Chaosistan

Political will, along with troops, needed in Afghanistan | Mindy Belz

Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images

In the early months of his adminis­tration the president ordered policy reviews of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and al-Qaeda but set no timetable for completion. Substantive talks with heads of state in the region did not commence until June. Nearly nine months into his administration, despite repeated threat warnings, top advisors met for the first time to hammer out an Afghanistan strategy, focusing for the first time on ousting the Taliban and hunting down Osama bin Laden. That was Sept. 4, 2001.

Barack Obama is not the first new president to nervously nudge Afghanistan to a back burner. The failure of the Bush administration to early on adopt a comprehensive and muscular strategy can be instructive. Despite 216 threat warnings issued by the FBI in the first nine months of 2001, despite 33 intercepts recorded by the National Security Agency suggesting al-Qaeda attacks, despite military commanders placing U.S. forces in the Arabian and Persian Gulfs on Threat Condition Delta, the highest state of alert, political leaders in Washington during those same months could agree on neither a strategy to fight terrorism nor the urgency to have one.