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Politics : President George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (87)	11/1/2004 11:20:46 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 168

You express a reservation based upon a suggestion of negative geo-political consequences. The vote from all over Afghanistan suggests you proffer of 'central enclave of Kabul" surrounded by a virtual no man's land of fiefdoms.' seems in and of itself an overly simplistic discription that is simply false. As to going to rural areas, one may or may not run into very bad people. There are many locations in America where the same can be said. 418+ have been murdered in Los Angelos so far year. I'd guess if one marked on a map where these murders occured, you would see a few very concentrated clusters. The drug trade problem is difficult. But it will only be addressed by creating over time alternative economics. I have no reason to not view Afghanistan as an amazing success. I see the results in Afghanistan as compelling proof of the genius of President Bush's leadership. Let's review the scale, the scope. Americans have a deserved reputation for historical amnesia. Three years -- an eon -- have made us imagine that the Afghan war was easy and foreordained. Easy? In 2001, we had nothing there. What had the Clinton administration left in place? No plausible military plan. Virtually no intelligence. No local infrastructure. No neighboring bases. The Afghan Northern Alliance was fractured and weak. And Pakistan was actively supporting the bad guys. Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban. President Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what everyone had said was impossible: defeat an entrenched, fanatical, ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy in a land that had no history of democratic culture and was just emerging from 25 years of civil war. recut from #reply-20708583