Afghanistan

John McCain says:

"Let me be very clear, I am not questioning his patriotism, I am questioning his judgement. Senator Obama has made it clear he values withdrawal from Iraq above victory in Iraq.

"He has made these decisions not because he doesn't love America but because he doesn't thinks it matters whether American wins or loses."

Yeah, that makes sense. Right, John. Ramble on.

Meanwhile, as McCain talks about the Iraq surge ("That's what this is about! That's what this is about!"), Barack Obama offers a reality check, pointing out that we should focus on the Taliban, sponsors of al Qaeda and co-sponsors of 9/11.

"As commander-in-chief, I will have no greater priority than taking out these terrorists who threaten America, and finishing the job against the Taliban," Obama said.

He said he would add two U.S. combat brigades, 7,000 fighters and support staff, and would provide an additional $1 billion in non-military assistance for Afghanistan....

..."Six years ago, I stood up at a time when it was politically difficult to oppose going to war in Iraq, and argued that our first priority had to be finishing the fight against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan,'' he said. "Senator McCain was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, and he became a leading supporter of an invasion and occupation of a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks."

Do you, dear reader, really thing that this election is about a tactical surge in Iraq that happened last year?

His obsession: It's the surge, stupid!

Apparently he still hasn't noticed that al Qaeda is in Afghanistan, not Iraq.

He keeps getting things all mixed up. It's sad to see what seems to be senility, or at least a bit of addled confusion. Sad ... except that he's running for president, which makes him scary.

While President George W. Bush meets with the Iraq Study Group about how to un-fubar a mess of his own making, things are getting even worse in Afghanistan, where 9/11 was planned:

Insurgent activity in Afghanistan has risen fourfold this year, and militants now launch more than 600 attacks a month, a rising wave of violence that has resulted in 3,700 deaths in 2006, a bleak new report released Sunday found.

This is what happens when the proverbial eye is taken off of the proverbial ball.

Meanwhile, in the volatile border area near Pakistan, more than 20 Taliban militants — and possibly as many as 60 — were killed during several days of clashes, officials said Sunday.

The new report said insurgents were launching more than 600 attacks a month as of the end of September, up from 300 a month at the end of March this year. The violence has killed more than 3,700 people this year, it said.

It sure seems like Afghanistan is where Bush's "anti-terror" focus should have been, instead of pulling punches while focusing all of his attention on Iraq.

Maybe the Taliban should be told that they've been sidelined in the "front lines on terror." After all, Iraq holds that title, according to President Bush — presumably for all its civil-war violence between different Iraqi factions.

Then again, when it comes to threats against the rest of the world, Iraq doesn't seem to be very relevant at all. The Asia Pacific Economic Conference forum is focused on domestic terror. And in England, MI5 has identified 30 terror plots against Britain:

Muslim extremists are planning at least 30 major terrorist attacks in Britain, according to MI5. The head of Britain's internal the security service, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, says some of the plots might involve chemical or nuclear materials.

Some of the potential attacks may involve young British Muslims who are being groomed to become suicide bombers, Manningham-Buller said.

MI5 agents are watching 1,500 suspects, most of them British-born and with links to Pakistan.

[NPR audio link]
Will more American soldiers and Marines dying in Iraq really help? Or is the real front line on terror not in some dusty, broken country reeling from decades of dictatorship, but rather in the police work done in cities and countries all over the world?

Arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan in January 2000, Rahim says al-Qaida leaders burned him with cigarettes, smashed his right hand, deprived him of sleep, nearly drowned him and hanged him from the ceiling until he "confessed" to spying for the United States.

U.S. forces took the young Kurd from Syria into custody in January 2002 after the Taliban fled his prison. Accusing him of being an al-Qaida terrorist, U.S. interrogators deprived him of sleep, threatened him with police dogs and kept him in stress positions for hours, he says. He's been held ever since as an enemy combatant.

Rahim's story is one of several emerging from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay as defense lawyers make bids to free their clients while the Bush administration tries to use a new law to lock them out of federal courts.

Now it's quite possible that Rahim's story is not true, but how would we know? He's being held without charges, without trial, in the black hole that George W. Bush and the Republican Congress have created in American justice.

Once upon a time, the American justice system was hailed as an example of fairness. It's not perfect by any stretch, especially for the lower classes, but with the Constitutional rights established very clearly in the United States Constitution, the accused could expect a speedy trial with a fair and impartial jury, a right to confront the evidence, a right to cross-examine witnesses -- and (duh) a right to actually know the charges being filed and challenge their validity. The system is run by people, and therefore is fallible. Injustice has happened all too often.

However, the Bush Administration has managed to take away even those rights, on an arbitrary basis. And now we have prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay and secret torture interrogation bases in foreign countries, following in the footsteps of the French Bastille and the Soviet Gulags. Is this the road to follow? As more and more Guantanamo prisoners are released, can we truly believe the claim that these people are guilty until proven innocent until the Bush Administration decides otherwise?

Despite Condoleezza Rice's claims to the contrary, the new Robert Woodward book "State of Denial" details a Bush White House that, in 2001, did not take Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda seriously.

The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

The main content of the book, however, focuses on the confusion and dissention within the Bush Administration regarding Iraq -- whether to attack, how to wage the war, how to characterize the resistance, how to win the war.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

The question is when this president is going to accept responsibility for getting us into this war -- and responsibility for getting us out. "Stay the course" until he can pass off the problem to the next president is not a winning strategy.