Re: Willing To Win in Afghanistan?

In this article Anne Applebaum describes what would be required to promote the interest of the United States in Afghanistan.  There is a surreal aspect to her discussion is that she seems to totally ignore the past seven years.  It is not as though Afghanistan was totally unknown to us.  We were after all deeply involved in Afghanistan at least since the Russian invasion.  All that Applebaum describes in this column was well known years ago not just by the American intelligence agencies but by anybody who has been following the world and American news.  

When Bush made the decision to invade Afghanistan he should have been prepared to face just the situation that Applebaum described.  Yet his plan for Afghanistan has been almost exactly the opposite of what one would expect in such a situation.

He merely destroyed the central government and replaced it with a very lose confederation of tribes and regions.  This obviously would lead to the exact results we now see.   She then says that the small islands of calm created in Afghanistan show that hasn't been neglected.   But if the intention was to end Afghanistan as a terrorist breading ground, the only possible measure of success would be the monopoly of military force held by central government.  This was never attempted and so the goal of fighting terrorism in Afghanistan has never even begun.