mistakes, misjudgments, arrogance and
incompetence of the Bush administration's "war on terror.")

Rumsfeld's poor judgment continued when he refused Secretary of State
Colin Powell's request in 2002 to send several thousand U.S. troops to
help secure areas of Afghanistan outside Kabul. As a consequence,
President Hamid Karzai has never gained control of his country.

In June 2004, Bush stood in the Rose Garden with Karzai for a "Mission
Accomplished" moment, proudly declaring, "Afghanistan is no longer a
terrorist factory sending thousands of killers into the world." No,
now it's a drug factory sending tons of heroin into the world. A new
crop of terrorists won't be far behind the new crop of dope.