Sidney Blumenthal

On the day of the London bombings, President Bush proclaimed: “The war on terror goes on.’’ Through the 2004 campaign, his winning theme was terror. He achieved the logic of a unified field theory connecting Iraq to Afghanistan by threading terror through both, despite the absence of evidence. He insisted that if we didn’t fight the terrorists there, we would be fighting them at home. In January, the CIA’s thinktank, the National Intelligence Council, issued a report describing Iraq as the magnet and training and recruiting ground for terrorism. The false rationale for the invasion had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With his popularity flagging, Bush returned to the formulations that succeeded in his campaign. In Bush’s “global war on terror’’ (Gwot), Iraq and Afghanistan present one extended battlefield against a common enemy - and the strategy is and must be the same. So far as Bush is concerned, it’s always either the day after 9/11 or the day before the Iraq invasion. Time stands still at two ideal political moments. But his consequences since are barely managed chaos. “I was horrified by the president’s last speech [on the war on terror], so much unsaid, so much disingenuous, so many half truths,’’ said James Dobbins, Bush’s first envoy to Afghanistan, now director of international programmes at the Rand Corporation. Afghanistan is now the scene of a Taliban revival, chronic Pashtun violence, dominance by US-supported warlords who have become narco-lords, and a human rights black hole. From the start, he said, the effort in Afghanistan was “grossly underfunded and undermanned’’. The military doctrine was the first error.

Lack of accountability began at the top and filtered down. Democracy was an afterthought for

the White House, which believed it had little application to Afghans. At the Bonn conference establishing international legitimacy for the Kabul government, “the word `democracy’ was introduced at the insistence of the Iranian delegation’’, Dobbins points out. However, democracy - now the overriding rationale for the Gwot - does not include support for human rights. Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and the White House removed restraints on torture. In April, the US succeeded in abolishing the office of the UN rapporteur on human rights for Afghanistan. Dobbins believes that the operation in Afghanistan has improved, but that the administration “hasn’t readily acknowledged its mistakes, and corrected them only after

losing a good deal of ground, irrecoverable ground ... most of the violence is not al-Qaida type, but Pashtun sectarian violence. It’s not international terrorism.’’ Facts on the ground cannot alter Bush’s stentorian summons to the Gwot. “We’re taking the fight to the terrorists abroad, so we don’t have to face them here at home,’’ Bush declared in June — and repeated endlessly - finally appearing vindicated with the London attacks. London, like Iraq and Afghanistan, is “there’’, not “here’’. —The Guardian