Bush's bloody memorial The US military death toll in Afghanistan since Washington led the ouster of the Taliban in 2001 reached 2,000 on Saturday. The man who was killed was apparently shot by a renegade Afghan solder, which will make this an even more bitter pill for the American public to swallow. Had their boys not been sent to Afghanistan to save the country from anarchy and ignorance? Is this how the Afghan people repay a country which has spent so much in blood and coin to save it for democracy and freedom? All most Americans ever understood about this complex and distant country was that it was the headquarters of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. After 9/11, the surgical destruction of the terrorists and the Taliban state that gave them refuge was one of the most popular acts President George W. Bush ever undertook. Except of course that Bush's thinking hardly went much further than that of the average member of the US public. Revenge cannot be the driver of a mature foreign policy. As in Iraq, the idea that once the “bad guys" had been thrown out, a country would gleefully take up the arts of peace and embrace the values of a democratic state was deeply crass and stupid. There were wise heads in the State Department that warned that the war on terrorism could not be so easily won. But Bush and his neocon inner cabinet were having none of this. US power and might would smite the men of violence and win the war on terror with a single strike. Of course the blow that Washington delivered was like smashing a single piece of mercury with a hammer. It shattered into many thousands of smaller pieces, no less toxic, but thereafter infinitely harder to locate and deal with. Finally finding and destroying the key piece of terrorist toxicity, Bin Laden himself, has not, of course, made any difference to the rest of the scattered network, which again like pieces of mercury have been attracted to each other and joined up again to deadly effect in Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb, northern Nigeria and Mali. Americans are understandably baffled that since 2001 the huge cost in lives alone, 4,409 US servicemen and women were also slain in Iraq, has yielded so little in the way of change in the Middle East. A year after the the US finally withdrew its last troops from Iraq, the country is slowly re-descending into the bloody intercommunal rivalries sparked off by the 2003 invasion. And stirring the pot of blood are Al-Qaeda militants, who flooded into the country once Saddam was overthrown. The US public will probably be little interested in the fact that since 2001, over 10,000 members of the Afghan security forces have died, along with more than a thousand foreign troops from other NATO countries. Then there have been some 20,000 civilian deaths, most caused by the Taliban but an unacceptable minority by NATO forces. By the time foreign troops quit Afghanistan at the end of 2014, the death toll will be an even bloodier memorial to the utter failure of the Bush presidency.
