AFGHAN ELECTIONS
Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, one is the greatest intelligence failures in our history occurred on 9/11, and the seeds of that disaster were planted long ago in Afghanistan, whose people will participate tomorrow in the historic election to select their next President. I know my colleagues share my deep respect for the Afghan people and the many others who worked so hard in recent months to make these elections possible.
The elections already have been postponed three times, and the parliamentary elections that were to be held this weekend have now been delayed until next year. President Karzai has shown tremendous courage and determination in the face of multiple assassination attempts. He and the vast majority of the Afghan people have demonstrated an impressive commitment to a free and democratic Afghanistan.
Yet Afghanistan still faces fundamental threats to the casting of ballots on Saturday, let alone its long-term stability and prosperity. Elections are vitally important to the process of rebuilding a free country, but they are not a panacea for the myriad of problems that face the people in Afghanistan. Those problems will still be there the day after the elections, and the Bush administration, Congress, and the American people cannot afford to be distracted from the ongoing efforts that will be required to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan.
We made that mistake once before in Afghanistan, in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, and the result was a failed nation that became the breeding ground for the terrorists who attacked us on September 11, 2001. We cannot afford to allow Afghanistan to fall into chaos once again. Unfortunately, because of its misguided war in Iraq, the Bush administration may bring us perilously close to doing just that.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, President Bush rightly spoke about the need to put Afghanistan on the right course. He welcomed then-Chairman of the Afghan Interim Authority Hamid Karzai to the White House in January 2002, and said:
The United States is committed to building a lasting partnership with Afghanistan. We will help the new Afghan government provide the security that is the foundation for peace.
Instead of finishing the job, however, President Bush foolishly and recklessly diverted America's attention from the real war on terrorism in Afghanistan by rushing to war in Iraq, a country that had no operational links to al-Qaida terrorists.
We now know that President Bush began planning the invasion of Iraq from the earliest days of his administration. Finding a rationale to get rid of Saddam Hussein was on the agenda from day one of this administration. Barely 3 months after the most vicious terrorist attack on America, the President already began concentrating on Iraq, not Afghanistan. On November 26, 2001, he said:
Afghanistan is still just the beginning.
And 3 days later, even before Hamid Karzai had been approved as interim Afghan President, Vice President Cheney publicly began to send signals about attacking Iraq. On November 29, he said:
I don't think it takes a genius to figure out this guy [Saddam Hussein] is clearly . . . a significant potential problem for the region, for the United States, for everybody with interests in the area.
The shift was all but sealed by the time of President Bush's State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002. Karl Rove had told the Republican National Committee that terrorism could be used politically. Remember that speech, that terrorism could be used politically? That is Karl Rove in 2002: Republicans could "go to the country on this issue."
In the State of the Union Address, President Bush unveiled his "Axis of Evil"-Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Those three words forged the lockstep linkage between the Bush administration's top political advisers and the Big Three: Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz.
What did President Bush say about bin Laden in the State of the Union Address that day? Nothing.
What did he say about al-Qaida? One fleeting mention.
What did he say about the Taliban? Nothing.
Nothing about bin Laden, a fleeting mention of al-Qaida, nothing about the Taliban in that State of the Union Address.
With those words, we lost our clear focus on the most imminent threat to our national security-Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The President had checked the box on Afghanistan and was poised to use the 9/11 attacks to advance his Iraq war agenda of a war on Iraq.
The consequences of that decision have been severe for the security of Afghanistan and for the security of the American people. Without a doubt, the war with Iraq has distracted us from the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
The administration botched the battle at Tora Bora in December 2001. By outsourcing the job to warlords in Afghanistan, he let Osama bin Laden escape. Instead of sticking with the job of capturing bin Laden, the administration launched a war with Iraq. Reports indicate that the Bush administration shifted special operations soldiers and Arab language specialists from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq. And it recently pulled the State Department's extraordinarily talented assistance coordinator for Afghanistan, William Taylor, out of Afghanistan and sent him to Iraq. Saddam Hussein is behind bars, but he did not attack America.
Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden is probably hiding somewhere in the ungovernable tribal region between Afghanistan and Pakistan planning another attack on America.
Security outside of Kabul is tenuous because we and our allies are overstretched in Iraq and cannot commit sufficient troops in Afghanistan. We have 140,000 troops in Iraq and our allies, another 20,000. It was al-Qaida operatives who trained in Afghanistan who attacked America. Yet America has seven times more troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan.
We obviously do not have enough soldiers to secure Afghanistan. It was the lowest troop-to-population ratio of any postconflict country during the past 60 years. President Karzai asked for 20,000 new troops for election security at the NATO summit last June. The U.N. reportedly estimated this summer that it would take somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 additional troops to secure this Saturday's election. Sadly, what NATO and the United States eventually provided fell far short of that requirement-3,000 troops total. Spain agreed to send a battalion to Afghanistan for election security only after the Government pulled its troops out of Iraq. Our allies can't meet NATO requests for a minimal increase in troops for Afghanistan because they too are bogged down in Iraq.
This administration's lack of credibility with the international community has made it almost impossible to obtain the necessary troop commitments to win peace in Afghanistan. Because the international community is unable to provide adequate security in Afghanistan, the forces of the Taliban and al-Qaida continue to strike regularly. Most experts believe that elements of the Pakistani security services continue to support the Taliban and that Taliban forces are able to move freely between Afghanistan and Pakistan and can launch attacks on American and Afghan forces before retreating to their sanctuaries in Pakistan.
