Five years after President Bush largely dropped the military operation against the Afghan-based Taliban and Al Qaeda so he could invade Iraq, American and NATO troops are needed as much as ever in Afghanistan to hold back a resurgence of those forces. Yet Washington and its European allies still do not have an effective and comprehensive strategy to combat the threat.
Despite the presence of more than 50,000 NATO troops - most of them American - and some 140,000 Afghan troops and police, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have gotten stronger over the past two years. And Afghan forces are far from being able to defend the country on their own.
Within the last few weeks, hundreds of NATO and Afghan troops using helicopter gunships engaged in one of their biggest battles in years. The target was an estimated 400 Taliban fighters who had dug into several villages near the southern city of Kandahar, raided the main city jail and freed hundreds of their comrades.
A report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that after investing $16.5 billion, the Pentagon and the State Department still lack a “sustainable strategy” for developing the Afghanistan Army and the country’s police force. Only two of 105 Army units - and not a single police unit - are judged to be “fully capable.”
President Bush should direct the Pentagon and State Department to devise a plan that would ensure that American money is used to build a capable Afghan security force. International donors, who recently promised millions more for Afghanistan, must keep pressure on President Hamid Karzai to root out government corruption and coordinate closely with the new United Nations representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide.
An unstable Afghanistan in which extremists and narco-traffickers have a safe haven may well be another Bush legacy. His would-be successors need to explain how they would deal with it.