by James Glaser
May 23, 2005

Every day now there are headlines in the paper and sound bites on the radio about the continued chaos in Iraq. It is hard for Americans to understand the amount of horror the Iraqi people face every day. Over twenty people a day are dying on their streets and scores are wounded.

What is even harder for most Americans to understand is that Iraq is only one of the Wars we have going on right now and Washington feels real good about that.

Thousands of American troops are in Afghanistan, where they are still looking for Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden four years after the hunt started. While Washington might have felt good about the puppet government they set up with former oil executive Harmid Karzai, the troubles in Afghanistan have moved both wars onto the front page and that worries those who started them.

Everything was supposed to happen fast. Our troops would go in to Afghanistan and Iraq, we would "shock and awe" the country to surrender, we would set up an American friendly government, and other than a garrison force left behind, our troops would come home.

Washington had it all planned out. Our garrison troops would be just enough to protect whoever we put in power and democracy would take over and everyone would be happy. The fact that Mullah Omar and bin Laden got away was a setback, but we did get the government we wanted in Afghanistan and the number of troops we were forced to keep there was manageable.

George Bush could hold up Afghanistan to the world as a success. Now however everything seems to be unraveling at the same time. For a couple of years the news from Iraq has been so bad that the little we hear about Afghanistan seems tame in comparison. This past week things have changed.

On Sunday Justin Huggler, of Independent News writes, "Shocking and detailed accounts have emerged of how two Afghan prisoners were tortured to death by American Interrogators and prison guards at Bagram air base outside Kabul."

On the same day, the New York Times had a piece by David Cloud and Carlotta Gall, saying. "United States officials warned this month in an internal memo that an American financed poppy eradication program aimed at curtailing Afghanistan's huge heroin trade had been ineffective, in part because President Hamid Karzai 'has been unwilling to assert strong leadership.'"

It is always hard when a Puppet starts pulling his own strings and Washington is losing control in the country we told the world we set free.

On top of these two stories, there was a piece in Scotland on Sunday, about "The forgotten conflict." It seems that not only America, but the British are also seeing Afghanistan again. Of course almost all of the world's heroin is Afghan in origin, so at least national police units have been dealing with what is going on in that country all along.

Stephen Carter in Kabul writes, "As the bloody imbroglio of Iraq has preoccupied the world's headlines, the exercise in nation-building once viewed as the template for all others has begun to tear at the seams: to the extent that some officials in Washington and London are beginning to warn of a descent into bloodshed that would rival the brutality of Baghdad."

George Bush has been holding up Afghanistan up to the American people and telling them, that Iraq will be a success like Afghanistan some day and we just need to hold the course for a while longer and things will work out.

Because the bloodshed in Iraq has been so great, American media has failed to see the bleeding going on in our "other" war.

There has been a slow but steady American troop death toll in Afghanistan with the number killed there at 183 with another soldier getting killed this weekend. We have no official number for wounded, but if the numbers hold with Iraq, way more than a thousand Americans have been wounded.

Opium is the biggest threat to Afghanistan, Under Taliban rule, its production was almost eradicated, but now it is reported that there are over 500,000 acres in poppy production. Even with Afghanistan's new found freedom, many in Washington believe that the country is" on the verge of becoming a narcotics state."

Stephen Carter writes, "Opium already accounts for more than a third of the total economy: money that funds warlords and fuels corruption that is spreading through the heart of the government."

According to Barney Rubin, Afghan expert and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Cooperation in New York, "Some very foolish people in the United States think that the way to stabilize the country and get rid of the drug problem is to stop people from growing drugs without any alternative development ready to provide them with income."

Much like Iraq, Washington had no plan for post war Afghanistan and because of no plan, the war in Afghanistan is starting up again. Most American troops are in and around Kabul for the protection of the "democratic" government we have set up and hundreds if not thousands of Americans protect the Afghan President 24/7 from his countrymen who want to kill him. Imagine if President Bush had thousands of foreign troops in Washington guarding him night and day. Would that look like stability?

Soon both of Bush's wars will be on the front page and any talk of heading into Iran will be folly. We never did have enough troops in Iraq to secure that country and we pulled many of our troops out of Afghanistan to fight in Iraq. George has his troop strength too low to send more troops to Afghanistan if they are needed and there is no way he can open a new front any place on the planet, we just don't have enough troops for anything else. Recruitment is down and George says a Draft is out.

So Americans will continue to die for George Bush's idea of bringing democracy and freedom to the Middle East and our children's bill for this war will get higher. I think a real clue that tells us how badly things in Afghanistan are, is that Washington admits that there are still War Lords controlling much of the country. America has a President set up in Kabul and we show him around to the world, but 90 % of the world's heroin trade is being run by Afghan War Lords. It almost sounds medieval, but it is really 21st century and just like the government in Kubal, with its American guards being a sham, the democracy and freedom Bush talks about in Afghanistan is a sham too.

It is hard to do, but if you try, you can watch both of George's wars at the same time. Afghanistan tells us that even when we think we have won, we haven't. Remember Bush has already talked about "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq and he touts the freedom we brought to the Afghan people, but this week we learn that we are going back to where we started.