Bailing on Bin Laden

I should hope that the absurdity of conservative commentary on Afghanistan is self-evident, but to summarize briefly, the Obama administration is currently under wingnut fire for a) under-resourcing the Afghanistan mission, and b) failing to do exactly what Stanley McChrystal wants (even as it, apparently, does pretty much exactly what Stanley McChrystal wants). The patent stupidity of these arguments is manifest, as the Bush administration evidently under-resourced the Afghanistan mission for some seven years before Greater Wingnuttia noticed what was happening, and the Bush administration further overrode the authority of local commanders when those commanders had unpleasant things to say, generally to the loud applause of aforementioned Wingnuttia (see, for example, the Bush administration’s decision to push forward with the Surge, in spite of the resistance of the larger US military establishment). There’s some risk, of course, in making it All About Bush, but then I suspect we’re not yet close to accounting for the lasting damage that the Bush administration (and its cheerleaders) did to US security.

The latest cause for re-examination comes with the utterly unsurprising news that the Bush administration completely botched the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in 2001 and 2002 by failing to deploy sufficient forces to Tora Bora, and by relying on Afghan proxies to fight Al Qaeda forces. The administration was abetted in its ineptitude by Tommy Franks, who apparently didn’t believe that capturing or killing the man responsible for murdering 3000+ Americans was very interesting or worthwhile. Franks “genius” went down the memory hole around the same time that Donald Rumsfeld became persona non grata among the Wingnutty, but it bears recollection that Franks was, for a while, the Greatest American Hero Evah for Destroying the Mighty Legions of Saddam Hussein. I actually think that Franks’ execution of the early weeks of the Iraq War was more capable than the retrospective judgment allows, but nevertheless it’s fair to say that his inclusion in the pantheon didn’t last very long.

Jules Crittenden, Standard Bearer of the Knights of Wingnuttia, seizes the opportunity to blame this all on …. John Kerry. Rather than denying the now-consensus position that the Bush administration developed and pursued an utterly disastrous Afghanistan policy (and really, this holds regardless of your larger attitudes about the Afghanistan War), Jules describes examination of the failure in the following terms:

So, eight years later, what’s the point?

The horse is still out, and going forward, the vaguely hinted-at suggestion is that it’s important to stay focused on barn door open-closed operations.

Indeed. It’s never worth taking time to examine massive government failures.

Beyond the insinuation that calling the Vietnam War a mistake is somehow similar in criminal degree to the failure to catch Osama Bin Laden, Crittenden also provides this gem:

Give your highly experienced field commanders what they ask for, a counterinsurgency plan to aimed at winning, rather than some fraction of a counterinsurgency plan aimed at exiting ASAP

Right. Maybe I’m crazy, but it seems that the relevant cliche here doesn’t involve a horse and a barn door, but rather a pot and a kettle. But then there’s always the memory hole…