The Iraqization Of Afghanistan

Last year suicide bombings quintupled, attacks on international forces tripled, and support for the Taliban grew. According to CNN terror analyst and Taliban expert Peter Bergen, here are the top 10 entirely avoidable mistakes made by the Bush administration.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


  1. Letting Osama Escape Tora Bora: Because Donald Rumsfeld wanted a “light” footprint in Afghanistan, only 60 U.S. Special Forces were sent to smoke out bin Laden. During the 2004 reelection campaign, Bush implied that bin Laden wasn’t at Tora Bora at all—a claim publicly slapped down by the cia‘s on-scene commander, Gary Berntsen, a longtime Republican, who pleaded for additional forces, to no avail.
  2. Too Few Grunts: The initial U.S. deployment was the smallest peacekeeping force, per capita, that America has sent anywhere since World War II.
  3. Hiring Warlords: By outsourcing security to militias in the first years of the occupation, the U.S. undercut attempts to form a desperately needed Afghan national army.
  4. Iraq: Almost immediately, time, money, and key personnel were diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq, including the 5th Special Forces group, which specializes in the region.
  5. Nickel and Diming: After the fall of the Taliban, aid per capita to Afghanistan was one-twelfth of what Bosnia received following the Balkan war. According to a rand: analyst, “Afghanistan has received the least amount of resources out of any major American-led nation-building operation over the last 60 years.”
  6. Nixing nato: For two years the Bush administration prevented nato troops from deploying anywhere beyond Kabul—i.e., anywhere that mattered.
  7. Coddling Pakistan: Pakistan arrested some Al Qaeda leaders, but the U.S. allowed it to ignore the Taliban. A former U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan notes: “Pakistani citizens, residents, money, and territory are playing a much greater role in the Afghan civil war than are Iranian citizens, residents, money, or territory in the Iraqi civil war.”
  8. Prioritizing Poppies: Eradicating poppy fields hasn’t put a dent in drug exports—Afghanistan now supplies 90 percent of the world’s opium—but it has uprooted farmers, some of whom have joined the Taliban. In 2005, the U.S. spent $782 million on narcotics operations, $222 million more than Afghan farmers earned from growing poppies.
  9. Losing Hearts and Minds: Particularly in the first few years, American soldiers had a tin ear for local customs—failing to grasp, for example, that in tribal society, each civilian death must be collectively avenged.
  10. Timetable: In 2005, the Pentagon announced U.S. forces would begin to pull out of Afghanistan—prompting Taliban violence to surge. This February, the former U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Lt. General David Barno, told Congress that the Pentagon’s statement “caused both friends and enemies to recalculate their options.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate