Kerry's 'evolution'
Charles Krauthammer
October 29, 2004

WASHINGTON -- In the 1990s, Afghanistan was allowed to fall to the
Taliban and become the global center for the training, indoctrination
and seeding of jihadists around the world -- including the mass
murderers of 9/11. This week, just three years after a two-month war
that destroyed the Taliban, Afghanistan completed its first free
election, choosing as president a pro-American democrat enjoying
legitimacy and wide popular support.

This represents the single most astonishing geopolitical
transformation of the last four years. (Deposing Saddam Hussein ranks
second. The global jihad against America was no transformation at all:
It existed long before the Bush administration. We'd simply ignored al
Qaeda's declaration of war.) But perhaps even more astonishing is how
this singular American victory has disappeared from public
consciousness.

Americans have a deserved reputation for historical amnesia.
Three years -- an eon -- have made us imagine that the Afghan War was
easy and foreordained.

Easy? In 2001, we had nothing there. What had the Clinton
administration left in place? No plausible military plan. Virtually no
intelligence. No local infrastructure. No neighboring bases. The
Afghan Northern Alliance was fractured and weak. And Pakistan was
actively supporting the bad guys.

Within days of 9/11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits
Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this:
forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured
military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and
authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on
the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout
the Taliban.

Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what
everyone had said was impossible: defeating an entrenched, fanatical,
ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and
Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by
creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy
in a land with no history of democratic culture and just emerging from
25 years of civil war.

This is all barely remembered and barely noted. Most amazing of
all, John Kerry has managed to transform our Afghan venture into a
failure -- a botched operation in which Bush let Osama bin Laden get
away because he ``outsourced'' bin Laden's capture to ``warlords'' in
the battle of Tora Bora.

Outsourced? The entire Afghan War was outsourced. How does Kerry
think we won it? How did Mazar-e Sharif, Kabul and Kandahar fall?
Stormed by thousands of American GIs? They fell to the ``warlords'' we
had enlisted, supported and directed. It was their militias that
overran the Taliban.

``Outsourcing'' is a demagogue's way of saying ``using allies.''
(Isn't Kerry's Iraq solution to ``outsource'' the problem to the
``allies'' and the United Nations?) And in Afghanistan it meant the
very best allies: locals who had a far better chance of knowing what
cave to storm without getting blown up. As Kerry himself said on
national television at the time of Tora Bora (Dec. 14, 2001): ``What
we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to
protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will''
-- i.e., not throwing American lives away in tunnels and caves in
alien territory. ``I think we have been doing this pretty effectively
and we should continue to do it that way.''

Now, as always, the retroactive military genius says he would
have done it differently. Yet in the same interview, asked about how
things were going overall in Afghanistan, he said ``I think we have
been smart, I think the administration leadership has done it well and
we are on the right track.''

Once again, the senator's position has evolved, to borrow The New
York Times' delicate term for Kerry's many about-faces.

This election comes down to a choice between one man's evolution
and the other man's resolution. With his endlessly repeated Tora Bora
charges, Kerry has made Afghanistan a major campaign issue. So be it.
Who do you want as president? The man who conceived the Afghan
campaign, carried it through without flinching when it was being
called a ``quagmire'' during its second week, and has seen it through
to Afghanistan's transition to democracy? Or the retroactive genius,
who always knows what needs to be done after it has already happened
-- who would have done ``everything'' differently in Iraq, yet in
Afghanistan would have replicated Bush's every correct, courageous,
radical and risky decision -- except one. Which, of course, he would
have done differently. He says. Now.

©2004 Washington Post Writers Group

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