You may remember this from 2001:
Over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity... You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.
--George W. Bush
You may also remember hearing this earlier this year:
President Bush praised Pakistan's fight against terrorism as unfaltering...
"We're not going to back down in the face of these killers," Bush said two days after a suicide car-bombing killed an American diplomat in the southern city of Karachi. "We'll fight this war and we will win this war together."
So given the Bush track record ("Nobody ever expected the levees to break..."), it will come as no surprise to the cynical that, with the approval of the Bush Administration, Pakistan has concluded a truce with Al Queada that will allow Osama bin Laden, the architect of 9/11, to live freely in Pakistan.
The Pakistani military will no longer operate in the area where Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda operatives are believed to be hiding, according to terms of what the Pakistan government calls a "peace deal," signed today with militant tribal groups allied to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
The above is from this ABC News story (so by clicking the link you'll also be showing ABC that their "docudrama" isn't fooling anyone).
Mission Accomplished!
It goes on to explain the Pakistani Army will return to its barracks, leaving the Al-Qaeda sympathetic tribes alone in return for their not attack Pakistani government troops.
basically, this is a victory for Pakistan's own version of fundamentalist Islamic insurgency:
Though the military will not release exact figures, they also killed and injured hundreds of Pakistani soldiers in roadside bombs and suicide attacks....
Witnesses in North Waziristan said tribal leaders hugged each other and fired guns to celebrate the deal, which is widely being viewed as a victory for their camp and a humiliating retreat for the Pakistan military.
In exchange for cutting and running, the Pakistani government will, to turn the famous Ronald Reagan quote on its head, will "trust but not verify";
Under the agreement, the Pakistan military will stop monitoring the activity of the militants, who will pledge to "live like good citizens,"....
Yeah, sure.
So let me get this straight: Pakistan, a country that wasn't invaded, didn't have its infrastructure destroyed, and isn't under the de facto rule of a foreign occupier, nevertheless can't win militarily against tribesmen and Al-Quaeda terrorists armed with improvised bombs.
But in Iraq, occupied, already is a civil war in all but name, riven with sectarian strife and ethnic cleansing, chafing under a non-Muslin and foreign occupation, will "stand up" -- real soon now, you betcha, last throes! -- so our US Army can stand down?
Come on, get real.
All along, the real threat's been Al-Qaeda. We might have crushed Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but rather than finish the job there, Dubya the Decider decided to accomplish a mission in Iraq -- a nation with no real WMDs, which had nothing to do with 9/11, a side-show everywhere except in the fevered dreams of the neo-con-job Project for a New America Century.
But now Afghanistan, which was supposed to be a show-case of American might is, as the New York Times reports today "one of the most troubled fronts in the fight against terrorism".
Three years after "Mission Accomplished", Al Quaeda terrorists run free in Afghanistan, because we didn't have the foresight, the will, or an available army to finish the job there. Pakistan has concluded a peace treaty with Al-Qaeda, because we've been occupied in occupying Iraq. Iran, unchecked with our army tied down next door, has become the main beneficiary of our misadventure in Iraq.
But still this very day, President Bush insists we must stay in Iraq, because "Iraq is not a distraction in their war against America" but the "central battlefield where this war will be decided."
This isn't a matter of Democrats being "soft on terror"; it's not a matter of wanting to "cut and run". Tell everyone, Republican, Democrat, independent -- hell, tell all three members of "Connecticut for Lieberman" --, this is yet another Bush screw-up: he's continuing his obsession with fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong place for the wrong reasons. He's destroying our Army by continuing this disaster occupation of Iraq, while our real enemy -- Al-Qaeda -- has regained and is consolidating its power in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
This is the same obliviousness to what's really going on that brought us "Heckuva job, Brownie!" and "nobody expected the levees to break".
You want to fight Al-Qaeda? You want to finally bring Osama bin Laden to justice? Then we need new management, not Captain Ahab Bush demanding that we continue to chase the white whale Moby Iraq.
We're losing to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan because our military is tied down in Iraq. We're losing to Al Quada because President Bush can't see anything but Iraq.
Bush has lost Afghanistan, he's lost Pakistan, and the situation on the ground in Iraq is untenable. How many more loses do we need to show us that the only patriotic course is to dump this "decider" and elect new management?
IMPORTANT UPDATE: quaoar, in a comment below, points out that Bush approved the Pakistani treaty with Al-Quaeda:
Bush knew about and approved of the truce with the Taliban.
Musharraf deployed 80,000 troops in mid-2003 to seal the Afghan-Pakistani border, subdue the separatists and track down bin Laden and his followers. But the military's heavy artillery and helicopter gunships failed to conquer the separatists and establish government control over the border region, a tribal area where the government has never established its dominance.
The United States reportedly has spent more than $1 billion underwriting the border fight, but when the military failed to crush the separatists, the Bush administration agreed to support Pakistan's truce-making efforts and pledged millions of dollars in additional aid.
Wrote a diary about it a couple days ago.
EVEN MORE IMPORTANT UPDATE:
As part of the deal
Pakistan will also allow Osama bin Laden (anyone remember him?) to live freely in Pakistan.If he is in Pakistan, bin Laden "would not be taken into custody," Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan told ABC News in a telephone interview, "as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen."
....
"What this means is that the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership have effectively carved out a sanctuary inside Pakistan," said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism director.
The agreement was signed on the same day President Bush said the United States was working with its allies "to deny terrorists the enclaves they seek to establish in ungoverned areas across the world."
(And I owe some Kossack an apology; I posted in her (?) diary that I'd already diaried Osama-is-home-free story, when I'd diaried about the previous ABC News story on the truce deal, to which the Osama story is a follow-up. The stories do overlap and are from the same ABC News blog, and so I initially thought they were the same.
I didn't ask her, or intend for her, to delete her diary, but being a good Kossack she did; so when I looked for her diary again, I couldn't find it and don't recall her user name. But I do ask her forgiveness.)