The other war

In late 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda had attacked the United States and Afghanistan's Taliban regime harbored al-Qaeda. I wasn't entirely comfortable with this war but one could've plausibly argued that it constituted self-defense. We attacked the guys who attacked us. This is why the domestic and international opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan, while hardly non-existent, wasn't nearly as vehement as the opposition to the war that followed.

However, a little over a year later, we invaded Iraq, a war which wasn't even remotely close to having anything do with self-defense or our national security. While many individual Americans may have had noble reasons for backing the war, the purpose of the aggression against Iraq was to take control of the country's economy.

Appropriately, Iraq has been a huge windfall for American corporations, who are being subsidized by the US taxpayers. The US has spent nearly 40 billion dollars on rebuilding Iraq, to very little effect. Where has the money gone? The answer is murky. As a BBC World Service investigative series revealed, huge chunks of this money is unaccounted for. Billions of your money and mine vanished without a trace.

Not surprisingly, US-occupied Iraq has been labelled the second most corrupt country in the world by a pro-business, anti-corruption watchdog group.

The aggression against Iraq has had many terrible effects that have been well-documented. Most notably the sharp rise in anti-Americanism, the sharp decline of American credibility and prestige and the transformation of al-Qaeda in the eyes of many from a marginal movement into a mythical ideology. Even many in the normally conservative military establishment contend that Bush's actions have made America less safe. The head of the British army recently said the presence of British and American troops "exacerbates the security problems" in Iraq.

But one of the less well-known effects of the Iraq debacle is its impact on Afghanistan. Less well-known if your main source for news is television. By all accounts, the Taliban are making a resurgence in the country. NATO recently decided to take control of security in the whole country, because of the increasing influence of the Taliban.

The Nation magazine has a troubling piece on the Taliban's resurgence. The narrative is quite common throughout history. The formal Afghan central government controls little outside the capital. In much of the rest of the country, basic law and order (to say nothing of more ephemeral goals like democracy) are virtually non-existent. Many regions are controlled or held hostage by corrupt militias.

Whenever there is chaos, it's quite natural for people to welcome, at least in the short term, a group that promises some kind of stability. This is how Lenin came to power. This is how Hitler came to power in Germany. This is how the Islamists are coming to power in Somalia. Heck, this is how the Taliban came to power in the first place!

Yet, the Bush administration diverted a huge chunk of its resources to the aggression against Iraq, long before the normalization of Afghanistan was even close to being completed. Iraq had nothing to do with our national security. Afghanistan did. But now the Bush administration has screwed up both countries, stabilized neither, implanted chaos instead democracy and created a breeding ground for terrorists.