The Dreadful Legacies of Bush

[unhappycamper]

When he should have been focusing on Afghanistan, through massive civilian assistance, then-President Bush was getting into the wrong war and allowing the rebirth of a Taliban insurrection, which has never stopped gaining ground since.


The Dreadful Legacies of Bush
Le Monde, France
Translated By Amélie Filliatre
28 July 2010
Edited by Sam Carter

Practically every day the news points toward the drama of the two wars inherited from the Bush era: Afghanistan and Iraq.

The leaks revealed this week by the website WikiLeaks do not really tell us anything new on the first of those military interventions. The leaks matter not because of their content, but because of their provenance. They are from official U.S. military sources — namely progress reports established by the military intelligence — and they add to the image we have of a difficult war, of foreign forces often resented by the local population who pay the high price of the terrorist attacks performed by the Taliban (they make up over 60 percent of the victims of the conflict) and of the coalition strikes.

More critically for the future of the war in Afghanistan, those leaks confirm the duplicity of Pakistan. Official reports posted on WikiLeaks stigmatize the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). They are once again, and this time by official American sources, accused of actively supporting the Afghan Taliban.

Islamabad may try its best to deny this collusion with the Afghan insurrection, but the documents offered on WikiLeaks denounce an actual collaboration between the ISI and the Taliban: networks set up jointly to fight American soldiers and assassinate leading Afghan figures.

The leaks span a period that ends with the arrival of Barack Obama at the White House in January 2009. There is no reason to think that fundamental changes have taken place since then. As the New York Times wrote on July 28, “if Mr. Obama cannot persuade Islamabad to cut its ties to <...> the extremists in Pakistan, there is no hope of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan.”