It appears that the suicide bomber who killed himself and eight CIA personnel at a base in Khost Province was not an Afghan or Pakistani Taliban, but rather, a Jordian al Qaeda operative.
Hammam Khalil Abu Mallal al-Balawi was an al Qaeda terrorist who pretended to go over to Jordanian intelligence, and had been sent to work for the Americans he killed at the CIA's base in Khost Province, gathering intelligence on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This wasn't an Afghan defending his home, as some recent diaries would have it. This was the work of the people who attacked us on 9/11, and these deaths are part of the war they are waging on the United States. This isn't about Iraq, and it's only tangentially about the fighting in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is hitting back at the people who hit them. I guess you could call it "Counter-counter-terrorism."
Bush politicized, exploited, lied about, and bungled the issue of al Qaeda, but he didn't invent it out of thin air. This was a big loss to our country.