1.   BUSH AS COMMANDER IN AFGHANISTAN: COWARDLY AND INCOMPETENT  (Sept. 2002)

          Imagine this. It is 1942 and the Allied counteroffensive against Nazi Germany has begun with a landing in North Africa. As the advance continues, American intelligence suddenly receives startling information: Personally commanding the Axis forces from the front--- is Adolf Hitler! Swiftly the news is relayed to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and here is the course of action he decides on, with Winston Churchill's grudging concurrence:
          He halts the Allied advance. Concerned about casualties, Roosevelt instead orders the hasty assembly of a ragtag force of Arabs and Berbers to hunt Hitler down. A reward of $10 million is also announced, Roosevelt hoping some very greedy Wehrmacht officers might seize the Fuhrer and turn him in for a big payday.
          The native force of course proves incompetent, where they're not simply sympathetic to Hitler or paid off by the Nazis. Hitler makes his escape to Sicily, and then back to Germany. His legend and stature have grown--- the war, and the Holocaust, that might have been ended in 1942 will now grind on into 1945. The river of blood--- shall become an ocean.
          Something along these lines is what George W. Bush did, with the prize of the century, Osama Bin Laden, in our grasp.
          As late as November 11, 2001 Osama Bin Laden, with around 1,500-2,000 Al-Qaeda troops, was still in Jalalabad, just a 5-hour drive from the capital Kabul (which fell the next day). All Bush had to do was send in several thousand Rangers or paratroops or Marines and the King of Terror, with lord knows how many of his top lieutenants, would have been captured or killed. Bush knew they were there. We were bombing the hell out of the place. Instead he did nothing. Later that day Bin Laden moved out of the city in a convoy of several hundred cars and trucks, plus a few armored vehicles. How the American military, which endlessly brags that its high tech sees everything, missed this huge convoy is a question nobody has apparently asked--- till now. Wending its way slowly south to the mountains of Tora Bora it was the perfect target. Finally, Bin Laden and his men reached their caves and dug in.
          We had them.
          Bush still didn't act.
          He was afraid.
          Of casualties.
          And of opposing his fancy-chested, cowardly generals.
          Instead, the "battle plan", apart from continued bombing, consisted of enlisting the services of a ragtag bunch of local warlords to do our fighting for us, some of these warlords men with ties to the Taliban, some criminals, some both.
          Starting in the last few days of November, and running into the 2nd week of December, most of the Al-Qaeda fighters, apparently including Bin Laden (though there are some who think he was killed in the bombing), made their escape, many to Pakistan, in most cases aided by our "allies" and "friends" (who were well-paid to betray us). The warlords did some fighting too, starting Dec. 5, but it was too late and inadequate. (They didn't have the stomach to check out many of the caves, for instance.)
          Though Bush and the high brass had no fight in them, further down the line real American warriors who knew what was at stake were dying to be sent into battle.
          MSNBC.com (2/18/02) reported that "officers of the 82nd airborne division and elements of the 101st--- pleaded with the generals running the war to have their men dropped along the Afghan-Pakistan border region to cut off the retreat of al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden. To the fury of these officers, their pleas went unanswered, turned aside by the high probability of casualties."
          Bush made another horrendous and idiotic decision in November, in some ways even more inexcusable. As reported by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker (1/28/02), and in other sources, Bush apparently, as a favor to a different "ally", General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, the Taliban's (and hence Al-Qaeda's) greatest foreign supporter, "ordered the United States Central Command to set up a special air corridor to help insure the safety of the Pakistani rescue flights from Kunduz", a key city then about to fall. According to a "C.I.A. analyst", many in the Taliban leadership escaped in this airlift. According to the RAW, India's C.I.A., perhaps 5,000 Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Pakistanis got away. Hersh writes of the deep frustration, no doubt the fury, of the Delta Force members who were forced to watch as their own President stabbed them in the back.
          Simply at Tora Bora and Kunduz Bush was responsible for the escape of perhaps 7,000 of the most wanted men in American history. We had them all trapped. We may spend the rest of our lives chasing them all over the planet.
          Then came Operation Anaconda.
          I have talked to someone who knows Bush personally, and is generally admiring of him. Nonetheless, he says one of Bush's most striking qualities is his astounding lack of curiosity.