The Bush administration's Ambassador to Afghanistan admits what has become the obvious truth on the ground: The Taliban ranks are growing in Afghanistan.
Our Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad told reporters in September:
With regard to Taliban, I have to say that there may have been some growth in the numbers of their people that are active. There has been some effort, obviously, at recruitment, increased effort at recruitment in the refugee camps and in the madrasas.
Ambassador Khalizad also tells us that he still sees a "strong link" between al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Three years after our invasion of Afghanistan to deny al-Qaida its sanctuary under Taliban protection, the Taliban and al-Qaida still retain a strong relationship in Afghanistan. How did the Bush administration ignore the fact that America cannot be safe until Afghanistan is stable and al-Qaida no longer has a haven there?
As a result of the poor security, President Karzai still does not have full control over his country and is forced to negotiate with warlords who control private militias with forces numbering in the tens of thousands. A recent report by Human Rights Watch summarized the issue well:
Political repression by the local strongmen is the principal problem. Through the country, militarized political factions . .
. continue to cement their hold on political power at the local level, using force, threats, and corruption to stifle more legitimate political activity and dominate the election process.
Our inability to secure Afghanistan means that opium production is at record levels. Funds from the drug trade are being used to finance attacks against our troops and against the Afghan people. They are being used to operate the private armies of the warlords and rebuild the ranks of the Taliban. They are pouring fuel on the fire of instability and terrorism. Yet the administration failed to give a priority to shutting off the drug trade in Afghanistan, and the result has been predictably destructive.
Two weeks ago, Robert Charles, our Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, painted an ominous picture in his testimony in the House International Relations Committee. He said:
On the narcotics front, tied like a ball and chain to security, justice and economic development, we stand in the darkness of a long shadow . . . President Karzai and other Afghan officials have said that drug trafficking and the corruption it breeds may be the biggest threat right now to Afghan's long-term security and democratic future.
The CIA and the United Nations estimate that the crop of poppies for 2004 will be 20 to 40 percent greater than last year. That means 500 tons of heroin. No wonder Afghanistan now accounts for 75 percent of the worldwide production of opium.
The long shadow that Robert Charles described is the shadow of our misguided war in Iraq. The forces and resources we are pouring into Iraq could have been used and should have been used to end the drug trade in Afghanistan, regain control of the country from the warlords, and dismantle their militias.
Last month, LTG Walter Sharp of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the House International Relations Committee that less than half of the approximately 40,000 people targeted in Afghanistan for disarmament had actually been disarmed. The operations manager of the U.N. disarmament program on the ground in Afghanistan told the Financial Times that fewer than 10,000 of the targeted individuals had been disarmed. Clearly, the effort to dismantle the private militias has fallen drastically short with dangerous consequences for Afghan stability.
In June, local militias killed five aid workers from Doctors Without Borders in a brutal attack. In July, that distinguished nongovernmental organization pulled out of Afghanistan after 24 years of helping the Afghan people. Their loss is a sad commentary on the continuing violence and the Bush administration's misguided handling of Afghanistan. The failure to crack down on the narcotics trade, the continuing domination of much of the countryside by warlords, and the inability of this administration to provide sufficient troops to stabilize the country are major setbacks to the war on terrorism. Clearly some progress has been made. I hope the elections tomorrow will proceed without incident. But if we had not rushed to war with Iraq, much greater progress could have been made and certainly would have been made in Afghanistan, and America would be safer today. Yet President Bush continues to deny this obvious reality. Incredibly, he told a campaign rally in Ohio last week that as a result of the U.S. military, the Taliban no longer is in existence.
Representative RON PAUL, a Republican Congressman from Texas, does not agree. As he said on September 23:
A picture of Afghanistan has been painted, I think, overly optimistic. You read the newspapers, what you're talking about doesn't even exist from the reports that I have read about what's really going on. And when you hear about the Doctors Without Borders leaving, after having been there through the Russian occupation. The U.N. wants to leave. Protection of the president is very precarious. We don't know what will come of that.
The airport's getting bombed. There's estimates that 90 percent of the country, at least a very large percent of the country, is under the occupation of the Taliban and the warlords. We have a serious disconnect here and we have to be-as Americans and as members of Congress, we have to be realistic and not hide from the realities of what is happening.
That is from a Republican Congressman from Texas. I couldn't agree more.
In the aftermath of 9/11, it was clear that America had to deal effectively with Afghanistan as the highest priority for our national security. It was clear that America could not be safe if Afghanistan remained unstable. Instead of finishing the job, we rushed off to fight a different war, the war in Iraq. We squandered the tremendous worldwide good will that flowed to America after 9/11. We alienated longtime friends and leaders in other nations on whom we heavily depend for intelligence for support in the ongoing war against terrorism. Distrust of America has soared throughout the world. We are especially hated in the Muslim world. The past 2 years have seen the steepest and deepest fall from grace our country has ever suffered in the eyes of the world community in all our history.
All this is the heavy price our country has paid because of the war in Iraq that America never should have fought. We cannot afford to continue down this dangerous path of incompetence in foreign policy. We know that America has to do better.
As I have said before, the only thing we have to fear is 4 more years of George Bush.