Mission Unaccomplished: A Bomb in Pakistan Expolodes Myths of Afghan Gains

It's not nearly as infamous as George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. But maybe it should be: Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declaring victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, on April 26, 2003, almost upstaging Bush's declaration four days later.

Rumsfeld was taking questions from reporters aboard a plane while on his way to a Middle East victory tour. "The reality is in life that things are seldom black or white. They’re more often a gradation," he said, according to a Department of Defense transcript, immediately contradicting himself in the very next sentence: "and if one looks at Afghanistan and even Iraq today, it’s very clear that we are and have been in a stabilization operation mode for sometime in many portions of the country."

The word stabilization was the Bush administration's euphemism for declaring victory. Four days later in his victory speech Bush declared: "In the battle of Afghanistan, we destroyed the Taliban, many terrorists, and the camps where they trained."

Not so fast, cowboy.

Since January 1 in Afghanistan, 229 western troops, including 124 Americans, have died in Afghanistan, the largest number of Americans since "the battle in Afghanistan" began and just three short of the total of 232 killed overall last year, with more than three months to go. Afghanistan, which Rumsfeld and Bush abandoned very soon after the apparent defeat of the Taliban in late 2001, Afghanistan, which Rumsfeld and Bush let local warlords and relatively small contingents of American and multinational forces control, was never won. The administration got too busy siphoning off men, intelligence, energy, attention and money from Afghanistan to Iraq beginning in early 2002, where Afghanistan was really lost over the following six years.

Now it's too late. The Taliban are back. Not just in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where the Taliban is in virtual complete control, and where al-Qaeda is operating its camps and planning its operations with impunity. Occasionally bombing the place or even sending in a few special operations forces with American flags on their shoulders going to change six years of failed strategy. Nor is continuing to court the latest of a series of double-talking Pakistani presidents, to whom the United States is just another dope to manipulate out of billions of dollars with one hand while deceiving it with the other: Pakistan never took seriously its claim that it would battle militants, the Taliban or any other kind. Pakistan isn't going to turn on its own creation, which the Taliban has always been, and remains.

I was thinking about all that when I heard of the truck bomb outside the Mariot in Islamabad, which killed upward of 50 people, including the Czech ambassador to Pakistan (who'd just moved there from Vietnam four months ago). And, not surprisingly, two members of the American military, who have been scurrying around Pakistani corridors of power for the last few months in a mad dash to try to nab Osama bin Laden and hand Bush (and John McCain) an October surprise that would a) stanch the humiliation of Bush having to leave office while Osama is still at large, and b) maybe hand John McCain the presidency, thus ensuring that the blind-batted strategy of the last eight years in the Middle East continue for at least the next four.

The 1,300-pound bomb stuffed with military-grade explosives, artillery and mortar shells, and the 60-feet wide crater it left in front of the Marriott, are bloody, costly reminders of the consequences of a job undone.