          So if Bush learned anything from, studied anything about, drew any lessons from, Tora Bora and Kunduz, it was not especially apparent in March, 2002, when Operation Anaconda was launched against Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in eastern Afghanistan. Once again we relied on Afghan allies instead of our own fighters, their role being to drive the enemy toward waiting American troops. But our Afghans quickly gave up the fight and retreated. American troops did what they could, but apparently most of the enemy escaped to Pakistan. 1,000 "top-quality" Taliban and Al-Qaeda we would have loved to get our hands on we could have trapped them all easily if Bush had more fight or brains. But his and the brass' apparent terror of producing casualties even in the most necessary cause cripples their warmaking. Tellingly, Canadian troops were given the assignment of mopping up the last 60 to 100 enemy holdouts.
          In fact, American troops didn't take a single city in Afghanistan. Every city fell to negotiation ---between theTaliban/Al-Qaeda and other Afghans, many of these Afghans Taliban sympathizers. In some cases "surrender" consisted of nothing more than a Taliban whipping off his black turban and whipping on a white. 1,000's, maybe 10's of 1,000's, of Taliban and Al-Qaeda we needed to capture, interogate, try--- were allowed to waltz off into the night, back to their villages, or to melt into the local scene.
          We had them all trapped. We may spend the rest of our lives chasing them all over the planet. Yes, we spared ourselves the 83 dead and 411 wounded or 142 dead and 615 wounded that might have resulted, but perhaps some of those escapees will one day make it to America and launch a terror attack that multiplies the above casualties a 100-fold or a 1,000-fold, and then those dead will be on George W. Bush's head as 9/11's are on Clinton's.
          Since chasing out the Taliban and Al-Qaeda Bush has made a number of other grievous, perhaps fatal, errors:
          1) He adamantly blocked the extension of the International Security Assistance Force beyond Kabul, despite numerous offers of troops from Europeans and others. He has barely explained why, typical of the secrecy and incoherence with which he prefers to do business. This may prove his greatest mistake in Afghanistan, essentially handing the whole country except the capital over to a pack of warlords and druglords without a fight. In such a ruined field terrorists those weeds can flourish easily.
          2) He has not fought the moral war well, but has often fought a soiled war, which turns some in the world against us who might have stood with us. Executions and nightmarish prison conditions have been tolerated on the part of some Afghan allies, we have apparently turned some of the captured over to torture by 3rd-world "friends", the humanitarian effort (especially against starvation) has been inadequate, civilians have been killed by air attacks which could have been avoided if we were more ready to fight on the ground, and civil liberties have become imperiled, especially by the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens.
           3) The heroin trade has been allowed to flourish right under our nose. And yet this is the only time in our lives when the Americans will be in Afghanistan in force. If we can't contain it now....
           4) Instead of simply imposing democracy on Afghanistan now, take-it-or-leave-it, as we did with Germany and Japan after WW II, he has initiated a slower, step-by-step process that may or may not take in the end.
           5) And perhaps Bush's greatest mistake has been his pitiful performance in the Israeli-Palestine crisis,  the number one foreign policy problem today. Like his father, he is not apparently much on "the vision thing". Until the second Intifada, and Israeli response to it, grew too fierce to ignore, he simply--- ignored the problem (gleefully spitting in Clinton's activist face?). His passivity before, followed by an endless series of policy flip-flops since--- punchless threats, appeals for peace unbacked by action, calls for Palestinian democracy in which we will not tolerate Arafat's (inevitable?) election, support of peace one day, support of brutal Sharon military actions the next--- are clueless and amateurish. The whole Islamic world, which we must have as an ally in the war on terror, has been alienated. As for Ariel Sharon, a man who cannot be influenced (or scared) by mere words, he has long since taken the measure of Bush's weakness and incoherence and runs unchecked.
          6) Let's not even get into the intelligence failures which ultimately lie at Bush's quiet, disinterested feet. Suffice it that up until his aide whispered about tragedy into his ear down at that school in Florida September 11 the Bush administration was simply a continuation of the Clinton administration. No more damning criticism of a President can be made.

          Bush's approval ratings are high. But so are the ratings of TV trash and moronic films. In the end, his performance in Afghanistan rates a C-, if that, and without a new measure of both brains and backbone in the future, the potential exists even for startling failure. 3,000 dead deserved better.