Bush lost Afghanistan

A book has come out from Rand analyst, Seth Jones, effectively following up on Tom Ricks' "Fiasco" the invasion of Iraq.  Seth Jones' "In the Graveyard of Empires" puts to rest any thoughts that our invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was effective and sensible.  Jones writes that Bush's Afghanistan effort was a disaster thanks to his invasion, two years later, of Iraq.

Quite apart from the Bush administration's flouting of the law at home in order to play warrior overseas, their wars were badly planned, riddled with ignorance and carelessness.  There was something limp and indecisive -- and cheap -- about the Bush-Rumsfeld partnership in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Michiko Kakutani writes, in a review of Jones'  book:

It’s hard for the reader to finish this volume without being struck by the remarkable parallels between the American failure to prevent a re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and its failure to prevent the emergence of an insurgency in Iraq. In both cases the determination of Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon to use a smaller deployment than others recommended (what Mr. Jones calls a “light footprint”) and to attempt to do reconstruction on the cheap resulted in a lack of sufficient troops and resources to maintain law and order and to provide the local population with basic services like electricity. In both cases these failures led to residents’ growing dissatisfaction with the United States-backed government and a tilt toward the insurgents, who rushed to fill the power vacuum.

It's interesting that this book comes from a Rand political scientist.  Rand is no Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  Since the early '50's, Rand has been the military strategist for the Pentagon and was the home of Herman Kahn, aka "Dr. Strangelove."  Back in school, one of the things we had to do, when called on with short warning, was give five-minute speeches before the entire school on current events.  No notes allowed.  My assigned topic was "MAD,"  Kahn's and Rand's famous strategy of "Mutually Assured Destruction," a policy dominating the Cold War.